i'm angry and not very knowledgable

open world video games suck

2011-11-14T10:28:00.000-08:00

been awhile, but link times at work are absurdo-slow, and thus i cant get anything done. seriously it took me longer to build my main executable than it did to leave the building, go to the salad place, have them build me a wrap, and walk back. today is clearly a lost cause.

so! Gabe has a really good point:
http://penny-arcade.com/2011/11/11/skyrim

he laments that, basically, when games present you with a choice, it is as much about forcing you to choose what _not_ to experience as it is anything else. as neo says, the problem is choice. and this for me is a huge problem, because i'm clearly not getting "everything" out of the game. which is fine, i clearly dont get "everything" out of any media, but games are extremely upfront about it. they smack you in the face with a "hey, this right here? this is you missing out on something. deal with it". and there's no way in hell i'm going to invest the time to re-play vast sections of the game just to do a few things differently - diminishing returns make that clearly not worth my time.

at a broader level, letting players choose how aspects of the narrative play out is akin to writing a choose-your-own adventure book, instead of a novel. it completely destroys any semblance of pacing, narrative cohesion, or character that may otherwise have been established. so as far as i'm concerned you can effectively toss the story out of a game like Skyrim before you even start. and once you've done that, you have this grand, huge world to explore... and no reason to explore it. sure, there's probably some giant boss dragon or demon or something somewhere, and you may have to go through a lot of plot/quests to get there. but if no one in the world cares if you piss off hundreds of hours in an NPC's basement, why the hell should you bother? i mean games have an extreme potential for narrative art, because of the inherently deep level of interaction and immersion the player has by being in control. and players should be in control, and should have lots and lots of options - about HOW to achieve the narrative goals of the plot (ie, save the world). they should be able to use their sword or their axe or magic or items or whatever they want. but they should not, NOT, have any choice about what goals to set. it'd be like letting the audience decide in the middle of Hamlet to bail out on this depressing mopey dude and go see what Fortinbras is doing. it may seem like a cool idea, but its really going to have an extremely destructive effect on the play as a piece of narrative art.

a few other rants: you cant do "anything" in these games. and honestly the more they try to let you do, the more the 4th wall shows when you can't do something. i have never played an open world or sandbox game that actually felt like it existed without the player character - so long as NPCs' are asking you to clear out their basement for you... hell so long as they're asking you to do _anything_, it wont feel that way. this is a huge problem with non-character player characters (ie, player characters that have no voice, not dialogue, express no opinions or only the opnions the player chooses for them). in fact in my opinion, non-character player characters should be done away with entirely. there are other narrative techniques to draw in your audience, without watering down your narrative to if not non-existence, than at least irrelevance.

and these games are, artistically, socially, irrelevant. they may be fun, but they are not important. and maybe you dont care, maybe you just want something fun. but i think in a few decades, kids could be playing games for literature classes. i think there's going to be a shakespeare in a few generations whose complete works will be purchased for the xbox. stories have always, will always, be an extremely important way for humans to communicate with each other, ideas, warnings, lessons, the human experience. and games provide a seemingly unique level of interaction with the story.

but as soon as the player gains control over the story - any aspect, even something like pacing, then the story looses.

and so i will not buy skyrim. instead i will just read and write about it, to express my disappointment with the development of the medium, and the, as i see it, stagnation thereof that skyrim represents.

games that promise "open" worlds and "non-linear" gameplay while simultaneously claiming to have "epic" storylines are full of shit. those things are in direct and irresolvable conflict. the games may be big (and probably therefore muddled), but they are not really open. nor should they be. games that set tight limits on themselves, games like portal with its extremely short play time, or dark souls which basically ignores narrative in favor of mood, are, in my opinion, better games. if i were picking a curriculum for a Comp Lit class in video games, i'd pick them, and not elder scrolls, or GTA.

Bioware mostly manages to walk the line. but i'd still rather they take control of Shepherd.

dear Apple; fuck you

2010-12-20T15:57:00.000-08:00

i have an iPhone 3Gs. i've head this one for about 1.5 years (after cracking the screen on my first on by dropping it on a marble floor in mexico).

i dont update the thing very often - there's not much point because i steam all my music, so theres no real need to sync the thing ever.

on saturday i finally update to iOS 4.2 or whatever - the one with multitasking. i had been putting this off for awhile because while its annoying not to be able to use a music-playing application like Rhapsody while also checking email, that frankly doesnt happen that often, and updating is a hassle. as soon as i updated, my phone stopped working.

if it goes idle for more than a minute or so, it just turns off. if its on, and being used, its slow, almost unusably slow. if its on and playing music, once the screen goes off, the music will start skipping. it is, in short, not usable for anything a phone or media player should be used for.

now remember, before update, everything is just fine, after update, no worky worky.

so i make an appointment at the genius bar, and go. about 10 minutes of waiting (no big deal, they run the place well), and i'm being help by my "genius". she's pleasant enough, i explain my problem, she sounds like she already has a few suspects in her head, takes my phone off to the back corner to run some diagnostics. so far, so good.

now the bad. she comes back and tells me that this is actually a hardware problem - something with the RAM. presumably some of the RAM is no good, and the phone is constantly trying to access it, etc etc and just shuts off. this didnt cause any problems before with the old version of the OS, but with the new software the problem is exacerbated and we get an unusable phone as a result.

reasonable enough. now i'm under contract with AT&T until march, and i have my eye on switching to Sprint with their version of the Samsung Galaxy phone - this one does 4G and has a real keyboard. hot stuff. so my ideal solution to this current problem? rollback the goddamn software update and give me my phone back, the way it was, for another months.

but thats not the way Apple does things. this is apparently impossible in Apple-land. I'm out of warranty. my options are:

a) spend $200 to get a refurbished phone, same as my old phone.
b) spend $200 to upgrade to the new iphone, attached to a new 2 year contract with AT&T.

so, to boil that down... their software update kills my phone, and i have to spend at least $200 to fix it.

i understand that the software problem is actually caused by an hardware problem - however that hardware problem was completely unnoticeable before the software update, and may have occurred AT ANY TIME, from when the phone rolled off the factory floor, all the way through the year i was under warranty, or any time after. i'd have had no way to notice the problem and get it fixed when it happened, until this software update, which renders my phone rather useless.

this from the company that has built a reputation on customer service (actually the customer service is quiet good, but this particular policy fucking sucks) and things "just working".

so, i'm pissed, and this is more than i needed to abandon apple forever.

i'm not entirely sure how to proceed. my current though is to get a Galaxy Tab, which i kinda want anyway, and have that fill in for all my non-strictly-phone functionality until my contract is up, at which point i'll get the Galaxy S as well. or perhaps i'll break the contract, i need to figure out which option is better financially. but one thing i do know? fuck. you. apple.

edit: oh, also, actually said by some apple guy to a customer while i was waiting: "well, physical damage to your ipod isnt covered under the warranty, but i'm gonna give you a new one anyway". and you fuckers cant kick me a refurbished outdated model for less than $200? fuck you.

religion + morality

2010-08-24T12:08:00.000-07:00

intelligent people who are also religious are a bit of a conundrum to me. and i'm going to speak very vaguely here for a bit so feel free to dismiss this all as vaporous bullshit if you want to.

but there seem to be some people out there who are brilliant, aware of the physical world, and willing to admit that god plays pretty much no part in it. he's not out actively influencing events or anything like that, actually answering the prayers of some sports team over another, and all that other stuff that doesnt make any sense. but, they believe in him anyway.

sometimes if you ask this kind of person why they believe, you'll get an answer about how they were raised in a given tradition, and how it played an important part for them at a young age in figuring out right from wrong.

for example, andrew sullivan (or whoever these guys are who blog for him when he's apparently otherwise occupied) has little post up: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/08/can.html

with an interview with some catholic rocker who says:
"I started really thinking about the role the church played in my own life, and the fact that even though I didn't believe every little bit of what the Pope thinks, there's a lot of beauty in the Catholic church and a lot of beauty in the teachings. Things like forgiveness and redemption, the Ten Commandments, it's hard to argue these as negative things."

now, these are supposed to be the kinds of opinions everyone should respect, because they sound so nice. the guy believes because the church, to him, means stuff like forgiveness and redemption. who doesnt like forgiveness and redemption?

but thats half-baked. because god, and the church, have nothing to do with forgiveness and redemption. they may teach about it, but they dont have anything to do with its existence or value. algebra doesnt exist or not exist because of your grade school math teacher - just because something happens to have been the source of insight or knowledge for you doesnt actually tie it to the truth or validity or correctness of that insight or knowledge.

god is either necessary for morality, or he isnt. thats true for everyone; you either think everyone needs god to be moral, or else it follows that no one needs god to be moral.

if you think god is necessary to be moral, then you think i'm immoral, since i dont believe in god. fuck you, i'm a good person. ok, i'm a pretty mediocre person. but there has been some person out there somewhere that you'll probably admit was both "good" and not of your faith.

so then if, on the other hand, you think people can be perfectly moral without god, or the church, then... why do you continue to believe in him/it? anyone can be perfectly moral with or without god/the church, so... why do we need god/the church? obviously, at least as far as morality goes, we dont.

why is this important? why not just let people have their good values (forgiveness and redemption are pretty great values, after all), and leave it be?

because the same though processes are used to justify some pretty loathsome shit. i mean, stoning for example.

you may say that i cant equate stoning and forgiving. but i can, if the exact same thought process is used to validate both actions. someone who only forgives because god tells them to is not much different from someone who only stones because god tells them to. both of these people are abdicating their responsibility to make the moral judgment for themselves.

which is why intelligent religious people confuse me, and why i'll often get sucked into tryingconvince them that they are, in fact, actually atheists who just havent owned up to it yet. and thats why i think its important for them to own up for it; because either religion is a valid source for moral decision making (in which case, stoning and forgiving are both equally good), or its not (in which case forgiving is still good, but stoning is pretty fucking awful).

its also interesting to watch these people go through mental gymnastics around the idiotic stuff the church believes that they dont while simultaneously defending the good parts of church doctrine. as if these actually were a package deal in the real world (as opposed to the one defined by the church). i get very confused about why they even bother.

GG. on point. as always.

2010-08-23T07:21:00.001-07:00

http://www.salon.com/news/ground_zero_mosque/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2010/08/23/park51

fuck "near" ground zero...

2010-08-19T12:43:00.001-07:00

..lets put a mosque in ground zero.

seriously, whatever memorial or whatever we finally eventually build there (almost 9 years now and its still just a fucking hole) should include a mosque (as well as other places of worship.. lets not exclude anybody!)

what kind of message would that send?

Osama: "America is the great devil who hates Islam and we must wage holy war agaisnt them"

Everyone else in the fucking world: "are you serious? they put a mosque in ground zero! you are totally full of shit"

i am honestly completely for this idea. as long as large percentages of our population are going to worship fictitious parental figures in the sky, we may as well use that to unify our populace and show just how awesome/free/strong a country we actually are.

edit: just dont pay for that part of it with public funds, obviously.

an important point..

2010-08-19T06:03:00.001-07:00

http://www.salon.com/news/ground_zero_mosque/index.html?story=/opinion/feature/2010/08/18/gop_islam_war

and one thats easy to forget:

"Insulting our Muslim allies and giving Osama bin Laden a huge propaganda victory by making the struggle against terrorism appear to be a war against Islam -- exactly as he claims -- would be a strategic disaster."

i still cant believe this shit. people who want to limit the practice of a particular religion can get the fuck out of my country. they can go start a new one with those people who dont want to pay any taxes.

dick armey on TDS

2010-08-18T09:41:00.000-07:00

watched the interview just now. its frustrating, thought JS does a good job pointing out just incoherent what Dick Army is saying actually is.

there seem to be a subset of people who simply dont want to pay taxes to the federal government. i would suggest that that is completely unpatriotic, and that if they dont want to pay any taxes to the united states, they are free to leave and go live/work somewhere else.

gah

2010-08-17T10:48:00.000-07:00

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/08/17/129251846/facebook-may-unveil-new-products-tomorrow-including-geo-location-feature

definitely not a fan of this idea. if any of you ever want to know where i am, try asking me. i'm pretty easy to get in touch with. in fact i'll probably be a bit flatter you went so far as to call or txt me to find out where i am.

so i dont see much value in a geo-location feature for myself. advertisers on the other hand will, i'm sure, love it. "hey, you're a fan of starbucks! did you know there's a starbucks 105.8 ft that way?? awesome, you should go be some coffee there!"

facebook: taking the "social" out of "social networking." by cramming the rest of the internet in.

this is a sign..

2010-08-17T08:54:00.001-07:00

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129236595

...that things are wrong. that this continues to be sure a large portion of the national discourse is a indication of some pretty serious problems in the country's priorities.

Douthat continues!

2010-08-12T08:50:00.001-07:00

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/sex-marriage-and-upper-class-obligation/

he's:

1) wrong
2) utterly convinced he's right
3) pushing to legislate based on his correctness

he holds the standard religious-conservative views, and strings together words in the new york times (why have they given this guy a venue to voice his bullshit anyway?). and he makes claims like

"But I think there’s a pretty good case that they should do it[stigmatize pornography/ally with anti-obscenity advocates] anyway, because other people’s children, further down the ladder of education and income and prestige, might stand to gain from a less pornified society."

might they? how so? explain, and be sure to correlate why the problems these poor kids may face actually justify legislating your religious-moral standards.

" And an elite that was more morally serious about sexuality and its consequences would be willing to confront this problem directly, instead of ignoring the issue and/or sneering at the anti-abortion cause."

what a ridiculously pompous sentence.

"What all of these proposals have in common is an attempt to wrestle with the cultural costs of separating sex, marriage and procreation."

there it is again - infertile people obviously should not be allowed to marry according to Douthat.

"We’re being asked to formally ratify a cultural and legal shift that’s been rather obviously better for upper class Americans than for the country as a whole"

gay marriage benefits the elite more than the rest? again, this assumption is completely unjustified.

what a fucking asshole.

palin...

2010-08-10T07:33:00.000-07:00

...sounds like one of those kids who'd start an argument with you in grade school, but didnt actually know how to argue and just shouted the same thing over and over again, except when they'd occasionally grab on to some non-sequitur . its infuriating to listen to her

I kinda cant believe we still talk about her. i guess she wont go away as easily as i had hoped. but, considering she's getting by entirely on her looks (i mean, ok, what the fuck else does she bring to the table, you tell me), we wont have to deal with her that much longer, as those are on their way out.

VAT

2010-08-10T06:55:00.001-07:00

he's mostly swayed me:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/08/10/liberal_case_regressive_taxation/index.html

i have no idea how much i pay in sales tax.

fuck you, google

2010-08-09T12:21:00.000-07:00

http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/08/joint-policy-proposal-for-open-internet.html

fuck them. i agree with Dan Gilmore:

http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/08/09/google_verizon_deal/index.html

his main point:

The right way forward is to have sufficient bandwidth that we can do pretty much anything we choose using public networks -- a true broadband infrastructure where packet-switched services (moving data around, at super-fast speeds, in little packages that are reassembled at the user's device) are the basis for all communications.

Instead, the game is on to create a parallel Internet. It'll still be packet-switched. But they won't call it the Internet anymore. That's an end game we should not encourage."

truth. i'm of the opinion that the internet, wired or wireless (be honest, whats the difference?), is a utility and should be treated as such.

The Marriage "Ideal"

2010-08-09T07:22:00.000-07:00

Ross Douthat (whose name, particularly when he writes articles as asinine as this one, i have a hard time not noticing as a declension of "douche" and "ass-hat"):

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/opinion/09douthat.html?_r=1&hp

firstly, GG lawyers his ass:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/09/marriage/index.html

and there's no need to really say much more, as GG wins yet again.

here's DOUbachebagassTHAT's main "argument", i guess:

"This ideal holds up the commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings — a commitment that involves the mutual surrender, arguably, of their reproductive self-interest — as a uniquely admirable kind of relationship. It holds up the domestic life that can be created only by such unions, in which children grow up in intimate contact with both of their biological parents, as a uniquely admirable approach to child-rearing. And recognizing the difficulty of achieving these goals, it surrounds wedlock with a distinctive set of rituals, sanctions and taboos."

i have no idea how the first sentence is relevant to straight vs gay marriage, unless he think that merely by being the same sex, gay people are therefore "sexually identical". i suppose he does.

ah but that next sentence, thats the interesting one. obviously Douthat thinks that infertile people should not be allowed to married and should be relegated to whatever inferior institution it is he wants to stick gay couples into. infertile people, people who only want to adopt, people who dont want to have kids at all.....

thats fine. for Douthat, the point of marriage is to have and raise kids. thats typically what religions say about the whole thing, and thus we see that Douthat's argument is in no way "intellectual" and is merely religious.

marriage means different things for different people. Douthat can go fuck himself; he cant define what marriage means for me.

he's right about one thing though: "These arguments have lost because they’re wrong." indeed, ross. so will your argument lose, because it too is wrong.

just keep reading GG people

2010-08-06T11:27:00.001-07:00

http://www.salon.com/news/economics/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2010/08/06/collapse

wtf google?

2010-08-05T10:52:00.001-07:00

i thought you were supposed to be the good guys on stuff like this

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/technology/05secret.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

this has been true for awhile...

2010-08-05T08:06:00.001-07:00

but its good to see the quotes side by side like that:

http://www.slate.com/id/2262799/

nothing particularly new here but...

2010-08-05T07:13:00.001-07:00

i still find articles about this subject pretty interesting:

http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet/index.html?story=/mwt/broadsheet/2010/08/05/booty_call

the title to his paper would have been better if he'd just left it at "positioning the booty call relationship"

honestly..

2010-08-04T11:40:00.000-07:00

can anyone answer the question posed in the title?

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/08/03/u-s-military-power-preeminence-for-what-purpose/

because i would just love to hear one.

stub: how can gay marriage possibly be a personal issue for straight people?

2010-08-03T12:07:00.000-07:00

why do religious people in red states care so much about gay marriage if they themselves are not gay, and none of their friends/relatives are? you can make abstract claims about "societal damage", but i think thats kinda crap, since people only seem really to care about stuff that effects them personally, not abstractly.

clearly it is a personal issue, or else they would not have such strong feelings and devote time/money to it.

but how can something that has no effect on them be so personal

well, gay people are "living in sin".

"living in sin" means that these people EXIST in sin. not that their ACTIONS are sinful, but that merely by existing in a certain state (gay, cohabitating before marriage?), people are sinful. how pernicious of a mentality is that, by the way? merely the existence of a certain person is wrong, as opposed to their actual actions being wrong? thats actually really my main thought here; the immense horrid concept of "living in sin" and how people are thus sinners merely for existing.

but, anyway, by the same logic, we have "living in faith", or whatever you want to call the opposite. merely by following whatever your faith is, you are good and correct, and it doesnt matter what your actions are.

thus its a personal issue. if gay people arent evil sinners merely for being gay (and actually have to be judged on their actions), then faithful people arent good merely for being faithful. then they may have to be judged by their actions, and they may wind up coming up short. admitting that gay people have equal rights forces them into this admission.

...thats the best i have anyway. there's probably holes in my theory, so if you have some better explanation i'm all ears.

age of non-state actors?

2010-08-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

my history sucks, but for awhile there, "nations" seemed to be in control of pretty much everything. this is opposed to previously, when "nation-states" were in control, or before that when "tribes" were running the show.

but now, wikileaks has the power to release huge amounts of data the united states would rather not be releaesed, google goes toe to toe with china over privacy concerns, and a bunch of guys in caves and rendered the largest military in the world pretty much useless. (dont read those sentences at face value, take my point).

so are we into some new age when non-state actors yield at least as much, if not more, power than actual nations?

there are plenty of people with way more knowledge on this kind of stuff than i have, it just occurred to me and i'm curious.

stub: why i wont have a facebook account in 10 years

2010-08-03T11:53:00.001-07:00

as facebook and "the internet" merge, the reasons for having an account in the first place recede. facebook originally made it easy to connect to people, but as advertisers, politicians, and other interested parties find various ways to get themselves on your feed, you'll have to wade through more and more muck to actually connect to people in the way you originally wanted, which subverts the whole point of being on there.

so in my opinion facebook is at its apex right now. they'll plateau in the immediate future if they havent already. i dont think they're going to fade into irrelevance, simply by virtue of inertia, but its hard to see anything really exciting in their future. and if it winds up as just a way for the government to tie your ip address to your actual name (see GG here) , some negative PR could push people on to some other system.

in their battle with google for the internet, i'm backing google.

thank you levi

2009-07-10T06:13:00.000-07:00

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2009/07/10/2009-07-10_levi_johnston_has_theory_on_alaska_gov_sarah_palins_resignation__she_needs_money.html

the best part is this:
""I think the big deal was the book. That was millions of dollars," said Johnston, who has had a strained relationship with the family but now says things have improved."

in the same sentence we get "she quit her job as a public servant to make money" and "oh yeah, we're great friends now"

things were improved levi, until you let this slip.

awesome.

screw pascal

2009-04-14T09:15:00.001-07:00

culhane's wager:

1) there is no evidence of god, thus i dont believe in one
2) i plan on living a good life anyway, so even if there is a god, that should be enough for him
3) if thats not enough for him, then he's petty and vindictive and clearly not worth worshipping anyway.

how you doin?

2009-03-27T10:29:00.001-07:00

plenty of people in our generation (apparently we're gen Y?) are having a hard time:

http://www.slate.com/id/2214712/

luckily, i'm ok.

its all related

2009-03-26T12:55:00.001-07:00

GG on point again, on how our handling of the torturing we did is so similar to the handling of the financial crisis

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/26/comparisions/index.html

well then Jack...

2009-03-25T14:33:00.001-07:00

who the fuck's fault is it??

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/opinion/25desantis.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=opinion

personhood...

2009-03-25T14:22:00.001-07:00

somewhat related to previous post:
http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/03/25/personhood_laws/

if we are more than just our brains, than even a fetus that has developed a brain is arguably not yet a person. pro-choice advocates may want to get on board with that position.

actually i'm not really ok with abortion at a term as late as after the brain has (somewhat fully) developed, and i dont most pro-choice people i know are either. so maybe its moot anyway.

but 8 cells does not a person make, and we should not let these people make laws claiming otherwise.

you aren't you brain!

2009-03-24T20:26:00.000-07:00

very interesting stuff: http://www.salon.com/env/atoms_eden/2009/03/25/alva_noe/

i suppose the main point is that a brain in isolation is not concious, that it needs an environment to interact with, and that sounds good to me. after all as far as i know most of the interetsing parts of the brain are dealing with some kind of stimulus; visual, audio, tactile, what have you.

there was an article i read years ago about some "pregant" man who had been carrying his twin brother in his body for his whole life. (i love google, here it is: http://abcnews.go.com/primetime/story?id=2346476&page=1)
i wonder what they did with the twin's brain, as this is probably the only kind of chance we'd have to study what a brain that had never really received any stimulus looked like.

i'm pleased with myself because about three sentences before they got to the paragraph that starts with "Evolutionary biology is one good example of the way to proceed. " i was thinking the exact thoughts laid out in that paragraph. aren't i smart? yay.

anyway, fascinating stuff.

matt tiabbi rocks my socks

2009-03-23T06:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/1

he's the only one doing "investigative reporting".

ok probably not true, but the only one i know about, which is kinda the point.

just like gleen greenwald is one of the very few doing "informed commentary".

most people are doing "complete bullshit"

especially people like glenn beck....

they're doing it wrong

2009-02-18T13:57:00.000-08:00

http://www.slate.com/id/2210732/

i agree with the author of the article in the last 2 paragraphs. basically they're going about this process all wrong, and i'm very excited to see what happens when they finally figure that out and start getting it right.

fighting idealogues with... ideas?

2009-02-17T13:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/02/17/islamist/

what a concept!!

what if we had done this on a massive scale rather than invade a completely unrelated country?

sigh....

A-Rod says drug use was a "stupid mistake"

2009-02-17T12:52:00.000-08:00

http://www.salon.com/wires/ap/2009/02/17/D96DGQT86_bba_yankees_rodriguez/

no it wasnt. me checking in a bug that amounts to a typo is a stupid mistake. someone turning left instead of right and winding up late to work is a stupid mistake.

routinely deciding to take illegal drugs (or drugs which you strongly suspect are illegal) to enhance your performance is a conscious decision made repeatedly and idicative of a systemic and arguably cultural problem.

i dont really care about baseball, so i dont really care that they're all doping. but claiming its a stupid mistake is the exact same as everyone acting all surprised and pissed off; bullshit.

god's realm shrinks a little further

2009-02-11T07:59:00.001-08:00

suck it creationists:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5705331.ece

robots robot people

2009-02-10T20:36:00.000-08:00

the daily show had a segment today on iRobot and how they're apparently making armed robots for the army. they also had a guy arguing for legislation on moral grounds restricting the efficacy of these robots.

to anyone who thinks armed robots might be a good idea, try to define the following terms:

1) gun
2) enemy
3) threat

good luck! can you do it in such a way that an innocent person never gets shot? (hint, the answer is no, nevermind pesky bugs)

i'm not against robots in combat by any means. but we should absolutely legislate (the UN i guess) and enforce non-lethal weapons on robots. and not even like tazors, i'm talking about that foam stuff that will glue their hands and feet together (so long as theres no way it suffucates them should it get on their face).

the UN already has laws in place about proportionality. 0% risk of loss of human life can not be proportional to non-0%, so seems like there's already grounds for such laws.

FSM again

2009-01-29T15:55:00.001-08:00

sullivan put up another reader's response, so i actually emailed him myself, as follows:

the FSM is meant to point out the unlikeliness that God exists. the statement is that the FSM is as likely as God to exist based on all available evidence. anyone bringing up the FSM thinks that God is very unlikely to exist. the absurdity of the FSM is obviously a jab at theists and hopefully we can look past that for the moment. the reader who posts the following:http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/01/spaghetti-monst.html
takes the question from "is there a god?" to "is there meaning in life?". i think this statement: "But you can no more avoid making a positive choice about the source of meaning in your life and the universe than you can avoid living in some country"serves to prove that point. we were talking about the existence of god, and now he's talking about meaning in your life. atheism is not a positive choice about the source of meaning in life. it is (potentially) a positive choice about the existence of God.
the existence of god is not the same as the existence of meaning in life. i believe my life has meaning (admittedly, probably not as much as a theist, since i have an eternal component, but my life is still meaningful), without believing in God.
the reader who posts here:http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/01/spaghetti-mon-1.html
takes the question from "is there a god?" to "is there morality?". once again these are not the same question!
(s)he says:"the evidence for God that your last commentator finds lacking is the same kind of evidence which can't be found to support the existence of morality."

i think he means the existence for a source for morality, as evidence of practiced morality abounds in human interaction. But there's a big biological imperative for morality. as social animals our survival is more assured if we work together and behave well towards each other than if we don't. there may be a biological imperative in believing in God as well, which would explain why such beliefs are so universal in human culture. i personally think that God and Religion are arbitrary ways to codify biological imperatives (like morality, cultural taboo, etc) the same way the varied languages that humans have developed are arbitrary ways to codify the biological imperative of being able to communicate clearly and effectively with each other.
the existence of god is not the same as the existence of a source of morality!
these are extremely important distinctions, i think. many people, particularly in this country, seem to think that atheists can not be moral people, or that their lives are meaningless and they thus do whatever they want all the time ( which is already bs, since everyone does what the want (or at least prefers to the alternative) all the time, otherwise they wouldn't do it).
if you can have meaning and morality without god, that diminishes the need for god. with a diminished need for god, more people may actually make decisions on the question of the existence of God based on the (lack of) evidence.
i personally find life and morality to be more powerful and more meaningful without God. we choose to be moral to each other because we decide it is the right thing to do, not because of some external force. we give our lives meaning, whatever meaning we want to, not some external force. i have faith in humanity, not in God, and i personally find that more powerful, even if the ultimate reason is a straight biological imperative (life is good and should be preserved and continued).
thanks for the opportunity to have a reasonable discussion about an often fiery topic.

FSM

2009-01-29T07:43:00.000-08:00

there's a discussion on andrew sullivans blog about atheism so naturally i will chime in.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/01/spaghetti-monst.html

thats the most recent post and the reader makes the following points

"They are treating it as an intellectual puzzle rather than what it actually is for every last of us: a lived commitment. "

"Atheists should be forced to articulate their positive position (say, secular humanism) as price of admission to the conversation. So when your reader wants to "put the burden of proof on the one making a specific, positive claim," I simply point out that living your life is a specific, positive claim, and thus everyone has to bear the burden of proof equally."

fine points, if the conversation is "what is the meaning of life", which i think this particular reader would say has a lot to do with god.

but if the question is "is there a god?", then how people live their lives doesnt play any part in that conversation, since, if you posit that god exists, you must posit that he would exist even if there were no people (unless you have some really weird concept of "god"). but we (atheists) certainly all allowed to go on the attack on that question.

so in short, that reader is wrong (or rather is discussing a different question).

yup..

2009-01-26T11:00:00.000-08:00

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2009/01/26/ipod_versus_zune/index.html

microsoft should never have gotten into this market in the first place. it literally makes no difference if their product is superior, the ipod is as much a fashion accessary as anything else, and considering apple had already established a winning name brand in a name-brand contest, it was a bad move.

what the...?

2009-01-26T08:27:00.000-08:00

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/01/another-catholi.html

i read Sullivan pretty regularly; his opinions seem pretty well reasoned in general and its pretty rare these days to find a "conservative" that isnt religion crazy or war crazy or what have you (at least i've had trouble with it). so i was pretty surprised to read this quote:

"In the end, I do not experience being Catholic as a choice any more than I experience being gay as a choice. "

WTF?

this doesnt make any sense to me. Homosexuality is, as far as i'm concerned, not a choice. i think the science is heading that way, it makes sense as a form of population control, my roommate (my resident expert on all things gay) said it wasnt a choice for him (i seem to recall such a conversation anyway). i didnt choose to be straight, i dont know why anyone would _choose_ to be stigmatized, etc etc etc.

but faith definitely _is_ a choice. thats the whole point, i thought. you choose to believe, in spite of the lack of evidence. thats the whole idea behind the sacrament of confirmation; you were too young to choose to believe any of this stuff when you were baptised (which is why your godparents do it for you), but now you're of age and you can choose to do it yourself.

most religious people believe their religion is correct. say for example, Jesus with was, or was not, the Messiah. obviously catholics say yes, others say no, and whichever category you fall into, you belive yourself to be right (of course you do, everyone believes they're right, or else they wouldnt hold whatever believe that is). but if Sullivan is saying he didnt choose to be catholic, isnt he implicitly admitting he's no more right than any other faith? wouldnt that sort of fly in the face of the whole point of religion anyway?

i havent read his book, in which he apparently goes into detail about all this stuff, so i'll try to refrain from making any conclusions. but it was a surprising and confusing quote to run across; if thats how he feels, that he has no choice but to be catholic, i wonder what he even gets out of it.

from the proper scope...

2009-01-21T10:04:00.001-08:00

..we look like an infestation:

http://www.popsci.com/content/inauguration-day

that was my thought anyway when adrian sent me the above link

yes, they should

2009-01-21T09:12:00.001-08:00

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/humannature/archive/2009/01/21/faith-and-healing.aspx
i disagree with the author of the article (unsurpisingly) on many points, but thats not really worth getting into.

what is interesting is how we handle this case as a society. if we say that parents who do this kind of thing (let their kid die because they dont provide them with basic health care, opting instead for "faith" based healing) are criminally responsible, we would seem to be encroaching on the whole separation of church and state thing. the state would essentially be invalidating faith as a legitimate health care choice. which i'm all for.

what if the parents were to successfully argue something like an insanity defense? that would have some interesting implicationg on the status of religion (ie, its essentially a mental disease).

i think they should do some time. further incentive for any other parents out there not willing to take their kids to the damn hospital. kids should not pay the consequence for their parent's fanatical religious beliefs.

all in all, pretty depressing. what a waste of human life.

we must prosecute bush/cheney

2009-01-21T07:48:00.000-08:00

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/01/21/guantanamo/
whats been done to these people in our name is completely unforgiveable. we can only begin to make amends, and get our soul back as a country, by prosecuting those responsible. starting at the top.

abortion donuts for all!

2009-01-16T10:56:00.000-08:00

http://wonkette.com/405492/free-abortion-donuts-on-demand#more-405492

ridiculous. these people have their blinders on to such an extent that they actually took the phrase "donut of choice" to mean "donut celebrating abortions" rather than "whichever kind of donut you'd like"

they need lives.

legitimately terrifying

2009-01-16T10:21:00.001-08:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-wilson/follow-jesus-like-nazis-f_b_158295.html

"whatever it takes" is just another way of saying the ends justify the means.

this is the scariest thing i've read in awhile.

altitudinal control seems limited...

2009-01-14T12:13:00.000-08:00

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/01/14/flying.car/index.html
which will prevent this essentially self-propelled hangglider from ever being really useful IMO.

i'm listening to...

2009-01-14T06:55:00.001-08:00

Stevie Ray Vaughn pandora station. excellent.

should be common sense....

2009-01-14T06:46:00.000-08:00

http://www.developmag.com/news/31085/Pratchett-Integrating-writers-is-the-key

gee, integrating writers into the rest of the game developement is a good idea? what a surprise. games will never become a mature narrative artform so long as writers are kept away from the rest of the process. portal was developed by a tiny team and a big part of the reason its such an artistic success is because everyone on the team was at least aware of the the other parts of the game and were thus able to produce a cohesive whole.

the latest prince of persia was relly well written IMO. perhaps a whole post on that at some point

sounds like this guy rocks

2009-01-13T10:41:00.001-08:00

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2009/01/13/stephen_chu_hearing/index.html

excited to hear this coming from obama's team

obviously, atheists can be jerks too

2008-12-06T09:41:00.000-08:00

link

basically, some atheists put up a sign next to a nativity scene. the sign reads:

"At this season of the winter solstice, may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds"

they then acted surprised when the sign was found to have been taken from the site and chucked into a ditch. yeah, big surprise.

i agree with the contents of the sign but the approach here is all wrong. the last sentence in particular is bad. it goes from stating a given worldview (a naturalist one) to attacking everyone who doesnt believe in that worldview.

"Religion is but myth and superstition" implies that if you believe in it, you are stupid.
"that hardens hearts and enslaves minds" there is no room there for religion to be doing anything beneficial.

this is not the way we should be going. we cant afford to attack religious people, especially the good ones, because such attacks will provoke defensive responses. for people claiming to be putting forward the rational argument, where is the benefit in provoking a primal/defensive response?

you dont need major changes to the sign to achieve the same goals without falling into pretentious traps. "Religion is full of myth and superstition that can harden hearts and enslave minds". there. same message, only now the reader isnt an enslaved, hardened idiot.

the first step towards gaining acceptance and legitimacy is to prove that atheists can actually be good people. words like "godless" and "heathen" still have extremely negative connotations in american society. people think atheists can not be morally good people. they're wrong of course, this is like any other prejudicial stereotype, but sentences like "Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds" don't go far in winning them over.

many people think they need god and religion to be morally good people. often these people were brought up in such a manner that morallity and religion were always tied together and so its hard for them to imagine one without the other. the first step for atheists is to show that that does not have to be the case. and going the crusades route doesnt usually end well. if you end up in a "but thats a perversion of my belief system" argument, you cant get out easily. the religious person is personally invested, and trying to make rational arguments will again provoke irrational and defensive responses. its not a good way to go.

instead, we need to show that we dont need god or religion to be good people. we can do it just by ourselves. then, since we are just ordinary people like anyone else, nobody really needs god or religion to be morally good.

if you can get a theistic person to admit the above, you've won. they've admitted they dont need god or religion to be a good person. now you can launch in with the mind enslaving, genocide-inducing aspects of religion. once you've shown that its not needed for good, and that it can cause horrendous evil, you have the extremely powerful question: "so why should we keep it?" let them mull that one over. and dont just reject any answer they come up with out of hand

thats the way to go. the sign skips the first step, and that first step is completely necessary, so they aren't doing us any favors. how is the golden rule "myth and superstition"? mother theresa, martin luther king, were their hearts hardened and minds enslaved? religion is a deeply human phenomenon and insulting people for buying into it is like insulting them for falling into one of the various logical fallicies human brains are hard-wired to fall into.

Mad Max and the Meltdown

2008-11-20T14:38:00.000-08:00

one DANIEL HENNINGER has an opinion article in the WSJ today that made me mad. combine that with the fact that its about stuff i dont know much about (anything outside of computer science and comparative literature) and we have the makings of a blog post.

link to aritcle.

the so called "war on christmas" is one of the most ridiculous notions that so-called conservative talking heads talk about. the idea that stores would put up signs with "happy holidays" instead of "merry christmas" actually offends them. they need to feel offended that badly, for reasons i think Glenn Greenwald has written a book about (though i havent read it).

here are my two biggest issues with the article:

1) "Little or nothing that has occurred through this crisis discredits the system of free-market capitalism. Across several centuries of rising world incomes and social gains, the system has proved its worth. In this instance, the system has been badly used -- by mere people. "

isn't that the exact argument agaisnt socialism/communism? i am no history buff, i know very little about political theory, but "from each according to his means, to each according to his need" sounds like a great idea. i need a tv, someone knows how to build tvs, he gives me a tv, now i have a tv. the guy who made me the tv needs a website, i know how to make websites (i dont, btw), i make him a website. of course we're just doing this out of the goodness of our hearts, so no money changes hands.

but it would never, ever work in reality, and has the potential for extreme, horrible abuse, as i think we've seen.

now it looks like the same is true for zero-regulation free-market capitalism, but this time its not the idealogy's fault, its the people's fault for not implementing it correctly? wtf?

for the record i'm all for regulated, sane free market capitalism. just like i'm all for individual freedom. but my individual freedom doesnt extend to me scamming, stealing, or killing others in order to enrich myself. when i do those things the state intervenes and throws my ass in jail. why should the economic freedom be any different? i dont want the government making aribtrary regulations just for shits, i dont want it preventing hostile takeovers because they aren't "fair" or some childish shit like that, but clearly we need some rules (laws) so that some actions (murder, predatory lending, fraud) are illegal and then we need to actually enforce those. government closing its eyes and ears to the financial world makes just as little sense as it does to the criminal world.

2) (and i cant believe these are actually coming up in the same, short article)
"Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.
The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines."

this is offensive bullshit rooted in the concept that atheists can have no morals. that merely because we dont believe in god, we have no concept of what's right and whats wrong. i'm not even going into this one but it angers me and is bullshit on its face.

and wait, i thought greed was the driving force of the free market? wouldnt that mean acting in my own depraved self interest should be good for the system, not bad? i mean, one of my few readers correct me if i'm wrong, but isnt his argument then:
1) morality and rules have no place in the free market system, and implementing them would be a determent to that system
2) a cause of the financial meltdown is the secularization of modern society which is underminding its moral base

clearly those two can not both be true. so as i see it we have a couple options here

1) I'm off base in my understanding of some of the core concepts, or the article itself; probably oversimplifying something
2) this guy is a fucking idiot
3) this guy is a selfish prick

i'm going with 2 and/or 3 (after all these arent mutually exclusive). someone let me know if 1 is also true.

how weird is it that the current GOP is made up of 3 (separate?) coalitions that think we should 1) police the world, 2) police the bedroom, and, 3) for the love of god, not police the market?

2008-11-07T08:02:00.000-08:00

http://www.slate.com/id/2203614/

community is definitely a positive thing about religion. of course, you also definitely dont need religion to have a community.

recent goings on with mccain

2008-10-10T19:23:00.000-07:00

let me start by saying i think its pretty much wrapped up. obama will win this thing in november barring some sort of outliar. of course, those do happen, but his victory seems all but inevitable.

this video, and the others like it going around now, really scare and sadden me. these people represent the worst of us, and when they start singing god bless america, i actually feel physically ill. their intolerance is revolting and the antithesis of everything good about the country for which they sing. and, as far as im concerned, palin is one of these people.

mccain is not, i dont think. he's been taking a lot of flak lately, and deservedly so, for stoking the flames of these people's hatred.

today it looked like he had had enough of that kind of campaigning. he told his crowd today that they didnt have anything to fear from an obama presidency, and that he was not an arab and was rather a decent, family man. crooksandliars has the video.

(lets ignore for the moment the fact that the woman said "arab" and mccain said no, he's "decent". because we all know that woman meant terrorist. "arab" and "decent" are not, in fact, opposites).

now a lot of liberal media types are saying that its too late, mccain stoked these flames, he shouldnt get any credit for now going back on his strategy, that this is exactly what he wanted people to think, and that he's only stopping now because its backfiring.

but he never looked comfortable when he was fanning these fires, even before today. he looks (and sounds) completely disoriented to me, like in the back of his head he was questioning if doing that was really worth it.

i think mccain really wants to be president. i think in that ambition, he took on the people who manufactured two bush victories, even though those people had strategies completely agaisnt what mccain originally stood for. i think, little by little, those guys pushed him to abandon the "straight talk express" values he used to exspouse. and he went along, because he really really wanted to be president, because he honestly thinks he could do a good job. and as he continued to fall further and further behind, these guys told him to go after obama in more and more sleazy ways. and mccain honestly thought "these ads arent me calling him a terrorist, just questioning his judgment". or rather, he rationalized them to himself that way. and so, as is how i think all "evil" is created, little by little, over time, each action performed, rationalized, and then used as a justification for the next, mccain wound up doing some really horribly negative campaigning.

i think sometime between yesterday and today, he took a step back, maybe even saw the videos of what his supporters were saying, and his conscience kicked in, and he realized he couldnt let this keep happening.

i think that, probably because i want to think that. this is probably not based on rationality, this is purely hopeful on my part. because the other alternative is that Glenn Greenwald is right, and that mccain is backtracking on this purely because its backfiring in the polls at large (and i'm relieved for the entire country that it is). and if thats the case then he's just as evil as cheney.

i disagree with mccain on just about every stance he has. his views on war themselves disquailfy him for office as far as i'm concerned. but if he continues to defend obama from slurs he himself helped create, he can at least, in my view, lose this thing with some small amount of dignity. as of yesterday he didnt even have that chance. after all, today he was defending obama when he knew full well that he'd at least get booed at his own event for doing so, and maybe even possibly lose votes, all when he's already way behind.

i think he's taking some responsibility for what was pretty heinous, cynical, and outright evil campaign strategy. but at least he's doing something about it now. if he goes postivie for the rest of the campaign, i wont hate him forever.

if he comes out with a new attack ad tomorrow, fuck 'im.

Olympics and other small things

2008-08-19T18:01:00.000-07:00

i'm a bit bored tonight so hey.

Olympics!

NBC was brilliant in posting pretty much every god damn thing imaginable on the internet. most of them dont even have commentary, which is great for a lot of the sports i watch. listening to someone explain what right of way or a back row attack are to the audience like their a bunch of four year olds gets really annoying really fast.

which is completely unfair to kevin barnett, one of the commentators for indoor volleyball, who is hilarious. karch on the other hand annoys the hell out of me. its just his tone of voice.

i love indoor volleyball, particularly the mens game. its a fast-action testosterone-filled competition that makes for great spectating in my opinion. but maybe i just have so much fun because i can imagine doing that the guys on the court are doing (but only imagine).

the best part about the phelps thing is how classy he's been. 8 medals is definitely impressive, but on the other hand its a little bit like giving out medals for soccer competitions of 10 mins, 20 mins, 30 mins... the point being most other atheletes simply dont have the opportunity to win more than one medal every 4 years, particularly those in team sports. but he's won with such class that i definitely support him.

non-sports!

never has it been more clear in recent history just how limited the US's power actually is. "Hey, Russia invaded Georgia! what can we do about it?"

nothing.

but this is an excellent article on that subject by someone extremely more knowledgable than me on that topic. i frankly think we should start minding our own damn business as much as possible, and i hope barack agrees.

it will surprise precisely no one who knows me that this statement really pisses me off:

Warren did say, though, he couldn't vote for an atheist. "An atheist says, 'I don't need God,'" Warren said. "They're saying, 'I'm totally self-sufficient in myself,' and nobody's self-sufficient enough to be president -- it's too big a job.

the quote is from here

its remarkable how little some religious people think of people in general. apparenlty we're not capable of governing ourselves (even in a completely and utterly incompetent fashion as demonstrated by the current administration) without some benevolent supernatural force.

benevolent to us anyway. my interpretation of that sentence (and i suppose its possible that i'm wrong) is that Warren thinks god is on our side. so lets break it down:

1) people can't run their own countries without God's help (we must be too stupid.)
2) God is on our side, since he's helping out our president. why did he choose america? i dunno, perhaps he flipped a coin. its a good thing we were all born here anyway, because that mere accident makes us better than everyone else.

blech. as always, my biggest problem with religions: they serve to draw distinct "us" vs "them" lines. they further a tribalisitic mentality that we would do much better as a global society to leave in the prehistoric age where it belongs.

tacking center...

2008-07-10T14:21:00.001-07:00

ha, i think i had long hair still the last time i posted. thats weird. and adrian has apparently tagged me 7 times or some such nonsense.

anyway barack's got me mad enough to actually come post again. I'll assume the readership here (hi, adrian!) is familiar with what went down in the senate yesterday, what barack had said he was going to do about FISA/telco amnesty, how he actually voted yesterday, and why that would make someone like me mad.

so what to do about it?

i actually havent given barack any money so far, and right now i'm glad of that. but i know plenty of people going "he's not getting any more donations from me".

thats great, but he's already gotten a lot of those donations, and they cant ask for their money back once he wins the nomination, "moves to the center", and starts fucking them all over.

what we need instead is a constant stream of small donations. get together a whole lot of people who want to support a candidate. each person donates however much money they want. the money goes into a really big pool. the candidate recieves small amounts of that money (daily, lets say) every day so long as those doing the donating are still happy with them. should they suddenly change views, the money stream is literally turned off, to be restored when the candidate makes recompense (or else returned to those who did the donating, whatever % of their donation had yet to be paid out).

in the age of the internet, this would be excedingly easy to do.

seems like the only way to hold a candidate to the promises he or she makes during the primaries is to threaten to take their money away once they start heading into the general election should they drastically change views.

and of course, only those passionate enough about the issues to be/stayed informed throughout the process are making the donations in the first place (and none of the contested-for swing voters are, presumably, or else they would have already decided on a candidate and thus by definition not be swing voters).

"Oh, but barack's just doing what he needs to do to win"

yeah. so much for "a diffirent kind of politician", huh. the biggest reason i'm so pissed is cause i actually let myself believe that stuff when he was selling it a couple months ago.

anyway, the turn-offable money faucet would take:

1) a very large number of people donating a (combined) very large sum of money. we'd need to be imperative to the success of the campaign to have any real influence.
2) a specific set of positions on a specific set of issues that, if breached, results in the turning off of the money stream.
3) a website (trivially easy in these days).

Glenn Greenwald et all have done a really good job raising funds for specific issues, something like this money faucet seems completely feasible to me. and if nothing else, it would give us a lot more leverage than we have now (since, like everyone else, i'll be voting for barack in november despite this). and we could punish/reward specific bad/good actions on the candidates part, more than just symbolically.

so who wants to set it up for 2012?

why I am a Bright

2007-10-16T15:44:00.000-07:00

adrian has a recent post on fox news' treatment of an atheist radio station.
in response he got a rather aggressive comment that, in my opinion, had no substance. but it did get me thinking about this stuff again i thought i may as well post as to why i'm a Bright.

Brights, if you aren't familiar with the term, are people share some very basic beliefs. from that website:

A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview
A bright's worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements
The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview

thats all. most Brights are obviously atheists, but as i understand it there is even some room for people who believe in a god or some such that exists completely outside our universe (really though, whats the point of that?).

Why does this movement exist? mostly because atheists are, at least according to some studies, america's most distrusted minority. i should point out that distrusting any minority, any group of people, due to their race, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, taste in music, or whatever, is stupid and wrong.

So the Bright movement is an attempt to counter that distrust by using a positive re-branding, similar to the homosexuals' use of the term Gay. it seems to have worked pretty well for them (well, as long as you're not playing like halo3 or WoW, where "gay" is used to mean anything that the 12-yr-old saying it doesn't like), hopefully it will work pretty well for us too.

now, why is this important? because politicians these days feel the need to cater to religious groups in order to secure their votes and remain in office. some of these religious groups believe (for example) that the rapture is imminent, that we should hasten it as much as possible, and that war in the middle east on behalf of israel is the way to do that. seriously, people believe this, and these people vote, often in larger numbers than any other interest group. this has a serious impact on our policies. these peoples beliefs thus directly effect my life, for the worse. making policy for these kinds of reasons is one of the most moronic actions a nation can take, and it is exactly the kind of thing we as americans have a long tradition of not doing.

where do the Brights come in? they count their members. I'm actually having a hard time finding that number right now (which is stupid, it should be plastered all over the site), but the point is a simple message: theres more of us than you may realize. the more this group grows, the less pressure there is on politicians to kowtow to religious groups. we've apparently got one atheist senator; i suspect theres quite a few more, and strong groups like the Brights may help give them the courage to "out" themselves. i would very much like to see more, if not all, of our policy decisions that require moral viewpoints be grounded in naturalist morals, and i challenge any theist to show me a single instance where a naturalistic morality is in any way inherently "worse" than a theistic one (sending other people off to kill each other in order to hasten one's own ascension into heaven is, i think it is fair to say, easily worse and more evil than not doing that).

So, that's why i'm a Bright, and thats why its important to me to be one right now. other atheists may find comfort in the communal aspect of the group (often one criticism leveed against atheism is that it does not build a community), and while i get a vaguely nice feeling on that note too, its not really my prime focus.

now, most people i talk to about this immediately go "isnt calling yourself "bright" pretentious?" the implication is that Brights think that they're smarter than people who believe in god and deliberately picked a term that shows that. its a valid criticism which is worth discussing.

its important to note that here the term is to be used as a noun. thus i am a Bright, not i am bright. very important distinction. the word "bright" didn't previously exist as a noun, just like Gay, so we, like they, get to define it however the hell we want to. that being said, its not the word i necessarily would have chosen (though i've yet to think of a better one). and certainly some Brights will use it in that sense and feel clever, but they're wrong to do so. being a Bright is not a condemnation of supernatural worldviews, merely the affirmation that one has a natural worldview instead. there is no judgment, only statement, inherent in being a Bright. individual Brights may pass judgment on those who belief in god, but they do not speak for the group in doing so.

So thats my schpiel on this stuff. if you think you're a Bright and would like to be counted, i encourage you to go sign up on the website. yes, you'll get an email (seems to be once every month or every other month or thereabouts). yes, twice a year they'll ask you for money. is that really a big deal? are you really running out of space in your gmail mailbox? theres strength in numbers, and we need all we can get.

EDIT: and, aside from the politics, it will also be nice if most of the country doesnt think we're amoral hedonists merely because we dont believe in god. but really in my social circles this isnt such a big deal.

why isnt congress doing this already....

2007-09-20T20:34:00.000-07:00

Bill Clinton was on the daily show tonight, and among other things, he lamented that congresspeople often have a very taxing schedule. they have to fly between where ever they live/represent and DC often. time they spend in DC is time spent away from their constituents and inside the beltway.

i believe this is a legit issue. and its incredibly stupid.

back in the day, it was necessary for congress to actually meet together in one place. the only alternative was correspondence my mail, and that would obviously never work.

but this is the age of the fucking information superhighway (thanks in no small part to al gore). i can go into any damn conference room in my office building and have people from london, tokyo, or both on the phone in moments. with a little bit of setup, i can have them on video. congress is so obviously begging for this.... its literally the ideal use case for videoconferencing.

for gods sake, install some webcams and lets get 98 video feeds into the capitol (someone should be there in person, just for kicks). theres no reason a senator should miss a session just because he has to be home campaigning.

this is incredibly stupid, there should have been a push for this 5 years ago. even if "all" it does is save our lawmakers some sleep, well, our lawmakers a group of people i want, by and large, to be in the best frame of mind they possibly can be. so they should be getting rest whenever possible. plus, *gasp*,they'll be closer and more in touch with the people they actually represent! in fact the only people this hurts are the big interest lobbying groups, since now they'll have to be the ones flying people around! good god its almost too good to be true!

there is no downside. congresspeople can still fly into DC whenever an occasion arises that merits the trip. er, well, there shouldn't be any downside, though if this administration has its way, it could tap the wires for some democratic anti-war committee without a fucking warrant because they're giving "comfort" to the enemy (by even considering a withdrawal)... but once we get this crazy neocons out in '08, there wont be any downside.

surprise surprise...

2007-09-13T16:31:00.000-07:00

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20749773/site/newsweek/

all that surveillance, all that data mining, its all bullshit. "good old fashioned police work" is still the best way to go. so why is our executive breaking the fucking law to spy on us?

i wont even go into McConnell's credibility, or apparent lack thereof. i have no reason to trust anyone in this administration at this juncture.

i agree with this completely:

2007-09-13T14:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/07/17/iraq_withdrawal/

only just found it, but i agree with it completely.

update: i dont think we can win the war in iraq, for any reasonable value of "win". but jon stewart said this on the first running of the daily show after 9/11:

"
Whatever barriers we put up are gone. Even if it's just momentary. We are judging people by not the color of their skin, but the content of their character. You know, all this talk about "These guys are criminal masterminds. They got together and their extraordinary guile and their wit and their skill. . ." It's all a lie. Any fool can blow something up. Any fool can destroy. But to see these guys, these firefighters and these policemen and people from all over the country, literally with buckets, rebuilding. . . that’s extraordinary. And that's why we have already won. . . they can't. . . it's light. It's democracy. They can't shut that down.
"

i also agree with that completely. as long was we have our democracy, our freedoms, we can never lose this so called "war on terror". we have already won.

a question...

2007-09-12T11:12:00.000-07:00

which i'll hopefully elaborate on myself when i get home tonight:

which is more valuable, an "objective" media that actually caters to one side or the other, or more independent, franchise style reporters (bloggers) who very much proclaim their stance and fight for it tooth and nail? should we empower biased bloggers with more resources to do more investigations, hoping the the competition will turn up the truth? or should we continue to rely on supposedly objective media outlets to bring us the full and complete story?

the coming cyberwar...

2007-09-11T18:10:00.000-07:00

haftofthespear has a brief post that mentions that general Petraeus mentioned the war of ideals agaisnt the "terrorists" in cyberspace. i'll just borrow the quote:

"Finally, in recognition of the fact that this war is not only being fought on the ground in Iraq but also in cyberspace, it also notes the need to contest the enemy’s growing use of that important medium to spread extremism."

so what should we do to stem the tide of anti-american propaganda on the intertubez? absolutely nothing.

i mean, this is some really basic social engineering. idiots in the states click on phising websites all the time, enough that bank of america makes me go through an extra layer of clicking for a completely fictitious sense of security. why shouldn't the terrorists be susceptible to the same things? they obviously aren't all brilliant evil geniuses, and they're coming from parts of the world that are relatively new to the internet.

and a forum in which anonymity is integral to success (an online terrorist network, if such a thing exists) would be excedingly easy to infiltrate; just have a couple agents or whatever read some of the numerous studies on establishing identity on anonymous online forums (those are fun studies by the way, though i don't have a link to one).

if anything, the US should be working to foster and expand online terrorists networks with the goal of infiltrating them, not suppressing them.

oh and for god sakes, log everything! hell have France log everything, so if we do find something, no one can accuse us of fabricating stuff. our international credit isnt exactly high right now...

i mean, this is basic stuff. its outrageous if we aren't doing this already. my advice to the policy/war makers; stay out of the tech you'll just muck it up. stick with basic policework, it will be much more effective anyway.

hell we should even tell the terrorists we're doing this, so they can all turn on each other.

and at no risk! if an agent is found out, who cares? he's sitting in his home outside NYC or DC or whereever!

i'd much rather my tax money go to something like this than Petraeus trying to figure out how to censor international content without pissing off everyone in the whole world

as for them attacking us, we need to secure our virtual assests anyway.

Ann Coulter is a complete idiot

2007-09-06T21:12:00.001-07:00

not that this is news to anyone, but i'm gonna have some fun with it.

source

"Normally, using the word "deviant" in reference to any form of sodomy
would be a linguistic crime worse than calling someone a "nappy headed
ho." Luckily, Craig is a Republican."

sex in public bathrooms with strangers is deviant behavior. what kind of sex it was is irrelevant.

"As a backup precaution, Matthews has worked to ensure that there is
virtually no audience for "Hardball." I shudder to think of the damage
such a remark might have done if uttered about a non-Republican on a TV
show with actual viewers."

an extremely juvenile comment, but Ann knows none of her readers watch the show, so she can get away with it.

"The New York Times ran 15 articles on Craig's guilty plea to
"disorderly conduct" in a bathroom. The Washington Post ran 20 articles
on Craig."

wow, a combined 35 articles. yeah, totally 9/11 or moon-landing coverage. i will admit, it does seem to have been a slow news week.

"In other news last week, two Egyptian engineering students, Ahmed
Abdellatif Sherif Mohamed and Youssef Samir Megahed, were indicted in
Tampa on charges of carrying pipe bombs across states lines. They were
caught with the bombs in their car near a Navy base."

wake me when they're convicted; indicted != guilty. maybe mathews is guilty of that as well, but then, craig plead guilty to something.

"If liberals were any happier, they'd be gay."

i'm not even sure what she's implying here. she probably isnt either, its a poor attempt to appear clever which probably succeeds on her audience. in any case, its another extremely juvenile comment.

"Indignant that Craig had short-circuited their gleeful gay-baiting,
liberals quickly switched to a new set of talking points. In the blink
of an eye, they went from calling Craig a "deviant" to attacking
Republicans for not insisting that Craig stay."

most of the ones i read attacked reps for treating Craig differently from that other senator when the only difference was the type of sex they're having (heterosexual or homosexual). remember Ann? the type of sex doesn't matter? thats the point

UPDATE: David Vitter - thanks adrian.. back to the point....

"Liberals said the only reason Republicans were not blanketing the
airwaves defending Craig -- maybe running him for president -- was
because of Republican "homophobia." After howling with rage all week
about gay Republicans, to turn around and call Republicans homophobes
on Friday was nothing if not audacious.
"

same point

"Liberals don't even know what they mean by "hypocrite" anymore. It's
just a word they throw out in a moment of womanly pique, like
"extremist" -- or, come to think of it, "gay." How is Craig a
"hypocrite," much less a "blatant hypocrite"?"

because he ran on a platform of family values, and then pleaded guilty to having sex in a public bathroom? public bathroom sex isnt very high on the list of family values is it? so he's saying one thing, yet doing another, which is pretty much the exact definition of hypocrite. can Ann really not understand this? or is she just being completely disingenuous? also, a great quote for GG's new book on gender bias, Ann certainly isnt afraid to pull out her giant ovaries and accuse "liberals" of being "womanly".

"Assuming the worst about Craig, the Senate has not held a vote on
outlawing homosexual impulses. It voted on gay marriage. Craig not only
opposes gay marriage, he's in a heterosexual marriage with kids. Talk
about walking the walk!"

what?? this is amazing, she's bringing up the exact same points someone attacking Craig would (hey, he's having public sex with strangers in a bathroom, while married and with kids!), and using them to defend him and attack the would be attackers. you have to give her credit, i mean this is skillfully laid out bullshit.

"Did Craig propose marriage to the undercover cop? If not, I'm not seeing the "hypocrisy."
"

laughable.

the same points keep coming up over and over

but this brings up a great point. lets giving Ann's readership the benefit of the doubt and assume they're intelligent, well meaning people. i'm sure they dont have the time, energy, inclination, or skills to go out and get all the relevant news in todays world, i sure as hell don't. so they, like everyone else, have to attach themselves to some source of knowledge. its unfortunate, but true. if they attach themselves to people like Ann, they'll receive nothing but the dishonest, false, and duplicitous information like that present in the post she made above. and they won't know it for what it is, since they won't have anything to compare it to.

i'm susceptible to the same thing. right now, i get my news pretty much from adrian and Glenn Greenwald. but honestly, i trust my sources a hell of a lot more than i trust Ann Coulter.

these are just too crazy to be true

2007-08-27T16:59:00.000-07:00

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/DouglasMacKinnon/2007/08/21/news_of_the_future_president_hillary_clinton_surrenders_america

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/DouglasMacKinnon/2007/08/15/the_two_things_to_know_before_your_city_is_nuked_by_terrorists

http://www.julescrittenden.com/2007/08/25/is-the-west-heading-for-civil-war/

are these people serious? i dont even have the words right now.

advertising in social networks

2007-08-26T17:28:00.001-07:00

see link, which should be automatically placed, i havent used scribefire for awhile (or posted at all in awhile) and pretty much forgot how it works.

advertising in social networks is a very interesting problem to me. as i see it the two goals are fundamentally opposed; users want to do whatever it is kids do on the facebook these days (presumably, post pictures of themselves drunk and write funny captions), specifically without being advertised to. the site wants to make money, so its sells advertising space. advertisers want to tap into this new marketing space which so often captures otherwise hard to reach demographics.

banner ads are all well and good, but they've been around for so long they've got to be pretty much completely ineffective by now. this leads marketers to try more novel approaches, like creating actual sites for whatever they're selling and trying to friend people, etc.

but users backlash against this. they perceive it as an infiltration into their otherwise pure online social world. and so they deface the site. its like the SL guys who blew up nike's building, or whatever that was.

both the site and the companies advertising on it are playing a dangerous game. in this case, more people probably found negative press on wal-mart than positive; i doubt they've earned any more shoppers through this venture. at the same time, users are mad at facebook, and it doesnt take much to get fickle user-bases to switch over to a new medium.

my advise to the wal-marts of the world; play your cards very carefully in this new game. err on the side of caution... when the kids in the facebook decide they need a new... whatever (what does wal-mart sell anyway.. everything right?), they'll decide where they want to go get it from. if they want to look at hilarious pictures from last weekends crazy party at Fred's place when his parents were out of town...they're going to get pissed at you if you interrupt that.

as for facebook, be careful not to sell out your user base too much, or they'll be gone before you know it.

i've even had thoughts of starting up a social networking site specifically designed not to have any ads... but there's obviously no money in that. still, an open source ad-free social networking site would probably catch on pretty quick.

link to what the hell i'm talking about

Congratulations!

2007-08-06T16:10:00.001-07:00

if you're reading this there's a good chance you either know my friend Adrian personally, or you've come across my blog through his. In either case, congratulations are in order; Adrian recently proposed to his girlfriend Ruth, and she said yes! these two crazy (no really, crazy) kids will be getting hitched next summer, as i understand it. in whatever capacity you may no him/her/them, drop 'em a line of congrats.

makes me feel pretty old. but it will be one hell of a party. congrats Ruth and Adrian!

quickly...

2007-08-02T20:45:00.000-07:00

on advertising in SL... dont bother, unless you can create value (and how you're going to do that for the average consumer in SL is beyond... no fuck that you arent going t0), theres not point in trying to advertise. people dont just go places to be advertised at. well, except times square.

second, i read somewhere (probably /.) that google's shown a ad-based phone to retailers. its just a prototype but its definitely interesting. free phone, free text messaging, etc etc, except presumably you have to listen to some ad before you can make your call. will people go for this?

probably, free is often too cheap to give up. the real question is how easy it will be to circumnavigate the ads while still getting the free service. once you can hack the thing up, google goes out of the phone business.

i'm not sure they belong there to begin with. yes, they've always been a targeted ad company (whether or not you were aware of it), but where else are they going to expand, and how much of this are we ok with? would you wear free t-shirts that are billboards for some cheesy product? i mean, some people pay a lot of money to do that right now?

its an interesting move and we'll see what comes of it. they may have some success in the poor sector; i dont think middle-upper class people will be willing to put up with ads in their phones. on the other hand, phones are often the one status symbol some lower-class people can afford (just ride on any given bus for proof of this) so they may not go for it either.

and how do you target the ads? i can see this as a great way to sell condoms (whenever you call your girlfriend, trojan gets a 10 sec blurb on safe-sex), but otherwise....

more than a month later....

2007-08-01T14:34:00.000-07:00

the reason i havent posted in over a month is frankly there was too much stuff i felt like i could post on. i got overwhelmed, though no one was reading this stuff anyway, and gave up for awhile. this is still pretty much true. however after having been accused of writing nonsense (not really), i feel like i should update again. adrian wants a post on the recent SL "Terrorism".

can terrorists use SL to train? sure they can, for certain values of train. they arent going to hone their aim with real ak47's in there. but they can go over procedure and protocol as much as they want to, and probably get some practice flying stuff. they could build a mock white house, bomb the shit out of it, and repeat as many times as they wanted to.

"zomg!!! shut down SL NOW!!!11!1" right? please. we can't limit our own tools just because they have the potential to be abused. and SL is a tremendous tool for various reasons that i'm not going into (just wiki it).

"ok!! lets throw lots of taxpayer dollars into government programs designed to infiltrate virtual terrorist cells so we can get those bastards!!!" eh. having some presence in virtual worlds may be valuable. but i'm not convinced. there's a ton of problems here and i only feel like going into a few of them. how do you determine who's actually a terrorist and who's using the whole not-reality of this medium to just play at one (there's a huge difference there, and the slippery slope applies too. maybe we should go after everyone who plays a terrorist in CS as well?). tracking down the people behind the avatars would also be a nightmare, even if they were in the states (just ask RIAA). finally, blowing up the ABC building in SL is not terrorism; it was probably some guy who loves all the geeky things about SL and doesnt appreciate it being hijacked by marketers trying to sell him stuff. i mean, i kinda feel like blowing up a virtual whitehouse right now, with all the bullshit gonzo's spewing out etc. (data mine that, suckers!).

so call me underwhelmed on this one, i really just don't care. they could make a facebook group. "i joined al'qaida and all i got was this crappy facebook group". i still wouldnt care. cause that group is gonna be populated mostly be retarded highschool kids going through the whole "stick it to the man" phase.

other thoughts:
today outside my office some people were marching for affordable housing. i mentioned i wouldnt mind if my rent was lower, and my boss said that the way to acheive that would be to get rid of affordable housing and let the free market do its thing. with a higher supply of market-rate housing my rent would go down (this is most likely true, there are people in my complex paying $800 a month for glorious 3BR's, just cause they've been there since 1930).

should we let the free market do its thing and determine value? why should i pay more rent just so some old lady doesnt have to? does her husband serving in WWII affect that? should it?

the next place to go with this is medicine of course. i'm really not sure about it. i believe the free market works and is a good way of doing things. but it also feels so heartless at times, and i'm not sure how to reconcile that.

rugby is awesome. the rugby world cup is coming up, and i'm psyched.

uh.. i bought a ps3 and enjoy it so far. i feel like i outgrew nintendo a decade ago and havent felt the urge to go back since then. the Wii just seems too much like novelty to me. Wii sports is fun for 15 mins, then you're done.

Apple's iPhone commercials are starting to bother me (people who know me in person will not find this surprising). the first batch i saw just demo'd the features (this is the one like "say you're watching pirates of the carribean and you decide you want calamari hey ok lets look up seafood oh theres the closest". a paraphrase, of course.) but now they're like "never before has an ipod been able to do this" while it shows the guy flipping through his fucking music library or playing a video. really?!? than wtf was the video ipod doing all these years??
but thats not as bad as the most recent offender in the ads-spreading-ignorance campaign. Time Warner Cable, who i'm pretty much forced to use, has one that makes fun of verizon's latest campaign about fiber optics. TWC claims to have been "using fiber for decades, get with the program!". and its true, TWC has been using fiber optics for probably that long. of course, that has nothing to do with what verizon is advertising. TWC is talking about the internet backbone, the absurdly high-speed "tubes" that handle large amounts of traffic. verizon's talking about the "last mile" (wiki it), the part that runs off those larger lines and into your house. does TWC offer fiber optics for the last mile? no. is verizon, by doing so, offering you faster speeds? yes.

i hate deceptive advertising, particularly in this arena.

UPDATE:
ha, i should clearly read full aritcles before commenting on them. the ABC building in SL went down due to a "computer error" rather than a bomb. but should someone bomb it, i still maintain its more likely to be some dweeb making a statement than a "terrorist". thats my take on the Second Life Liberation Army, anyway

marketplace of ideas

2007-06-25T20:43:00.000-07:00

this guy's blog, which he himself was brave enough to post on /. on a thread about Britain ruling intelligent design "not science" (duh), got me thinking about the marketplace of ideas.

generally, i'm a fan of the marketplace of ideas. This guys ideas though, or at least his writing, is incredibly self-centered and egotistical, and looks to use big words with no clarification in the hopes that by being very confusing he'll come off as intelligent. i read a rather long post and really have no idea what the hell he was trying to get across, other than that he's a genius. get over yourself man.

well i should rephrase. he's arguing for the existence of god and it would seem some other conservative ideologies, again in the most obfuscating way possible. just.. read a paragraph and you'll see what i mean.

so what? we should let him profess his ideas, in as unclear a fashion as he wants (or is capable of) even consider them, in the way we should consider all ideas, and choose the best ones based on merit, right?

well, yes, assuming we're capable of judging ideas on their merit. it seems to me that not everyone is truly capable of doing that, they're too prejudiced towards irrational beliefs (ie, religious), too egotistical to accept the equality of others (racists, classist, etc)... the list goes on. these people, either willfully or not, will not pick the best choice out of the marketplace of ideas. not everyone can tell which fruit are bruised.

but they all get to vote!

so we end up with assholes like this One Cosmos guy, and a bunch of idiots agreeing with him for whatever reason, and then they all run off to the polls to save america from teh gayz, meanwhile the rest of us have to deal with the consequences (war in iraq and general incompetence) of ther utter lack of abilities with respect to reasoning.

i'm not proposing anything here... just food for thought. and yes, i do realize i come off at least as egotistical as the guy in that blog, saying that some people can't judge ideas on merit, yet i can. hey, just because i can, doesnt mean i always do. and at least i'll admit these faults.

but really, i'd love to believe that most americans aren't idiots, i just dont get that impression. someone please clue me in if i'm wrong here.

Update 1: BLECH just look at the header under that blog's title.... this guy loves to make up stupid ass words. who the fuck does he think he's impressing with that childish nonsense?

USA 2 - 1 Mexico

2007-06-24T14:46:00.000-07:00

The USMNT won the gold cup about an hour ago, 2-1 over mexico. some thoughts i had on the game:

Benny Feilhaber (sp?) completely owned the second half. he played great.

how the fuck did Beasley miss that chance in the 82nd or so minute? my grandma could have finished it. and shes dead. i could have dropped her on the field in the right place at the right time and the ball would bounce off her and go in. incredible.

Ching played ok, did well to draw the penality, unlucky to hit the bar. Really did nothing else besides those two chances, but if we can get one forward who can consistently come up with two or three chances like that a game, it will be a step in the right direction for us.

Dempsey did nothing. Landycakes played ok.

I'm liking Bradley's coaching style so far. he's got some young guys and he seems to know them realy well. He's not afraid to make changes in either the system or the players when its not clicking, and moving landy to the right wing was a good move. I think he's going to be a good coach for us.

thats all really, fun game to watch. Action packed, both keepers made some very nice saves, etc.

just...wow

2007-06-21T07:26:00.000-07:00

I've never given much credit to Dinesh D'Souza's mental faculties, but in two recent blog posts he falls victim to a complete and utter breakdown in logic. one could argue that all his points of view suffer from such breakdowns, but whatever.

First off, double D claims that Newton is the greatest scientist ever, because Einstein only "modified" Newton's theories and gave them "a deeper and more elaborate context". By this arguement the worlds greatest scienist should be the guy who invented the wheel, since all Newtown did is explain rotational mechanics in a "deeper and more elaborate context". I mean, is he serious? thats completely absurd. Newton was a great scientest.... in the 1600s. we've come a long way since then, baby. I mean Leibniz developed calculus indepedently and at the same time, so you can't use that to argue for Newton's case. And yes, he came up with some great laws and big breakthroughs in mechanics. but mechanics these days is physics for dummies. anyone can understand mechanics. Einstien talked about converting mass to fucking energy. i think thats a bit more impressive than explaining how things move (it goes faster when somethings pushing it! WOW!!).

But none of this is relevant anyway. Atheists don't hold up Darwin and go: "look! this guy was really smart! he's like, the smartest guy evah! and he's an atheists!! we'll all be atheists too!!!". Atheists only point to Darwin when someone says "God created man". then we get to say "well, theres a fuckton of evidence that shows that thats not the case. Check out this dude Darwin and all he did". Darwin provides a pertinent argument to a specific debate (where did people come from). Newton is doing nothing of the kind.

Newton derives his prediction on when the world's gonna end FROM SCRIPTURE. He doesn't have any scientific evidence for the proof of God or anything else religious he may have happened to say. last i checked scripture was not a very good place to get your science. D'Souza's coming to battle equiped with a large baguette. It may, if your mostly blind, look like the right kind of thing to bring to a fight, but its not going to hold up once things get started.

Apparently Newton once said:
"This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and compets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being."

thats not an argument. thats "I don't understand how this system got started, so i'm going to make up an answer, and claim its the only one". Anyone who cant see that is decieving themselves. not to blame Newton, he was operating with very limited knowledge.

the big DD says:
"If the atheists are right that there is some great conflict between science and religion, how come Newton didn't experience this?"
4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727. thats why. Newton had no other knowledge to work with. Once he got to the edge of his understanding, he held up his hands and said "well, thats all i can figure out, God must have done the rest". BUT JUST BECAUSE HE SAID IT DOESNT MEAN ITS TRUE, and thats what DD seems to fail to understand.

You wouldnt take the cavemen who invented the wheel and ask him to build you a car. Just because someone has a good idea at one point doesnt mean 400 years later they're still an expert. Hell, i wouldn't even ask Bill Gates for advice on a piece of software today. i mean he had two good ideas (money in software, pc's everywhere), and thats it. he may, in fact, not be a genius. if he had't had the idea, someone else might. same is true for Newton. just cause he figured out how a ball on a string rotates above my head as i swing it, doesn't mean i trust him to expound on the order of the entire fucking universe. Nor should I. nor should DD.

Darwin is brought up by people because he's relevant to a specific debate (or rather, proves there should be no such debate). Newton isn't, because he's not.

Update 1:
Thats right! i missed the full article and in DD's paragraphs that i only just now read he brings up what Hitchen's said about Newton. Hitchins reminds us that Newton spent a lot of time with alchemy, trying to turn lead into gold. SERIOUSLY. then DD says "I'd set Newton's knowledge of science and religion against that of Hitchens anytime.". Yes, you would, and you're a fucking idiot to do so. Hitchen's has the benefit of ~300 years of scientific development since Newton's time. We've learned an awful lot since then DD, or at least, most of us have. you apparently are stuck in 1700.

Update 2 for grammer, syntax. its hard to write coherently when faced with such outragoues idiocy.

i do love technology...

2007-06-19T16:45:00.001-07:00

posting from work at 7:45pm because i'm a large idiot who left his keys in the apt, locking himself out. I'm not on the lease (or the key card, which i didnt know existed, but need to get on) so they won't let me in. which is good. they shouldn't be letting me in. My cellphone is dead (why they don't make cellphones that turn off 5 minutes before their batteris die so you can still get some emergence use out of them, like getting a number from your contacts? i would love this feature). My roommates out of town until thursday.

20 years ago (ok, maybe 25-30) I'd be fucked. i dont know where my roommate works, so i can't get in touch with him through his company. (I actually dont even have his cellphone number on my phone i will after this experience, howewver). With no real way to contact him, i'd be stuck waiting it out til he got back thurs and could let me in.

As it is, i have his cellphone number in a gmail conversation. all i need is internet access and i can get at it. luckily, all of my friends have internet access (altough i wound up going back to the office since i couldnt get in touch with them). with it i've already reached my roommate who will hopefully be able to find a fax machine at the airport in seattle, otherwise i'll have to crash somewhere and be let in tomorrow.

so yay for the internet. and boo for me being stupid.

nooooooooooooooooooo!

2007-06-18T16:10:00.001-07:00

i found this on fark:

ireland.com - Breaking News - Diageo mulls options for Guinness brewery

they'd better not sell it! i will be much anger and swift vengence should it be sold! actually, the coolest part about this is that Arthur Guinness took out a 9000 year lease. i mean, thats awesome. and i hear its for something stupid like, $3 a year.

this is interesting..

2007-06-17T20:07:00.001-07:00

131 - US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs « strange maps

new jersey's GDP is roughly on par with russia's.

i hate viral advertising

2007-06-17T19:52:00.001-07:00

Kooky: Halo 3 Viral Marketing Campaign Begins; Everyone Confused - Kotaku

the link above is kotaku linking to some other site that has photos etc about apparently a viral marketing ad campaign for halo3.

I hate viral ad campaigns. after their last one failed so horribly, i doubt sony will be trying them again any time soon. google "all i want for xmas is a psp" for some stories about that one, apparently the url (www.alliwantforxmasisapsp.com) now links to haagen daas ice cream. go figure.

In any case, viral ad campaigns, particularly of the sony variety, rely on duping would be consumers into believe they are authentic. as a result they're fundamental insulting the group of people they're advertising to. someone must think they're smarter than i am if they think they'll be able to trick me into believing that some schmuck is gonna start a blog completely dedicated to how he wants a psp for christmas. you could make enough money to buy one in half the time required to set up a polished blog. nevermind registering the domain name, site hosting, all that shit costs money.. the whole premise was utterly stupid, and you were supposed to believe it was genuine, which would make you even more stupid. there you go, thats a great way to get me to want to buy your product, calling me an idiot. the only thing they succeeded in doing was pissing a lot of people off.

so i don't really know what the halo3 people hope to accomplish with this one. they want you to go to this site: www.societyoftheancients.com. its clearly designed to make it look like it was the second of third page on the internet (i mean only 12 year old girls think flashing backgrounds like that are a good idea). they offer no way of contacting the "society", other than joining a mail list. great. cause i love signing up to recieve emails about god knows what from people of have as yet not identified themselves. its a thinly veiled hoax. and with a completely stupid premise.

i mean i just don't get it... no rational person is going to follow the "logic" they propose:

1) we don't know how or why they build stonehenge

2) therefore, the "simplest" explanation is that they had help

3) who could have helped them but technologically advanced aliens?

what?? i mean they actually invoke Occam's razor in their "argument". how does that work... since in order for aliens to be the simplest explanation to stonehenge or the pyramids, you have to explain where the fucking aliens came from and how they got here. thats a whole lot more fucking difficult.

so what's the point? i mean clearly this isnt meant to be taken seriously? how is it going to get anyone to buy halo3 who wasn't already going to? if it isn't, why the hell are they paying people to stand around times square and annoy passersby with this horse shit?

i just dont get it, and it bothers me. because i pride myself on my intelligence, and even the implication that they think i might fall for this shit is insulting.

what?

2007-06-17T17:02:00.001-07:00

Annals of National Security: The General’s Report: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

A dozen government investigations have been conducted into Abu Ghraib and detainee abuse. A few of them picked up on matters raised by Taguba’s report, but none followed through on the question of ultimate responsibility. Military investigators were precluded from looking into the role of Rumsfeld and other civilian leaders in the Pentagon; the result was that none found any high-level intelligence involvement in the abuse.

Who the fuck can hold these people responsible, if the main vehicle for investigation can't? This is a republic, we the citizens should be able to hold the people working for us, like Rumsfeld, responsible, and the army, who works for them, and thus us, should be able to investigate. this is crap.

BofA's sitekey

2007-06-07T11:36:00.001-07:00

one of the most ridiculous pieces of "security" ever. more to come when i get home from work.

ok... getting back to this more than a week later, the sitekey is designed to foil phising attacks. phishing attacks are when i design a web page that looks just like bank of americas, give it a url along the lines of www.bank0famerica.com, and then fake an email to you joe user from bank of america with a link to my version of the page. i want to get you to enter your username and password, so that i can later empty out your account.

Sitekey is supposed to foil this attack. you don't put in your password right away, just your username. then bank of america proves that its ok to enter your password by showing you a picture associated with your account. now that you know who you're dealing with, its ok to enter your password, right?

wrong! this is just creating an extra step for a would-be phisher, who now has to impersonate two sites instead of one. the main method of attack is the same. once you're on the phisher's version of the site, you enter your account name. the phisher takes your account name, goes to the real BoA site, gives them your user name. BoA gives the phisher your sitekey picture. the phisher gives you your sitekey picture. you give the phisher your password.

so there's no real added security here. sure its making things more difficult for the attacker, but the same attack is still possible. and if you've managed to convince your customers that they're safe because of this so-called security feature, they're more likely to trust it, and may even be more susceptible to attack.

but really its just another annoying page to load.

so, stupid sitekey.

On DRM

2007-06-07T09:05:00.000-07:00

this (zdnet.com) is a very good post on why DRM will never work. more on this later when i get home from work. Essentially i'll be tying it to why publishers need to give up on the whole "copyright" idea for content and just embrace free distribution.

evolution of the species

2007-06-06T18:33:00.001-07:00

facebook apparently came out with this little gem; Facebook Diaries: Busted.

now, before we get into the particulars, i'd like to reiterate a few things. i don't like where facebook is going. the more crap they add to their site, the less inclined i am to use it. i want to scope out hot sales chicks from work (ie, find out if they're single), maybe post something clever to some group or some picture or something so i feel good about my own intelligence, browse through photos of people i knew in high school and think "how weird is it that they're still friends with each other??" and thats really about it. i don't want to "RoShamBull" you. online rock-paper-scissors is just about the dumbest thing i've ever heard of (or any asynchronous version of the game, but sponsored ones are even worse). i don't want to paint on your wall with graffiti. i don't give a shit about your horoscope. or mine. the list goes on.

But i fully support this idiotic web-video-confession thing. please, please submit something about that one time in high school where you got totally smashed and drove over your neighbors shrubbery. not only will i laugh at your stupidity (ok i wont really, i'm not wasting my time with that shit), but i'll rest safe and sound knowing that people like me are going to have an easier time getting in to schools and landing jobs because idiots like you are posting yourselves at your most moronic on utterly public sites where such screening most certainly does occur.

i've gotten calls from recruiters because of my facebook profile (not that that means a damn thing about my abilities, i happen to work in a field thats currently pretty highly sought-after and went to a good school). you, after making your gastrointestinal pyrotechnics available for all to see, won't make it past the first round. and thats fine with me. getting into school in particular is such a crapshoot anyway, i'm all for giving the good kids a leg up over people who think anyone else gives a damn what they did that one time they got really high and their parents came back from florida a day early. if i was into that kind of stuff, i'd watch a damn sitcom.

so well done on this one, facebook team!

Volleyball is good times

2007-06-06T18:24:00.000-07:00

i had forgotten how much fun it was. Hurt my back though, so i couldnt jump very well and hit a couple balls into the net as a result. Also the guy in front of me in the rotation just loved to play defense right in front of where i was standing, leaving a huge whole where he's supposed to play and me with nothing to do. oh well, at least i have something to do on wednesdays this summer. soccer may be thursdays, i have to look into it.

now if only there were pick-up fencing bouts right outside my apt. that'd even be worth buying equipment for.

a couple thoughts....

2007-06-05T19:53:00.000-07:00

I'm too tired for a real post, but a couple things worth mentioning:

Read an article on "Radical Honesty" in my roommate's esquire magazine. It is, as you'd expect, the idea that you should always tell the truth. always. Its a pretty cool idea, i dont think i'll subscribe to it completely (which i believe means not at all, its a sort of all or nothing thing), but being more honest probably couldnt hurt.
it should be required of politicians.

uhh the facebook as allowed users to create applications and post them. this has resulted in a couple good apps, a couple dating apps, and a bunch of thinly veiled advertisements as apps. i'm not against free content in the form of advertising but i am wondering how the user base will react. when i joined facebook was only at harvard, brown, and maybe one other school. now its so ubiquitous i wonder if some of the appeal won't be lost. probably not. i'm just condescending.

i guess thats all. radical honesty is cool stuff and i'm gonna try it out. i dont have much to lose here really anyway. i just hope i can distinguish between "honest" and "jackass for the sake of being jackass".

publishing in the public domain

2007-06-03T20:12:00.000-07:00

this slashdot story got me thinking again about publishing content in the public domain. A couple weeks ago there was news about tv companies suing the likes of youtube for posting copyrighted content and all that jazz. Its a very interesting problem without a clear solution (well, we'll see about that anyway).

Say you produce content. You're ABC and you make Heroes, you're EA and you make FIFA 07, you're some record label recording Led Zeppelin... whatever. Doing this costs you money. You have to pay people to do this. You yourself are only doing this so you can make money. that's only natural, most people won't do work if they don't get paid for it.

The rise of the internet has made it impossible for content publishers to prevent people from stealing said content. Its not feasible; the crack only has to be applied once, distribution is widespread and if not untrackable, not worth tracking. Once you release it, people who want to are going to get their hands on it without paying for it. except in some fringe cases (MMO's, basically) thats the reality of the situation.

Most users are good people. Many pirate content not because they're upset about paying for it, but because its its just a lot easier to access that way. That used to be the reality anyway... i could head to my local music store and stive in vain to find a copy of Lakeshore Drive by... well whoever its by (part of the point that), or i could just search for it on napster and have it in minutes. theres a clear winner there. CD's themselves were another reason, no one wanted to pay 20 bucks for a cd when only one song was any good (remember melancholy and the infinite sadness? fucking $40 double cd and all i wanted was Tonight Tonight. bullshit).

TV companies have started to catch on, posting some of their shows streaming online. its a good start in the right direction, but not quite there yet; i can find HD-quality versions with no commercials on other sites. I wouldn't mind watching an ad or two at the start of the show, but they break them into like 5-6 minute chunks and do one in between each. not happening.

you can use something like itunes, but believe me, apple doesn't deserve to be making any money selling music. that they are is more a testament to how idiotic the music distribution companies were not getting in that market first. or you could just get it free.

back to that slashdot story, now apparently music (like, sheet music) publishers are pushing on sites that post guitar tabs (free sheet music, except you don actually have to be able t read music to read a tab). Thats insane; if i figure out a way to play my favorite song without ever reading any sheet music, i should have every right to share that method.

So we're faced with a widespread problem. The internet has provided pretty much unstoppable free distribution of copyrighted content. As a user you may not care (you get the good deal, right?) but remember that if there's no money to be made distributing this content, it won't get made. guaranteed. what's the solution?

Well the tv companies have the right idea; the producers of the content should publish it, for free, themselves. money lost in sales can be recouped in advertising, and users will be fine with that if its done right. i'm talking music, movies, tv shows, sheet music, books.... its going to happen whether publishers want it to or not, so they should ditch all this copyright lawsuit bullshit and get on board. hell, you can even ask for donations. Public broadcasting has been following these models for years now and while they aren't exactly huge financial successes (neither are they mainstream), and they're all still around and doing ok. but if you just do the advertising right...

i mean, say i sign up at a website that distributes tv shows, and i watch a lot of heroes and firefly. you can definitely direct certain ads at me and charge a lot more for those ads. just use google's model of advertising, its a perfect fit for this model. its how webcomics like penny-arcade thrive and i dont see why it cant work just as well for a music label. product placement is another excellent way to go (video and video games), as long as its well done, since at that point the advertising will directly impact the quality of the product. In short publishers need to give up their outdated ideas on how they can "sell" their product and adapt to the changing landscape of technology or go extinct. and this evolution is awesome for the consumer, since we'll get a ton of quality content, on demand, legal, and free.

or they can keep spinning their wheels in this stupid "content goes up, lawsuit goes out, server moves to switzerland" cycle, and attempts at DRM will continue to plague honest users and have no effect on the bad guys.

in the mean time, i'll continue to support worthy products in ways i think are fair. i will of course, err on the side of free (to me, suckers).

glenn greenwald clearly the man

2007-06-01T18:10:00.000-07:00

link here (salon.com)

Glenn is, as usual, on point. I can have only very little to attribute, and highly recommend you read his post yourself. Two things, though.

Glenn says:

"Beltway pundits are so easily fooled, because they are so eager to be. Their brains and emotional reactions -- and thereafter their political statements -- are dominated by these shallow and inauthentic symbols of masculinity and piety which overwhelm reality. They search so desperately for these attributes that they find two-dimensional cartoon images which are just archetypes -- really caricatures -- deeply satisfying."

I fear that not only do the pundits suffer this disease, but their audiences to as well. In fact, what a pundit actually thinks is irrelevant, if he's crafted his message specifically for his audience. I fear that this is in fact the case, and is a result of the infantile obsession we have as a nation with security, as i discussed in an earlier post.

Later Glenn says:

"It's always a great mystery how people who are on their second or third wives with children from each marriage can stand up with a straight face and proclaim themselves to be believers in "traditional marriage" and -- far worse -- to insist that the laws be structured so as to allow and endorse their own highly untraditional and un-Christian marriages while prohibiting other citizens from entering their own. And it's even more of a mystery that individuals such as Thompson are able to spout (though, with vigor, personally contravene in their own conduct) such platitudes and still be taken seriously."

Its an excellent point, and in a rational world, this would be a great mystery. But again, the audience to which these posturings are targeted don't care whether or not they're true. they just want to feel safe, and as long as someone plays the part, what matter that person's real life dealings? These people aren't going to fact check, they don't care if someone's actions reflect their words. they just want a nice and warm, fuzzy feeling when they see their "decider" on tv. as long as their getting that they don't care. once someone who they disagree has an affair, however, well, thats another story entirely.

in the mean time, i really do have a very negative opinion of the general population of america, particularly the red states. someone please, prove me wrong to hold it.

EDIT:
this (youtube) is Fred Thompson's video response to something michael moore apparently said to him. i dont know what. Thompson recommends Moore think about a mental institution (sigh... i always liked his character on L&W too).

but thats not the point. read the comments. go ahead, read them. how many of those people can vote? in swing states? apparently they'll vote for anyone who points michael moore down, because moore is fat and deserves to go to hell. or something, i mean you explain it to me if thats wrong.

EDIT II:
oh, apparently moore challenged thompson to a deabte on health care. hence the "i don't have time for you". now the "you should look into a mental instituion", that, to me, seems a little uncalled for.

Google's Mission

2007-06-01T09:03:00.000-07:00

Google's new street view is kinda cool. you can zoom around the street and look at stuff. neat right?

well, sorta. its also kinda creepy. and the trend it demonstrates is even creepier. Google is the first to admit their goal; have all the data. they want every piece of data, ever, and they'd like it now if possible. Their business model is as follows:
1) get lots of data
2) ????
3) profit.

and its worked well for them so far. But their never-ending quest for more information is in direct conflict with their "do no evil" philosphy. Lets take google maps for example. Initially it was how most people probaby still use it, just maps, with directions, etc. then they added satellite imagery. "Hey cool, i can see my car parked outside my house!". now apparently they've sent a van to drive around select cities and take pictures of everything that happens to be going on in that street on that day. Naked person in the window? woops. Now you're online for millions to see! check out this (wired.com) for some funny photos people have found so far. The logical next step for this is to put live cameras up there and make it all update in real time. Horrifying. Then you can store and index all that data and... well forget about getting away with running any red lights. or anything else for that matter.

it comes down to a privacy issue. i mean, i dont really have a problem with google street view. but whats next for them if they keep going down this line? google interiors? google people? those are all downright frightening. google blueprints seems completely feasible. do you really want the blueprint of your house/apt available online at a moments notice to anyone?

Can google possible stay "not evil" while continuing to hoarde every piece of data they can get their hands on? i don't think so. I'm not really paranoid over this, i'm not gonna lose any sleep over google street view. i was probably at work when the pictures were taken. but its still pretty creepy, and continuing down the "more data more data!!" line it only gets worse.

Someone's apparently already sueing over it, claiming that her cat can be clearly seen in her window. i dont have the link, but whoever it is said something along the lines of: if it was the government doing this, people would be outraged. And she's right, if the feds were doing this (or telling us about doing this anyway), wouldn't you be pissed? shouldn't you be just as, if not more, pissed now? i mean its not just the feds who can see this, everyone can.

in the mean time, you just try to catch me sunbathing outside on the street, suckers.

Security

2007-05-31T20:29:00.000-07:00

Security is a myth. it simply does not exist in the sense most people want it to. People want to feel that even if someone wanted to hurt them, this hypothetical attacker would not be able to. yeah right.

this article(cio.com) describes how hackers can cover their tracks in such a way as to be pretty much invulnerable to prosecution, at least through electronic evidence. It's an interesting read, and the techniques described are interesting (to me at least), but it raises some higher-level question about what we should be trying to do when it comes to security anyway.
can you possibly hope to protect your credit card number? well, no. you can make good starts (never give it to a place that will save it is a good one), you can hope vendors are smart and dont store the thing (which you shouldn't do), or you can just deal with some fraudulent charges when they show up. credit card companies seem to be pretty on top of that these days, which is good, since they'd go out of business if they weren't.

But if you can't trust your file system to tell the truth, who can you trust? Security in any sense, informational, personal. national, is utter crap. its a complete chimera. it will not and can not exist. If some wants very very badly (and i mean more than you've wanted, anything or ever) to do X, whether X is break into your house, steel your "identity", slice you open with a power saw, or fly a plane into your building, they're going to find a way to do it. if, god forbid (ha, god) a group of people decided they wanted to do one of those things to you, its just a matter of when. As a nation we need to accept our vulnerability, give up our infantile obsession with security, and move on. you want to play the numbers game here. you want to stop most of the attacks, most of the time, for most of the people. You want to stop big attacks. If you're smart you can usually do that without giving up much if any freedom (or time, or cpu cycles, or whatever). If, better yet, you can remove the benefit of the attack all together, now you're really winning.; why break into someone's house if you can't sell the stuff you steal? Of course to do that you've got to convince some people to keep vigilant eyes on their bank accounts, and others that there may, in fact, be no afterlife, so they should stick to this one. In the meantime, computer forensics go out the window; it's kinda like trying to ask a suicide bomber where he got his bomb. he's, you know, dead.

ps: oh yeah, slashdotters annoy me some time. here we have an interesting article on security, and theres no debate on the real topic. nothing about the schools of thought behind the guys writing these antiforensic apps, nothing about.. well, anything. other than "zomg you need an app to mess with timestamps? n00b you can just use touch!". My guess is TimeStomper is a windows app, boys. and even so, completely not the point.... but everyone wants to show off their knowledge (hey me too).

Rudi Guilliani is a bad person

2007-05-16T17:19:00.000-07:00

Whatever you think about republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, admit that he sticks to his guns. When he expressed the opinion that the US should stay out of foreign affairs, and that our meddling can result in things like 9/11, Rudi took it upon himself to say that the US was in no way responsible for 9/11, and i think demanded that Ron Paul take his comment back. He didn't, and went on to talk about the CIA's understanding of blowback and gave several examples.

What sort of evil bullshit is that? Rudi's words communicate the following things to me about his ideas:

1) We should continue to do whatever we want abroad, without worrying about the consequences.
2) Instead of analyzing what went wrong to bring about 9/11, we should all just stop thinking about it because it wasn't all fault.

and presumably:
3) Rudi will think about it for us and decide what's best.

he's an authoritarian fuckhead and i very sincerely hope he doesn't get elected.

US media sucks balls

2007-05-16T06:22:00.000-07:00

from /. (www.slashdot.com):

Hylas sends us to Democracy Now for a newscast on the missing emails, an interview with investigative journalist Greg Palast. Here's Palast talking about the fired US attorney from New Mexico, David Iglesias:
"Iglesias believes the real reasons for the firings are in what are called the missing emails, emails sent by the [White House political advisor Karl] Rove team using Republican Party campaign computers, which Rove claims can't be retrieved. But not all the missing emails are missing. We have 500 of them. Apparently the Rove team misaddressed their emails, and late one night they all ended up in our inboxes in our offices in New York City."
This story has had zero play in the US media; it's been being carried on the BBC.

why isn't this all over the news? i want to know whats in those emails.

jon stewart rocks

2007-05-15T21:03:00.000-07:00

he called the fact that politicians refuse interviews and duck questions and etc "open contempt for ... democracy". he couldn't be more right, and it sucks that this goes on so much.

Jerry Falwell dies

2007-05-15T14:32:00.000-07:00

just google him for confirmation that i'm not making this up.

and really, i don't care. i mean, i'm not happy anyone's dieing, but i am happy that this guy is shut up. check wikipedia on him, he was agaisnt the civil rights movement, supported apartheid, made up bad stuff about Clinton, etc etc. all that's really par for the course for these far right-wingers.

i'm about half-way through Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion and have been listening to what some of Christopher Hitchins has to say on the issue, and i have to agree with them. Religion is very bad. Falwell is an example. I'm an anti-theist.

That he died suddenly, and that he lived in a city in the south with the word "Lynch" in it, are ironic, but that's all.

IP copywrite laws chock full of utter stupidity.

2007-05-15T13:25:00.000-07:00

full article: http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9719339-7.html (news.com)

Apparently everyones favorite utterly inept (or completely corrupt, take your pick), attorney general wants congress to enact some new IP copywrite laws. lets take a look at some of the real beauties here.

" * Criminalize "attempting" to infringe copyright. Federal law currently punishes not-for-profit copyright infringement with between 1 and 10 years in prison, but there has to be actual infringement that takes place. The IPPA would eliminate that requirement. (The Justice Department's summary of the legislation says: "It is a general tenet of the criminal law that those who attempt to commit a crime but do not complete it are as morally culpable as those who succeed in doing so.") "

Why is this one so bad? well, what constitutes "attempting" to infringe on IP copywrites? clicking a link to download a movie? clinking a link you thought was to a review of a movie? this is one step away from thought crime. "you were thinking about clinking that link, therefore you go to jail". rubbish.

" * Permit more wiretaps for piracy investigations. Wiretaps would be authorized for investigations of Americans who are "attempting" to infringe copyrights. "

combine this with the "anyone using any real amount of bandwidth must be downloading movies illegally" argument and you get the feds listening in on every interent connection in the states. if they aren't already. i should write a packet filter that looks for "terror-related" material, then sell it to the feds. meh they probably have one already.

"* Add penalties for "intended" copyright crimes. Certain copyright crimes currently require someone to commit the "distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period of at least 10 copies" valued at more than $2,500. The IPPA would insert a new prohibition: actions that were "intended to consist of" distribution. "

oh here we go, actual thought crime. cool.

"* Require Homeland Security to alert the Recording Industry Association of America. That would happen when CDs with "unauthorized fixations of the sounds, or sounds and images, of a live musical performance" are attempted to be imported. Neither the Motion Picture Association of America nor the Business Software Alliance (nor any other copyright holder, such as photographers, playwrights or news organizations, for that matter) would qualify for this kind of special treatment. "

what? why the hell should the department of homeland security report anything to any commerical orginization? don't these guys have better shit to do??

and finally my favorite:
"* Create a new crime of life imprisonment for using pirated software. Anyone using counterfeit products who "recklessly causes or attempts to cause death" can be imprisoned for life. During a conference call, Justice Department officials gave the example of a hospital using pirated software instead of paying for it. "

thats life in prison for using pirated software. but don't worry, in order for you to wind up in jail for your stolen version of windows, you have to kill someone with it. or "recklessly cause or attempt to cause death". here's a couple ways this could happen to you:

1) because you didnt pay for your windows, your outlook is broken. you don't get an alert to go perform brain surgery on your patient, who dies.

2) a pirated version of photoshop running on your machine produces pictures so horrendous, onlooker's heads explode.

3) a stolen video game is so realistic, you die in real life too. of course, thats more of a suicide.

i mean in all seriousness, how the hell can you kill someone with a piece of software? and if you manage to do that, why in gods name does it matter that the software was pirated?? if through some brilliance you can kill someone with a version of windows, does it really make any damn difference how you got your hands on that version of windows? People who shoot people don't get life cause they stole the gun. The only way i can think to kill someone with acrobat is to lodge the cd in their throat, which is death by cd, not software. this whole thing is completely absurd.

so why's it happenin?

movie and record labels apparently have a lot of lobbying power. big surprise there.

in any case, its kinda like prohibition. you can try to make this stuff illegal, it will just mean that most americans are breaking the law.