Confessions of a Concept Junkie

Pop Quiz

2009-07-21T19:48:00.003-04:00

CBO Director Doug Elmendorf said: "In the [health care reform] legislation that has been reported, we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs." Mr. Elmendorf added, ". . . the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, because federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run ... under any plausible scenario."

Given that the CBO has a reputation for being objective and nonpartisan, what would be the choice of a sane, honest politician, attempting to act in the public interest?

1. Reevaluate health care reform, taking into account the fact that Americans are satisfied with their healthcare in the range of anywhere from the 60%-85% range according to different surveys. Maybe things aren't so bad after all, especially since you've already run up a bigger deficit in 6 months than the last President did in 8 years. Give things a chance to settle down and hold a huge public debate how best to address the problem when recovery is well under way.

2. Consider a piecemeal approach that would address the most chronic problems first, such as helping ensure that people who don't have coverage, but need it, and want it, can get it. Following that, implement a series of measures to rein in the tremendous amount of fraud and waste in Medicare and Medicaid. Couple increased services and entitlements with true cost-cutting reforms for a truly cost-neutral plan going forward.

3. Take measures to decouple health coverage from employment, which would allow much more freedom of choice and would not penalize people who are laid off (COBRA is extremely expensive), or who work in a volatile industry and change jobs often. Foster other means of collective bargaining for insurance that doesn't depend on a person's employer or union to help those people who are unemployed, self-employed or who don't have the best choices in health care provided by an employer.

4. Ignore the advice, plunge wildly ahead with another 1000+ page bill that will be passed without being read by anyone voting on it. Load the bill up with all kinds of pork, guarantee huge cost overruns, completely ignore the cries of common sense or the constituents, blaspheme the Constitution, and generally treat the economy like a bunch of thugs wielding crowbars and chains beating a poor victim to death in the back alley somewhere. When the victim cries for help, whack him good, be sure to break some bones, and tell the victim you _are_ helping him. Make sure the blood doesn't splatter on your Armani. When things go exactly as expected and reform makes things worse, blame your opponents or the rich.

If you chose 4, congratulations, you have undergone enough intellectual and moral devolution to qualify for Congress. For bonus points, make seditious comments against the military, kowtow to our enemies and steal candy from babies.

The Senators Respond

2009-07-11T17:39:00.002-04:00

Well, after my strongly worded plea to Senators Warner and Webb, I eventually received replies from both.

I did not care for Senator Warner's reply. It was extremely generic and made it sound to me like he had every intention of voting for the Cap-and-Trade bill. He mentioned the seriousness of the so-called global warming program, and said that the science "supports" the need for "dramatic changes", but briefly mentioned that this need must be balanced with economic considerations.

Senator Webb's response was much better in my opinion. He more strongly balanced the rhetoric for environmental concerns with mentions of the many obvious down sides to this legislation. It looks to me like the statement of someone who is seriously considering the issue, and is willing to acknowledge that there will be many, serious side-effects from this plan.

Both may vote either way, but from these letters, I would suspect Senator Webb is more likely to vote against this horrible bill than Senator Warner.

Of course, since the carbon-dioxide-phobics never mention the very reasonable alternative of nuclear power, which proves to me that none of them are interested in anything more than they are interested in harming the American economy. Besides, isn't water vapor a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2? And why won't any of these flat-earthers, excuse me, _hot_-earthers acknowledge that the climate has levelled off and has been getting slightly cooler for the last decade.

Those inconvenient truths...

I've been following the science at sites like Watts Up With That and there's no doubt in my mind that not only is the debate not over, it's changing rapidly and not in the direction the end-of-the-world types are so invested in.

The day the correlation between the global warming issue and political spectrum (left vs. right) isn't almost perfect is the day I'll start considering the science has something conclusive to say.

Independence Day? Independence from What?

2009-07-03T22:20:00.007-04:00

Independence Day may have finally outlasted its legacy. Independence Day may have finally outlived its meaning. Our country may not even deserve the right to celebrate this holiday any more, this recognition of a declaration of human sovereignty, this recognition of a declaration of inalienable rights that can be granted or refused by our Almighty Creator alone, this recognition of a declaration that each and every person has a right, and a duty, to govern himself, to hold himself to a moral standard, defined by God and recognized and codified throughout the history of Western civilization, to be, in a word, independent.

Is it hypocritical to celebrate Independence Day when our government is far more oppressive, far more restricting of our rights, far more confiscatory of our property, than the government from which our national forefathers originally fought and gained independence?

How can the citizens of this country, in good conscience, and without hypocrisy, celebrate the founding of a Republic which no longer exists, the brilliant yet simple Constitution written by men of wisdom, based upon the eternal and objective truths, which is essentially irrelevant, the ideals of individual liberty and of a limited government with narrow enumerated powers which are mocked relentlessly by the sprawling, unholy behemoth whose existence blasphemes against the idea of a government "of the people, by the people and for the people"?

How can this country pride itself in its recognition of the unique nature of man, who owes his will, intellect and many inalienable rights to his Creator, and yet confer personhood unto corporations, nonhuman and artificial entities which can engage in any manner of illicit or immoral behavior for which their human constituents are often as not never held to account?

How can we citizens even consider the idea that we remain independent? How can we consider the idea that we have not, through ignorance, through neglect, and often through choice, slowly but surely parceled off our independence, our liberties, bit by bit, over the decades, but rapidly increasing in recent years and months, for security, for convenience, for "fairness"?

This President and this Congress are a mockery of everything Independence Day stands for. This President, who if not a literal alien, is an alien to the American experience, an alien to the America ideals, an alien to everything that sets, or used to set, this country above and apart from every other... this President who was instructed at the feet of Marxists, this President who has associated with racists, terrorists, and criminals of all stripe, this President whose success, whose career, whose election had nothing to do with his merit, his accomplishments, or any other quality than his brazenness, his duplicity and his corruption. This Congress, charged with dispensing the legislation of our government, based upon and limited by the Constitution has become a marketplace of influence, buying and trading their very own power, compromising with each other how best to squander the riches they confiscate, not representing us, but using us to further their own interests, their own agenda.

These scoundrels must hate the idea of Independence Day. These dastards must take offense at the very idea of a free citizenry. These parasites must rail and chafe against the idea that each and every person in this great nation, for which hundreds of thousands gave their lives, can and should govern themselves. These would-be tyrants should denounce Independence Day, if there were any morsel of honesty in their words. Instead, they would have us celebrate Dependence Day. They would have us recognize that we owe our well-being, our livelihood, even very existence to the State. They would hold it as self-evident that the State's inalienable rights are to determine who lives and who dies, define morality and impose it at the point of a gun, and to pursue not equal opportunity among the governed, but equal results.

This President and this Congress do not see themselves as representatives of the citizenry, but as our superiors, our masters, our instructors. They do not see themselves as bringing the ideals of their constituents from across the land, and coming together to hash those ideals out to determine the proper way for the great men and women of this country to govern themselves. No, they see it is their duty, in fact their right, to determine for us what our ideals should be, to determine how best it is for us to live our lives, to determine ultimately how best we can serve them, so they in their benevolent wisdom can nurse us on the teat of their moral superiority, ensuring that the efforts of no one result in any greater benefit to him, than to his fellow.

While denying the dominion, even the existence of God, these would-be saviors, these would-be overseers, these would-be nursemaids have claimed for themselves the very mantle of the Almighty. Our leaders would claim for themselves a moral authority that is His alone. They claim for themselves a superiority in kind and degree over the governed that is His alone. They claim for themselves an oblation of time, talent and treasure which is owed to Him alone. They claim for themselves all these things for the benefit of their subjects, subjects who they believe are incapable of taking care of themselves, subjects who must be forced to do those things which their leaders in their wisdom decree best.

They claim for themselves the right, the authority and the power to nullify any consequences of a person's behavior, so that all might be made equal, in the name of fairness. They claim for themselves the duty and the privilege to determine what each person should receive, to protect each from the actions of the other, but to also protect each from the actions of himself. They claim for themselves, and will soon achieve, if we continue to let them, the power to reduce all of us from sovereign persons in the eyes of God to subhuman animals, smothered in a ever-loving, ever-caring, ever-controlling arms of Mother State.

And we have the nerve, the gall, the stupidity to celebrate independence?

My Letter to My Senators

2009-06-26T22:47:00.003-04:00

Senator Warner/Webb:

I have read with great alarm and disgust that this insane and reckless "Cap-and-Trade" Bill has passed the House.

I cannot for the life of me understand how members of Congress can, in good conscience, vote for bills with hundreds and hundreds of pages, with thousands and thousands of items, each one of which has the potential to radically damage our rights, our economy and the very functioning of this country.

If there is any hope for maintaining what little sanity in this country, and what little respect we citizens have left for our national legislators, and what little remains of the Constitutionality of this great country, I insist that you vote against this bill, and do everything within your power to convince your fellow Senators that this bill is utter folly and is tantamount to economic suicide.

I have no doubts that you are aware of the frustration, anger and disgust that is unprecedented towards the reckless antics of the last few Congresses, and especially this current one, and a President who acts more like some kind of tinpot banana-republic dictator than the leader of the Free World. I feel as if you folks, as a whole, are treating this country as nothing more than a big piñata, battering it, and us, relentlessly to see what goodies you can expose as it ruptures. The people have spoken against the bailouts and yet it did no good. The people have spoken out about the so-called stimulus and yet it did no good. The people have spoken out against earmarks and yet it did no good. Frankly, I wonder if there is anything we can do any more to stop the literal rapine of generations' worth of wealth in the support of mindless rhetoric, shameless demagoguery and outright lies coming out of our government these days.

It seems to me that Congress, as well as this President, have abandoned all pretense of abiding by the Constitution's specific enumeration of limited powers to the federal government. I feel utterly betrayed at the brazenness of these bills, the gall of passing something that members haven't even read, that members literally could not read in the time given. If anyone else in the world were to perform his job in this way, he would be fired for negligence, but for a Congressman or Senator, this is Standard Operating Procedure. To me it is a mockery of the duties and responsibilities of such important jobs, and shows willful abandonment of the oath to protect and defend our Constitution.

Our President and this Congress are systematically dismantling everything that made this country great, that made this country unique in the history of the world, that has allowed this country to become the most free, most productive and richest country in the history of Mankind. We are witnessing the end of our Republic as it has existed for 230 years, but which in the past decades has become further and further distanced from every idea upon which it was founded.

If our Founding Fathers knew what this country had become they would be ashamed and disgusted, too. They would especially be ashamed at the degeneration and devolution of their successors to the high offices of the Republic who have let politics and greed become the defining ideals of the United States. They would be shamed at the flagrant violation of each and every item in the Bill of Rights, with the exception of the Third Amendment, with the ease at which Congress rationalizes every power grab, every clear disregard for the intent of the Constitution, every show of contempt for the sacred ideals of limited government, of the people, by the people and for the people, confident in the knowledge that nothing will stand in their way.

Please vote against this legislation and do everything you can to convince your fellow Senators to reject this Bill. It will do nothing to help the environment, but do practically everything possible to ruin our economy, and thus, this country.

Rick Gutleber
Leesburg, VA

Hypocrisy in the Age of "Sacrifice"

2009-06-19T13:58:00.007-04:00

Of all all these rich liberals who support Obama and his ilk, why is it none of them ever offers additional money to the government, and I would suspect, tend to engage in every tactic possible to avoid, at least legally, paying taxes?

Many of these liberals support charitable causes and are generous with their money, often doing many admirable things to help others. However, they are never more generous to the government they vocally adore, or the President whom they treat, sometimes literally, as a deity, than they need to be. We can be sure of this because no self-respecting liberal in the public eye would contribute in such a way without using it as an example, or even as a means of self-aggrandizement, especially if the person is a politician.

And yet, in a time when the President and Congress are growing our government at a rate faster than any time except perhaps World War II, why are none of the supporters of these overreaching statists setting a good example and demonstrating their obvious faith in the government by making contributions to it? Why don't they put their money where there mouths are? If it's good enough for Joe the Plumber, why isn't it good enough for Barbra Streisand? Can't you imagine the fanfare of some great would-be philoanthropist personally handing a giant check for, say, one million dollars to a Senator or Congressman, or (gasp!) even the President himself, to be deposited into the general treasury? What a photo op that would be!

Is it because, they, like every good American, know that it's largely a waste? Is it possible that even in their minds, sodden as they are with visions of the Omnipotent, Omnibenevolent State, they acknowledge the universal truth that the Federal government is largely incompetent, wasteful and even corrupt?

I respect the idea of people of any political mien sharing their money with any cause they deem appropriate, because that is their right, even duty. Many liberals support causes such as the environment, education, and eliminating poverty, causes that transcend politics and support of which does much good. But none of them, so far as I've ever heard, are willing to turn over their largesse to the coffers of government. Why do these folks get to pick how their money is spent, but want everyone else, especially the rich, to have no say? Sure, they might contribute to building a playground, or a clinic, or a nature preserve, all admirable causes, but isn't the government also an admirable cause? And if not, why not?

Of course, charity is not always prevalent among these kinds of people. Why are people like the Obamas and the Bidens, who, though rich, contributing almost nothing to charity, while constantly lecturing us, even preaching to us, about how we must sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice, for the good of others?

Hasn't anyone in Washington ever learned one of the most basic lessons of life that you sway more people by actions than words? I mean even if the likes of President George W. Bush, who contributes far more than any recent Democrat president, are giving charity solely for appearance's sake, they're still doing it. Appearance is everything in politics, we are led to believe, so wouldn't even the appearance of caring for others be worth enough to contribute generously, regardless of the actual effect or intent?

Are these politicians really that dense? Do they really not care? Are they truly the hypocrites they appear to be? Is there any other conceivable explanation?

The Republicans in the Era of Obama

2009-04-29T12:42:00.003-04:00

So it seems the Republicans are now beating the Democrats in one of those generic (i.e., meaningless) Rasmussen polls. Huh. How about that? The Bible the President was sworn in on isn't even cool yet, and things are already trending to the Other Guys. The President has the lowest approval rating of any President in the last 40 years, except Clinton, at the proverbial "100 Days" mark and people are starting to look back to the opposition party they just got through tossing out of office. Wow. Short attention span much?

My first reaction is, "The Republicans? Are they even still around?" How many times are we going to play this stupid game? The Democrats spent decades running up spending and bloating the government, so we kick them out and vote in the Republicans, who will save us from the incompetent Democrats. The Republicans proceed to, er, run up spending and bloat the government, so we kick _them_ out and vote the Democrats back in, to save us from the corrupt Republicans. Oh, yeah, now we remember why we hated the Democrats. They're incompetent. Say... those Republicans are looking pretty good right now.

Does anyone else see a pattern here? It's the Battered Wife Syndrome. Conservatives keep going back to the Republicans based on the promise, true decades ago, but no longer, that they will help reform government and possibly rescue it from teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Then we get kicked in the nadgers. But we keep coming back, because, gosh!, where else are we going to go?

When will this country get a proper conservative, small-government, individual freedom/responsibility party, because I watched the Republicans from 2000 to 2006 and they certainly weren't that party? They essentially took a dive in 2008 by running yet another candidate whose heart wasn't in the race (shades of Bush 1 and Dole), and elected a total enabler for the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. Remind me again why they deserve anyone's support? Because they oppose the President's seemingly deliberate economic sabotage and surrender-monkey foreign policy? Sorry, that's not enough. Not nearly enough.

Right now, the Republicans track record is abysmal on almost every issue except National Security. There is no one at the national level that inspires any kind of confidence and support from the beleaguered true conservatives, who keep hanging in there, doing their jobs, obeying the law, raising moral families and being productive citizens. The few that were there have sold themselves out so thoroughly even True Believers have given up hope, seemingly being less capable of doublethink and more immune to self-deception than the Obama worshippers.

There are some good possibilities for the future from the state level, Governors Palin, Jindal, Perry and Sanford, but since the Chairman of the RNC apparently, like our President, was picked for his skin color as opposed to having anything to offer to the job, the Republican Party at the national level is, as far as I'm concerned, moribund. The Zombie Party won't save us from the Cult of Personality and its army of Useful Idiots. "Night of the Living Dead" didn't have so much aimless shambling around.

It's going to take a lot more than agreeing that Obama is bad for this country in order to save it.

The Perfect Rock Ballad

2009-02-04T12:11:00.002-05:00

And now for something completely different... I wrote this back in September 2003, but wanted to post it (with a little editing) for some friends to read. It regards a song from Spock's Beard's "Feel Euphoria" release from that summer.

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Rick's Top Ten Reasons Why "Shining Star" is the Perfect Rock Ballad

First off, I'm generally not a big fan of rock ballads. I think the form was generally perfected by Justin Hayward's and John Lodge's laments of unrequited love in the mid 70's and has generally been beat to an undignified death in the intervening years. However, that doesn't mean that there aren't numerous good examples still being produced, usually in non-obvious places.

Here's my list of 10 reasons why this is, in my opinion the perfect rock love song, in no particular order.

1. Nick's vocals are clean, clear and emotive. He doesn't have that raspy, limited range singing that plagues most rock balladeers, nor does he beat us senseless with brutal and shrill vocal gymnastics like Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey, etc. He just sings the song, does it well, and does a superb job of displaying the affection he feels for Tiffany.

2. This is no wimpy song even if it is mellow. It is definitely crankable, thanks to excellent production, Nick's tasty, groovy, understated drums, Al's great guitar, and especially Dave's smoov, sexy bass playing. The song has real mass behind it. Plus, it would be great to dance to.

3. Tambourine. 'Nuff said.

4. The refrain takes a different direction. Just like "Carie", the song takes a few unpredictable turns, which keep it from being a just a boring, old MoR radio staple, but a really cool piece of music. The ending is even better because being rather abrupt it leaves you wanting just a bit more.

5. The lyrics. First we know it's a real song about real people, which is a big plus, because we have all heard Tiffany talk about Nick and see that they seem to have that story book romance. The tactile references in the beginning are very evocative ("wind flows over me", "blood rush to my skin") and contrast neatly with the spiritual overtones ("You're there to open a door", "Shine your light on me" "the love that lights my way") highlighting the emotional/intellectual aspect with the physical/sensual aspect of deep, abiding romantic love. Very powerful, when you really start to think about it.

6. Like any good love song, there is an element of longing... we know the particulars: Nick is on the road for weeks at a time, and that absence is a hardship even as it paradoxically contributes to the strength of a relationship.

7. How could I not mention Al's guitar... dreamy, expressive yet subtle, the solo is short, sweet, and perfect for the moment. The steel guitar-style sound in the beginning complements the fretless bass in an awesome way to create a warm, fuzzy safe feeling that perfectly echoes the mood of the words... and the little volume-control bits remind me of another perfect rock ballad "Walking on Air" from King Crimson's "Thrak", a song that has a lot of similar elements.

8. The first few notes at the beginning of the song, when the guitar kicks in, reminds me very strongly of the beginning of the old Tempations' classic "My Girl". I don't know if that's on purpose, an accident or a product of my weird brain wiring, but it's cool nonetheless.

9. This was originally a personal reference to one of the members of the mailing list that would be utterly out of context and pointless here. Instead I will add the Ryo's very understated keyboards, especially his organ playing, don't stand out and grab you, but the song would be much diminished if they weren't there. This is the mark of a good artist and a superb ensemble performance.

10. The production, like that of all of Spock's Beard music, is excellent. The beginning is very clean and simple, but the refrain is lush, without sounding mushy or muffled. Just perfect. Rich Mouser's work should be required studying for anyone in the music production business, many of whom seem to have completely forgotten how to make a record sound good.

Along with "Walking On Air" and a list of other songs I will perhaps one day compile, this is something I would have liked to have been able to play at my wedding.

The End of America?

2008-07-08T20:29:00.002-04:00

We are living in strange times. As the most successful, most free, most productive country in the world, you would think the citizens and government of the United States of America would cherish and protect and nurture such a treasure, but we are steadily, systematically, and irrevocably dismantling this country, and everything upon which it was founded at an alarming rate.

We have turned immigration from wellspring of creativity and drive, spurring the greatest successes experienced in American history to a program of importing an overwhelmingly large population that is disinterested, if not wholly contemptuous of everything that sets America apart from, and above, every other nation in history.

There's nothing special about the newest immigrants. The vast majority of them are like all immigrants to our great Republic, just looking for a better lives for themselves and their families, but our country is being run by people who simply hate themselves and hate America. The people running our country are completely ignorant, or worse, completely disregarding of what it takes to properly nurture the "Grand Experiment" created by a group of men, each more wise than every single person in the entire Federal Government. The people running our government are happy (or oblivious) to squandering the greatest natural resource in history, the American people, by allowing their dilution and corruption, through abandonment of the rule of law, a complete abdication of proper education and abandonment of the wisdom of the likes of Moses, Aristotle, and Washington for the mores of Croesus, Bacchus and Eros.

Our officials don't want to "force" our values on immigrants (values that made the United States singular in the history of the world as the greatest political expression of liberty and the dignity of man, values that nurtured the greatest source of technological and economic innovations in history) and are doing everything they can to accommodate these immigrants and require nothing of them. And of course, if you simply give something to someone without requiring anything of them, it is human nature will that they usually hold it, and the giver in contempt. After all, what kind of chump country would do something so stupid as let itself be overrun and dismantled from within? Of course, this translates eventually into arrogance and open hatred, and that is what the immigrants are learning: The United States government is a complete sucker, and suckers deserve to be taken for everything you can beg, borrow or steal. After all, these immigrants are only valued as a new underclass to be exploited for cheap labor and easily swayed votes, not as enriching and contributing members of the traditional American "melting pot".

The darkest days of our country, and perhaps its end as something unique in history, are coming closer and closer. Our elections are becoming pointless choices between increasingly indistinguishably dismal and pandering shysters. Our latest Presidential election hinged on a bizarre and obscene cult of personality demonstrating a total lack of reflection, of critical thinking in a blind rush to elect someone different (how wasn't important) from our previous leader, who in many ways earned his historically low approval rating. Corporations are running riot over our laws and rights. Congress is nothing but the proverbial "parliament of whores" and officially has only single-digit approval ratings, despite being elected in to fix the rampant (but hardly unprecedented) corruption of recent years. The irony is that there are 10%-15% of the population that are simply too stupid and ignorant to realize Congress could possibly do something wrong and even a lot of those idiots realize Congress is nothing but a great big ripe slice of FAIL. Our populace is grotesquely ignorant of our history, and indeed the history of Western civilization, and are becoming increasingly misinformed and illiterate thanks to an education system designed by socialists to produce mindless factory workers suitable for the 19th century not the 21st. Campaigning by our national candidates is nothing but naked bribery and appeals to our most base emotions. People are more and more buying into the false promises of socialism and even Marxism, due in large part to collective amnesia of ravages of humanity these utterly failed philosophies have wrought in the past 150 years.

There are a few principled politicians, but they are far outweighed by those whose principles have been sold out to money, to power, to perversion, to literally every moral, intellectual and philosophical bankruptcy in these modern times. Our elected representatives exhibit every kind of corruption and depravity known to man. They themselves are largely ignorant, incompetent and capable only of gaming the system to their own gain or the gain of their moneyed benefactors, and pay only lip service to any proper notions of governance or even civilization.

It has been said that democracy will only work until it occurs to the electorate to simply vote themselves the largess of the state, and indeed we are in that time. The current bailouts elicit equal reactions of incredulousness and disgust as our leaders preach, against all logic, that the only way to get ourselves out of the hole we have dug ourselves into is to keep digging down.

So it's not the immigrants who have really changed. It's the country. America is rapidly heading in a direction and towards a point where it will no longer merit its unique distinction as the greatest country in history.

Liberal Judges, So Stupid They're Smart

2008-06-29T01:39:00.003-04:00

So it seems that Supreme Court, or the liberal half of it, has ruled that you can't execute someone for raping a child, based on some goofy notion that most people don't think that crime rises to the punishment. Frankly, even though I'm opposed to capital punishment, for a number of reasons, one of which is not that there's no moral justification for it, abusing a child this way would put someone at the top of the list of people needing a one-way trip to Slabville. From everything I've heard and read, and the story of Jeffrey Dahmer is a perfect example, even convicts have a special contempt for people who hurt children this way.

So the end result is that the Supreme Court has ruled that clean, painless execution is too good for these people. Rather they would lock them up for life (presumably that long, although who knows these days) where the rest of the prisoners will simply mete out more appropriate justice with a shank in the back, saving all the millions of dollars and decades usually wasted on appeals.

Thanks, Supreme Court, for reminding us that hardened killers have a stronger moral center than liberal judges.

Becoming Microsoft free...

2008-06-25T10:25:00.006-04:00

Well, having run Linux on and off on my main machine (which has been a laptop since about 2003) and having run Linux on my desktop machines for several years, I've decided to switch back to Ubuntu on my primary machine, Pigmeyer, an HP Pavilion dv2000 which shipped with Vista, that unlike Gertrude, the low-end, but decent Gateway I bought Provazolezec, could actually run it at a usable, if not snappy, speed. However, after a couple months of utter annoyance and frustration at having to change so many ways of doing things to accomodate Vista's arbitrary and caprious restrictions I finally broke down and bought another XP license (Microsoft wins again by selling two licenses for one computer). Migrating from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 was never that kind of hassle. Migrating to NT 3.51 a couple months later when I realized how worthless 95 was wasn't a hassle. Nor was migrating to NT 4, 2000 or XP, but Vista was just an unending stream of little annoyances, frustrations and plain old pains-in-the-butt. The camel-breaking straw came when I needed to reboot after a single update and it took 7 minutes for Vista to start up. 7 minutes while I had to sit there like a moron, waiting to log on to an online session with friends. I don't think I've ever seen a computer take so long to start up.

I'd run Ubuntu before on this machine, but having a 64-bit AMD processor, I'd installed the 64-bit version of the OS. Unfortunately, certain pieces of software don't work too well on the 64-bit version (yes, I'm talking to you, Adobe). Wireless, which has always been a bit of an issue with Linux was also a real problem for me, thanks in large part to the manufacturers who insist on keeping their drivers closed-source for reasons that benefit no one, especially them. I also had a lot of trouble with Java, but I don't know if that's because of using the 64-bit version of the OS, or because everything having to do with Java is like working with a Soviet-style bureaucracy. I can't imagine why anyone would want to develop under such a grotesquely byzantine platform. At the AOL developer's conference I attended while working there, I attended a presentation on some of the allegedly neat Java stuff they were doing, and why it's so easy and fun to get things done with Java. I went into the presentation rather optimistically only to be totally and utterly turned off by anything to do with Java (except ant... which seems like a really cool make tool). Most of the presentation consisted of the insane amount of hoops they needed to jump through just to get everything configured correctly, and we're not talking configuration scripts here. We're talking using some kind of hideous-looking IDE (including the long and tedious story of finding just the right version of the IDE that was actually compatible with the libraries and tools they wanted to use), with an utterly ridiculous string of cookbook "drag-and-drop" procedures needed to get everything set up correctly. "Write-once-run-everywhere" is clearly a joke from all my experience with Java. I've seen Java software that won't even run unless you had the exact same version of the JRE that it's expecting. Who knows what you're supposed to do if you're already running something newer, which at the time I was? And of course, after 10 years, it would be nice to see a Java program (besides Azureus) that doesn't look like XWindows circa 1994 (i.e., butt-ugly and primitive).

Ironically, I've found that one of the things Microsoft used to excel at is something almost everyone now does better than they: playing videos. The Windows Media Player, which spent about 6 years getting nothing but bigger, uglier and harder to use now utterly fails at so many video formats that it's not even worth having any more. On Windows, using Media Player Classic is the only way to watch movies without getting that useless "Codec not found" error (that doesn't tell you which one it needs), and a message asking if WMP should look for a codec. Has that ever actually worked? I've been using Windows Media Player since it first came out and I've never seen it actually find a codec it was missing. I suspect it only looks for Microsoft stuff, which is almost certainly already installed on any Windows system. The fact that it can't play MPEG-2 out of the box is beyond ridiculous. Or at least it wouldn't for me, and there's no point in trying to "fix" WMP since it's confusing and frustrating (and seldom worth the effort) to do and MPC "just works" right out of the box... including QuickTime and Real with the "Alternative" packages. (Why, oh, why does Real still exist? They are possibly the only company that hates their customers more than Microsoft and are far more incompetent.)

Anyhow, I noticed recently that Windows XP is showing little thumbnails of videos in Explorer, a very nice new feature (that KDE has had forever under Linux) which seems to have been part of SP3, because it only showed up recently. However, shortly afterwards, I started finding that Explorer (possibly the buggiest mainstream application in the history of software for 13 years running, no wait, that would be Word on the Mac, or possibly IE5, or IE6...) started crashing every time it would try to show a thumbnail of H.264-encoded movies. I only found this out by loading it into the debugger because all you would see is a crash dialog for "Explorer" and clicking on anything would restart Explorer, even though Explorer itself would continue working just fine, except you had this System Modal dialog box you couldn't get rid of. It turns out what was crashing was an ActiveX control that had something to do with H.264, according to its name. Smooth move, Microsoft. I wonder if that could even be fixed without reinstalling the OS.

Anyhow, I knew that the only way to eliminate this ridiculous problem would be to either use an Explorer replacement (practically anything is better) or just give up saddling myself with the stink of Microsoft's hatred and failure and just move over to Linux again, now knowing that sticking to a 32-bit distro would make life a lot easier.

Now of course, lots of people will point out correctly that Linux has its own shares of hassles, and I'm not going to deny it. There are plenty of pains, problems and utter stupidities in the Linux world, too. But given that most open-source software is developed not by one of the largest, richest and most powerful companies in the world with ten figures of capital and tens of thousands of employees to throw at any problem, but rather by small groups of dedicated people who are interested in making software that works and is useful, as opposed to locking users in a software prison. Also, when you have a weird problem under Linux, you can almost always find the exact solution you need with Google. The software discussion forums and documentation for various Open Source software are almost always 10 times more useful and informative than anything Microsoft provides.

Microsoft's utter arrogance and contempt for users by releasing Vista, after 5 years of development, long before it should have seen the light of day, and then prematurely killing XP, even though there is still a huge demand for it is a primary reason why I don't want to do business with them. Microsoft's biggest competitor for XP for years was Windows 2000, and the biggest competitor for Vista has always been XP. Being true to their monopolistic nature, since they can't, or won't, compete with XP (or anything else) on quality and performance, they will simply kill the competition. Fortunately for them, they don't even need to break the law to do it this time (for a change). Of course, customer demand and satisfaction never enter the equation. Watcha gonna do? Buy a MAC?! HAW HAW HAW! (I would recommend it. Macs are quite good.)

Meanwhile, Windows 7 is being hyped (albeit a lot less hyperbolically than Longhorn-cum-Vista was) and is now set to be released in 2010. Since every advanced feature Vista was supposed to contain was removed before it was released, and the only improvements were more ham-fisted security improvements (basically either disabling things, or making the user responsible for every tiny security decision, not so much to put more control in his hands, but to shift the blame), Vista offers nothing over XP except perhaps minor usability improvements and a bunch of meaningless (and ugly, IMO) eye candy. All this at a massive performance hit. I think the biggest reason for Vista's whole existence is to set the stage for ever more arbitrary and capricious control over what the users can and cannot do with their computers. Microsoft knew Vista was a total boat anchor, but since they have completely given up on competing on features, performance and usability, they have to devote all their energies into locking users in to their vicious cycle of upgrades and further restrict their ability to consider alternatives by their heinous refusal to open their document standards (ironically by releasing said standards which are so hideously and deliberately complex and equivocal that Microsoft themselves cannot implement them correctly or consistently) and interoperating with other systems by rarely implementing any standards without compatibility-breaking "extensions".

Regardless of the quality of Microsoft software, and I've consistently said that XP was overall a decent product, it's getting harder and harder to justify dealing with a company, however tangentially, that has never played fair, and is increasingly being forced, by sheer inertia, to rely exclusively on unfair practices to maintain its very existence.

And besides, Linux is really cool.

Microsoft Just Needs to Die

2008-04-22T23:18:00.006-04:00

No, I am not going to write another piece describing the train wreck that is Vista. This is about an experience I had with Internet Explorer. The current pre-release version of Firefox I'm using was giving me trouble on ebay.com, and I had launched Internet Explorer 7 so I could make some adjustments to some bids I've been watching.

Some time later, I wanted to look up codes for my RCA programmable remote because at some point it "forgot" its settings and I needed to program it. I have a PDF copy of the instruction manual, but I needed the list of codes to use with it, so I went to an open browser window, not realizing (or caring) that it was IE rather than Firefox.

I typed "rca rcr860 instructions" into the search query box, and picked the third link on the MSN search results which said "RCA UNIVERSAL REMOTE CODES". The next thing I know, my browser was pointed at "pornotube20008.com" trying (unsuccessfully, thank God) to play videos, and I couldn't even close the window because I was being deluged with message boxes telling me my computer was infected and that "Microsoft" suggests I install some kind of virus protection and that I needed to click to install the software, etc, etc. This was probably all Javascript code trying to get me to let it install botnet software. I literally couldn't make the message boxes go away so I could close the tab. I had to kill the whole browser to get rid of that stuff, and I was half afraid my computer had been compromised. A subsequent virus check showed everything was clean, no thanks to Microsoft.

So this is the vaunted IE7 that I've been hearing so much about. I've been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix, around version 0.4, which was about 4 or 5 years ago. I spend a lot of time browsing and I explore all kinds of interesting stuff, and in all those years I have never seen anything like what I saw doing a simple search and clicking one link on Internet Explorer. I never got hijacked to a porn site, and I never had to kill the browser because some website was abusing it so badly. This is what Microsoft has to show for the last 6 years or so of browser development? I was utterly astonished that anything like that was even possible with IE any more. I would have given Microsoft far more credit than that until reality showed me that in Microsoft-land, it's still 1998. Between Firefox, AdBlock Plus, NoScript and FlashBlock, I had literally forgotten that that kind of garbage could even happen any more.

It is my honest opinion that Microsoft literally has nothing to contribute to the software industry and the Internet as a whole. They are hopelessly behind the curve in software development, and falling further behind daily. They are drowning in their own corruption, far more beholden to maintaining their illicit monopoly through deceit, extortion and any other means, illegal or not, to avoid having to fairly compete in a market they can no longer dominate through quality and superior product... if they ever could.

After seeing a perfectly nice low-end Gateway laptop reduced to the slowest computer I've used in over 20 years (and that counts my floppy-based Amiga 500), because it was shipped with Vista installed, only to perform very reasonably when I "upgraded" it to XP, and seeing my own high end machine take 7 minutes to boot Vista after installing a single Microsoft update... read that again... seven minutes... I'm convinced that Microsoft simply has nothing constructive to offer the world. It was sad to see Explorer, after 13 years is still the buggiest piece of mainstream software on the planet. It was pathetic to get blue screens from a Microsoft OS installed by the OEM on hardware provided by the OEM, something I've never seen with XP. It was utterly insane having to navigate multiple security warnings just to rename an icon on the desktop! The sooner that horrible company and its belligerent, arrogant, chair-throwing President are removed from the world of software the better. I do still run XP on my laptop simply because of the Windows software I want to be able to run (PSP9, Multi-edit, which don't work in WINE, and a few games), but I run Ubuntu on my desktop machine and server, and will probably put Ubuntu back on my lappy as well just to be rid of the stench of failure on my hardware and in my life. Linux is not without its problems, but comparing Linux to Windows is like comparing Google, the company, with the old Soviet government.

I look forward to the day that the talent and skill of the engineers at Microsoft can be freed from the shackles of their destructively dysfunctional management and can begin to contribute to society again. Microsoft is falling further behind Open Source Software and Apple with every passing day, and the sooner we can shovel that corpulent, putrescent carcass off of the beach of the Ocean of Innovation, the better technology in our lives will be.

They say that you should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence, and I had always exercised that maxim in my judgement of Microsoft, after all they have done some things pretty well over the years. However, I no longer find that incompetence adequately explains the state of Microsoft's software. What I see in 2008 can only be explained by malice.

p.s. That garbage link did not show up on the first several pages of a Google search for the exact same terms. It seems MSN search is as horrible and useless as Internet Explorer.

Happy Birthday, Miss QT

2008-03-10T08:36:00.008-04:00

Happy Birthday, Miss QT, wherever you are.

Love, Spectral Visionary

For those of you who don't know, which would be everyone in the world minus 2, Miss QT was a college friend of mine whom I'd met because she called herself "Miss QT" on her Vax account at Virginia Tech. Most people used their real names, of course, but some of us used different names. It turns out she chose that name so her printouts would be put in the "Q" bin, which was otherwise empty, instead of the "L" bin, which was always stuffed with printouts. I was originally "Spectral Visionary" and used a couple of other names, but eventually settled on "Concept Junkie", a name that I can't take the credit for making up, but have been using for over 20 years now.

Dear Fat Fingers,

Here's to sine waves in the snow and Hawaiian pizza, watching the Lipizzaners but missing "Brazil".

Modron B Prime

Anyhow, the story goes that I IM'ed Miss QT (using VMS send, the 1980's equivalent of IM) and asked "G, R U really a QT?". I wish I had her exact response, because it was a classic, but it was something to the effect of, "If I said no, you'd think I was being too modest, and if I said yes, you'd think I was full of myself."

Eventually we met in person in class in Norris 236 and we became good friends. Anyhow, I've kept up with some of my college friends, but I've lost track of Miss QT. When we lived in Alexandria, she lived nearby and we visited several times, and she even became friends with my darling Provazolezec, but eventually her husband's career in the Navy took them to far off places. I always remembered that her birthday was exactly 3 weeks before mine.

Do you remember when I tricked you into thinking I was shutting down the Vax?

I'd found a script that mimicked the Vax shutdown sequence, so wrote a wrapper around it that I could use to pretend I was logging on as an admin and shutting down the computer, which if it were real, would have shut out dozens of people from doing their work. Miss QT was quite panicked when she fell for my little joke and I imagine the other folks in the lab were looking at us wondering what was going on.

Akiro would love to wish Eigen a Happy Birthday and many returns, and will celebrate by listening to music with many whining guitars.

p.s. Blind Bill says "Hi!"

LOLcats

2008-01-06T22:20:00.002-05:00

Sometimes an Internet meme rolls around that is silly, pointless and even stupid, but I still think it's neat. These days it's LOLcats. There are a number of disparate influences behind this phenomenon, but it amounts to this: Captioning pictures of cats in a childish, misspelled style, often about the acquisition of "cheezbrgrs".

The canonical example is a very cute kitten that looks very sad with the caption, "I made you a cookie... but I eated it." This fad has become big enough to merit mentions in "legitimate" media, and has now reached the logical zenith of all such fads.

I don't know why these amuse me, but they do. Here are a couple I contributed on a site with tons of amusing examples:

And of course, it's not limited to cats:

In fact, there's a whole sub-meme about walruses and buckets. It's a strange world. Go figure.

And yes, I looked it up later and now realize a skink is actually a kind of lizard.

Whom We Elect

2007-11-25T13:45:00.001-05:00

As I look at the lackluster, third-string run of candidates running for President, I am certain that 2008 will be yet another year of voting for the Lesser of Two Evils... and probably not lesser by much. However, in the spirit of boundless optimism (which is sorely needed right about now), I realized that there are some pretty constant qualities in the candidates who actually win.

Americans elect Presidents with the following qualities:

1. Charisma - We want our President to be a nice guy who seems like someone you'd like to have dinner with. We want someone who is charming, but not to the point of seeming fake. A good President is an orator who can make you feel good, and be able to tell you a story that might bring tears to your eyes. A good President makes you want to take charge and fix problems rather than wait for someone else to do it.

2. Likable - All the smarts in the world aren't going to win you the Oval Office if you're a jerk, or if you act like you're smarter than everyone (even if you are, which is actually a good thing). We don't want a soft or weak President, but we do want a President who can be nice. We want someone who laughs spontaneously, speaks off the cuff, make jokes and is occasionally willing to make fun of himself or herself, and yet can get up and make an inspiring speech. We do not want a President who is vindictive, easy to anger or just plain grouchy.

3. At least one "everyman" feature - Bush likes to work on his ranch, Clinton liked fast food, Carter used to be a farmer, Reagan played cowboys in the movies, even Nixon had his dog Checkers. We want a President who has as least some aspects that he or she shares with the common man that has nothing to do with politics. It's easy to tell when someone is faking this, and that kind of patronizing is worse than arrogance. We want someone who takes his job seriously but does not take himself too seriously. We want someone who does not act like he or she is above everyone else, even if it's true.

4. Optimistic - The U.S. President must be optimistic about America and must believe that it is the greatest country on Earth, despite its problems and flaws. The U.S. President must be willing to say about any problem, "This can be fixed and here's how we are going to do it." The U.S. President must be able to make us feel optimistic about the future, by convincing us how we can, and must, improve our country.

5. Prior executive experience - This is absolutely an imperative in my mind. We have had many Governors and Generals as President and very few Senators. There's a reason for that. The Presidency is not an entry-level executive position and anyone who hasn't run a state, a large company, a military branch, or something equivalent, has no business even running for the Oval Office. Vice-presidents count, obviously.

Look at every election for the past few decades and the winner always had more of these qualities than the loser. Fortunately, for the sake of the country, Hillary Clinton has _none_ of these qualities. Plus her speaking voice causes intestinal cramps, or at least it does for me. Four years of that shrill, nasal whining and we might just turn into France. And even _France_ isn't France these days.

p.s. I actually think Ron Paul is a very principled person... in fact the only consistently principled person on the Republican side. I don't agree with everything he stands for, especially his call to immediately withdraw from Iraq, but on the other hand, he's the only candidate who actually seems to stand for what he believes and to believe in what he stands for, and makes decisions based on conservative and libertarian principles and not based on which lobbyist he has last spoken with or what he thinks his current audience wants to hear. Given the way the major candidates and the media is shutting him out, it seems they recognize it too. I'd say the same for Kucinich on the Democrat side, except that he's completely wrong about almost everything. Of course, neither one of them stand a chance.

What can I say?

2007-09-08T15:43:00.001-04:00

Are you ready for parenthood?

2007-08-30T00:24:00.000-04:00

I have four lovely children who are a real treasure in my life and I wouldn't trade them for anything. Well, maybe some peace, quiet and sanity. Wait, that's what I traded for them in the first place. No, I really wouldn't trade them for anything. It's been the toughest job I've ever loved, and every day brings me a new wonder from these four little people (well, not so little) who have elbowed their way into my life and heart.

I've been a parent for more than 13 years and it might be a good idea to share some of my accumulated experience to you younger folks who are new to parenting, or haven't even started yet. After all, if you don't listen to your elders, you can never benefit from their experience, and they're going to keep blabbing on any way, so you might as well listen in case something useful comes out.

Today it occurred to me that some of you might be wondering whether it's time to stop being arrested adolescents, stop living solely for your own benefit, and have something to do with your spare time other than gaze lovingly at each other over dinner out. Three times a week. At places that don't have children's menus.

I'm talking procreation here. Cooperating with the Good Lord in the only real act of creation that still goes on, that of a new soul... or more specifically, giving it a place to live in a wrinkled little pink thing that looks like Winston Churchill and won't stop crying for anything, at least until the grandparents show up, just to make you look like an idiot.

In other words, are you ready to have kids?

Well, here I've created a handy checklist. You need to ask yourself, "Am I ready and willing to do all of these things?" If you are hesitant, for any reason, you should think twice about loosing your progeny upon this crazy world.

Anyhow, these activities represent things that will undoubtedly happen to you at some time or another, so it's better to be prepared than to be caught by surprise. These are all things, or approximations of things, that have actually happened to me, so I know what of I speak. Please note, some of these get a little gross. We are talking about children here. They are hard-wired by billions of years of evolution to do some really disgusting things, often in a surprisingly large radius. You have been warned.

Rick's List of Things You Should Be Willing to Do If You Want to Be A Parent

Let's get it out of the way first. Take a poop on the floor. Go ahead. Drop trou, squat down and lay a nice big one on the carpet. You are not allowed to look for a nice uncluttered piece of linoleum, just go right there in the center of the room, preferably in a high-traffic area. You think that's bad? Now step in it and walk around. (I told you this would be tough.)
Take ten objects that you treasure, regardless of their value, in monetary or sentimental terms. Arrange them in a nice row in front of you. Selecting at random, do the following: Drop one in a bucket of water. Smash one into pieces, not small enough to just throw away, but too small to easily fix with glue. Throw a third in the trash. You are not allowed alternate choices.
Drop a bowl of food on the floor.
Take three alarm clocks. Set them all to some time between midnight and 6 a.m., preferably different times every day. Put them in another room, so you'll have to get up to turn them off. Do this for a month straight. Take turns if you want. It's fun.
On one occasion when you wake up in the middle of the night for an alarm, take a bag of flour or something else that weighs several pounds. Set the kitchen timer for 45 minutes. Walk around the house carrying the bag of flour for the whole time. You may talk to it, or sing to it. You may not use foul language. You may not give up early and make biscuits.
Stand up in the middle of church, or some other place where some decorum is observed, and start screaming for several seconds. Walk out with an embarrassed look on your face. For bonus points, throw up first.
Drop a bowl of food on the floor.
Just once, drop everything you are doing at some random time, preferably when it causes real inconvenience. Rush to the emergency room. Wait around for four hours, and then watch someone get stitches. Up close. Help hold the patient down if necessary.
Take some crayons and draw a nice picture. On the wall. If you mess up, just move a few feet and start over. If you're having trouble, books offer lots more room for practice.
Buy three story books. Read each of them out loud once a night for a year. Try not to get bored.
This one involves a friend, or your spouse, although he or she might not be a friend afterwards. Ask your friend, at some time in the next couple days, when you aren't looking, or perhaps aren't even awake, do one of the following: a.) Dump a box of wooden blocks over your head. b.) Run up out of the blue and kick you in a very tender or sensitive region. c.) Give you an uppercut to the jaw., or d.) Throw up on you.
Turn on all the lights in your house. Leave them on for an entire month. You can only turn off lights in a room you are currently in. If you leave the room, you must turn them back on.
At least once, when you park your car in a public place, walk off without closing one of the doors.
Drop a bowl of food on the floor.
Ask your spouse to announce suddenly one day, ten minutes before he or she needs to go somewhere important, that he or she has either no clean underwear, pants or shoes. And I mean "not clean" as in "not currently wearable, period". Improvise if necessary.
Drink a very large glass of water. Watch TV for a couple hours straight. Don't miss a second of what's on, even the commercials. You know what I mean.
If you have a computer, smear jelly on your hands. Then use it. Make sure to touch the monitor repeatedly. Don't clean the gunk out of the mouse.
Punch or kick a hole in the wall. Then patch it. Try to make it not noticeable when you are finished. Pretty hard, huh?
Another time in the parking lot, throw your car door open with excessive force. Give yourself bonus points if you are parked next to a Mercedes. Write a nice note apologizing to the owner and leave your contact information.
Drop a bowl of food on the floor.
Dump a large bucket of water on the floor. Or perhaps on a piece of furniture. Give it a few minutes to soak in before cleaning it up. Don't forget, things get moldy if they aren't thoroughly dried.
Buy a video tape or DVD of a TV show or movie. It doesn't matter which one. Play it a couple times a day for three months straight. Keep it turned up loud. Don't switch to a different one. Shows with annoying, nasal-talking puppets give bonus points, but you are by no means required to choose them.
Pick a day and start throwing Hot Wheels around the room for several minutes. Do not attempt to avoid walls, windows or siblings.
If you live in an apartment or other high-density housing, turn up the TV unreasonably loud. Late at night. Then leave for an hour. While this isn't quite as annoying to neighbors as an extended bout of colic, it can be quite effective.
Drop a bowl of food on the floor.

OK. After looking over this list, if you aren't ready and willing to do each one of these things, sometimes more than once, then you just aren't ready for parenthood. Once you become a parent, they will be done for you. Repeatedly. You might prevent some occurrences, but you won't prevent them all.

You have been warned.

Simpsonized

2007-08-30T00:16:00.000-04:00

You can go to this site upload a photo and become Simpsonized. I have to say that I am fairly impressed by how the process works. It works better for some faces than others, but it always manages to be somewhere in the ballpark. There are some non-trivial analysis algorithms going on and I have to say it's one of the neatest things I've seen online in a while.

Of course, I had to Simpsonize all of us, and here we are:

A Random Thought

2007-07-29T23:56:00.000-04:00

Having had worked at AOL for 15 agonizing months, I was familiarized with some of the casual dress styles among the younger set. In particular I noticed the increasing preponderance of facial hardware, which has actually been popular for quite a few years. I was reminded of this last night seeing a striking young lady (well, another one besides Provazolezec) at the movie theater with a minute little nose stud affixed to the side of her schnozz.

Here's a note to the practitioners of piercing from someone who is older than you and whose opinion probably is of no value to you, but it will be expressed anyhow: You look ridiculous. What form of self-hatred could possibly inspire you to puncture your face and inflict it with what must surely be painful metal objects that make you look more like some kind of toolshop appliance than a human being? Trust me, to almost everyone over 30 (and probably a lot of people under 30) it's like a walking IQ test, each item dropping to the total by 10 or 20 points. If the piercing is inside your mouth, that's 50 points off the top. I'd love to see what would happen if someone fired up a big electromagnet nearby. It reminds me of a scene from "Heartbreak Ridge" where Clint Eastwood expresses his opinion of earrings in the military... ouch!

What I find even more hilarious is those women who want to join the bandwagon with those relatively conservative little metal nose studs that are often affixed by neodymium magnets. You should certainly be commended for your restraint from self-mutilation, but I hate to break it to you ladies, instead of a nose stud, you in fact look like you have a huge blackhead on the side of your face. A blackhead that may occasionally sparkle, but the overall effect is a need for Clearasil and a good scrubbing, which is probably not the intended effect.

Now I realize that the flows and eddies of adolescent hormonal changes lead many of us to engage in various "non-standard" or even "shocking" styles of self-expression in an attempt to establish an identity among the throngs of humanity, the rest of us see these piercings for what they are, lock-step conformity and complete silliness, and we laugh at you from behind your backs. I don't say this to mock you, just to tip you off to the truth. You look like idiots. Is it worth all the redness, swelling and infections?

p.s. Tattoos send pretty much the same message, that is "I'm too stupid or too lazy to come up with a unique way to express myself, so I will just put graffiti on my body."

p.p.s. We saw "The Simpsons Movie", it was great.

A Junkie's Eye View

2007-06-18T09:54:00.000-04:00

flickr.com rocks. They now allow free accounts up to 100MB of uploads a month. It used to be 20MB. I hope they can work out that censorship problem with Germany and other countries that have a lot of folks up in arms. Although to fair, I think it's the governments of those countries and not Flickr that's the real problem.

Anyhow I uploaded some pictures over the weekend. I included some of the best scenic photos Provazolezec and I have taken over the years, plus some pix of fun art projects we have done with the kids.

Provazolezec

2007-06-06T20:39:00.001-04:00

Provazolezec. Is it the latest concept in Web 2.0?

Provazolezec. Is it a great new cheese, firm, with a tangy flavor?

Provazolezec. Is it the latest anti-depressant from Bristol-Meyers Squibb?

Provazolezec. Is it a new fragrance from Prince Matchabelli?

It's all this and more.

2009 update: Provazolezec's blog has evaporated into the digital ether, but she can be found on Facebook under the name Guinivere MacFooz (of the Clan MacFooz).

My letter to President Bush

2007-06-01T13:41:00.000-04:00

Mr. President:

As a lifelong conservative and someone who voted for you twice, and as someone who has spent countless hours defending many of your policies, I am writing to express my utter disgust with your handling of the border situation and this impending legislation. People have been complaining about this problem since long before you came to office, yet even after 9/11, your Administration has done precious little to address this problem, which in my opinion is affecting this country as much or more than terrorism and radical Islam.

Now that this nightmarish legislation is being discussed, something which I, and millions of others believe will not help the problem, you have taken to calling us names and questioning our motives for disagreeing with you. This is invariably a sign of someone "defending the indefensible". The fact of the matter is that I, and I imagine the vast majority of Americans, believe the best we can hope for is that this so-called reform won't make the problem worse than it already is, and we can point to many examples of legislation with a similar track record. How can we trust your Administration to abide by the loophole-filled measures in this elephantine piece of legislative detritus when you have not showed much interest in enforcing the laws that are currently being broken by tens of millions? Why should we believe you will enforce the complicated bureaucratic laws, when you won't enforce the simple, concrete ones?

I honestly regret having voted for you in 2004, knowing what I know now. It is a sad day when I wished I had, as the Republican/Democrat political monopoly likes to call it, "thrown away my vote" on a third party candidate and in effect voted for Senator Kerry. I honestly believed that you always had (and still do have) the country's best interests in mind when you invaded Iraq, and in other aspects of your foreign policy, despite my misgivings about how the war has gone since then. I honestly believed you always had the country's best interests in mind for everything, but on the issue of immigration, I feel that not only are you not interested in supporting the Rule of Law, you are expressing utter contempt for the will of the people, as well as the Rule of Law. I don't believe you aren't even pretending you are on our side any more. I believe that you are placing the wants of businesses and other monied interests against the simple, unequivocal desires of the very people who worked hardest to get you elected. We know most of our Senators and Congressmen are beholden to special interests, and care most about their own careers instead of the people they represent. We would hope that at least our President would be above that.

While I continue to support this great country, our military and all freedom-loving Americans, and I support you as its elected President, even if I don't support your policies, I no longer believe you are representing, or even trying to represent, me. If you were, you would push first for clear, simple legislation that enforces existing laws, with real, concrete benchmarks. If you had done that, we would believe that you and Congress are being forthright about trying to solve _our_ problems, rather than your own political ones. That your political opponents won't agree to something simple and straightforward shows that they are also not being forthright. I'd long ago given up the idea that Congress, especially the Senate, cares about me as a hard-working, law-abiding, but not rich citizen. It saddens me to consider that you and your Administration no longer care either.

Our government, despite passing obscene amounts of legislation in the past few decades, has accomplished little but to erode the Rule of Law, waste trillions of our (not its) dollars, and undermine the trust of everyone but the most rabid, knee-jerk partisans, and I believe, Mr. President, that you are guilty of all these things as well. I want to trust and respect you, because I believe in your heart you are a very moral man, but many of your actions, especially in the past couple years have sent a much different message.

Please reconsider your position on the immigration legislation. I would have thought this could be a home run opportunity for you, since the Right Thing to do is both simple and obvious. You have expressed the idea that your re-election gave you political capital to engage in real reform, despite the obvious political costs that any meaningful, effective reform would entail, but I feel that this capital has been wholly squandered. The price has been paid, but nothing has been reformed.

Please reconsider your support of this legislation.

On the Folly of Meta-Laws

2007-05-20T14:41:00.000-04:00

Those rarefied few of you who might read these all-to-sporadic missives of mine (even if only on the way to see if I'm really bashing the Catholic Church in my other blog), which if I'm lucky, might include my wife, and maybe a co-worker or two who are polite enough to humor me, were witness to an intentionally vague posting of mine a couple weeks ago in which I mentioned the onerous Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Setting aside the trite and faddish nature of the name of this notorious piece of legislation, caused by an affliction that affected nearly everyone in marketing, politics, or any other public communication capacity around the year 1999 of utilizing, in nearly every kind of nomenclature, a reference to the fact that it would soon be a large, round number of years since the date that Dionysus Exiguus (know as "Dennis the Short"), a sixth-century Scythian monk, mistakenly identified as the year of the Birth of Christ, a fad that had nearly died out by time the new millennium actually began, thanks to the fact that Dennis, like everyone else outside of India at the time, and perhaps not even there, would have reacted with incredulity at the mere mention of such an absurd notion of a Year Zero, on 1 January 2001, by which time the novelty of the whole thing had faded and the country, beleaguered by a long, tedious and ultimately absurd election drama, became distracted by the ripe opportunity of a new chief executive to hate, this legislative monstrosity represents a perfect example of the absurd extremes to which Congress, beholden and responsive to only the most monied of its members' supporters, could stray, unreigned by common sense, simple consideration of the logical consequences, or just about anything else but the bidding of its corporate masters, or in an occasional fit of quadrennial panic, the perception, but not the well-being, of the public.

Consider gun control laws. It is already illegal in every jurisdiction to murder someone, with or without a firearm, but thanks to ineffective law enforcement, the breakdown of any sense in the public of civility, or civil responsibility, the short-sightedness of an increasingly intellectually benumbed population and the general moral decay that been the primary precipitate of post-Enlightenment Modernism, murders had increased to an epidemic proportion. Having completely failed in efforts to prevent or deter these awful crimes, the legislators, in their infinite pragmatism, and not insignificant otiosity concluded that since the laws were being broken with impunity, domestic order would most certainly be restored with the simple application of additional bureaucracy. So gun control laws were passed, and an activity which is inherently harmless, the owning of a firearm, was made illegal, in the apparent hopes that the failure of a potentially capital punishment to deter murderous behaviour would be rectified by the additional paperwork and the threat of much less serious punishment. Of course, to be fair, gun control laws did have a significant impact of reducing the potential for gun violence in all but the people who would actually commit such crimes in the first place. In other words, only people who want to obey the law, will.

Emboldened by the easy, but false logic of these feckless accomplishments, and completely undeterred by the truth of the almost complete failure of these laws to accomplish their goals, the U.S. Congress set about to address the complete lack of enforcement against digital piracy of music, books, and increasingly, movies. Media companies, having realized that their monopoly of 19th century distribution methods for their products was rendered completely null and void by the radical transformation wrought by the advent of the Internet, turned to various encryption technologies in order to prevent the violation of their copyrights, not to mention in order to maintain an artificially and grotesquely inflated price on the distribution of content, which has now become essentially free compared to the days when physical media was required to move around sounds and images. Under the auspices of the name "Digital Rights Management", companies have shackled their products with technological means to prevent digital redistribution by customers. Of course, the irony is that no matter how securely, no matter how byzantine and baroque the means used to protect your rights, if the end product is viewable by human eyes or hearable by human ears, then it can be copied. The end result of these increasingly misguided undertakings was to penalize paying customers, who were often saddled with products that did not work as they should because they were designed, under every conceivable circumstance except one, not to work at all.

On a personal note, my first DVD device was the DVD drive that came with the IBM Thinkpad laptop I purchased in 2000. Realizing that I now had the ability to play DVD's I went out and picked up DVD copy of "The Matrix", a movie that had been recently released on DVD. I found however, that the movie would not play on my computer, and that I had in fact paid some 24 dollars for a round piece of aluminized plastic that could serve me no purpose other than as, perhaps, a coaster. I later found out that that particular DVD had known problems with particular players, including those used in IBM laptops, and of course, this is due, in part to the inclusion of encryption technology in the DVD-specification. It wasn't until I purchased another DVD player (actually it was my wife who surprised me with it for Christmas) that I was able to actually use a product that I had months before bought and paid for fully. This is, of course, only one example of the numerous ways in which I was deprived of the rights and value which were most assuredly legally and morally mine to be had because of Digital Rights Management.

The ironic thing is that DRM has always been quickly and relatively easily "cracked" by those people with the means to do so. As the certain circles of the general public gained more and more skill in circumventing these methods of protection, the media companies engaged in more and more destructive behavior, rendering their products less useful and less valuable, infringing on the Fair Use rights of paying customers while having little or no effect on piracy, particularly the well-organized and highly lucrative piracy operations based largely in the Far East. Having failed completely in the totally contradictory goal of creating a product that can be distributed, but cannot be distributed, they turned their efforts to the resource always available to those corporations of significant financial wherewithal, the purchase of appropriate legislation from those most costly courtesans of the legal system, the U.S. Congress. Since the means to copy a protected CD, DVD, or software amounts to what is essentially a trade secret, which cannot by definition be protected by copyright or patent law, since you cannot copyright a process, and a patent requires those details of the process to be made public, the media conglomerates tried the gun control method. It is a common and well-known tactic that if a business cannot compete fairly, legislation can always be procured to protect what the market would take away. By carefully crafting legislation that would, in effect, enforce by law what they could not enforce by well-intentioned but woefully flawed technological schemes, and counting on the Congressional sponsors, too distracted by their burgeoning re-election warchests, to actually read and consider the ramifications of what they were about to pass, the media companies simply made it illegal to attempt to circumvent copy-protection. Now just like owning a gun. circumventing copy protection is a completely harmless activity. It isn't until you commit a crime: murder, in the case of a gun, or distributing a copyrighted movie or music to someone who is not legally entitled to receive it, does the activity lead to harm.

As always, in the rush to address a legitimate problem with an illegitimate solution, unintended consequences are often the main, if not the only, result. In this case, our esteemed representatives have carved away a huge piece of the rights of consumers under copyright law, that of Fair Use. It is no longer legal for someone to attempt to backup copy-protected media, despite the fact that there are many legally and morally justifiable reasons for doing so. Physical media are not impervious to damage, new technologies are constantly being developed which require the perfectly legal copying and conversion of a digital product in order to use it, and mere matters of convenience make it necessary for the rights already established by over two hundred years of copyright law precedence to be protected, and not whittled away by companies too lazy or stupid to effectively react to changes in the market for their products.

It is as if horse-and-buggy manufacturers in the early 20th century bribed lawmakers to require everyone purchasing a one of the new horseless carriages to still maintain a stable, and periodically purchase riding crops. In fact, one is reminded and actual instance of this behavior: that of the dairy corporations in the early 20th century which, in a move that would feel right at home in a list of the business practices of Microsoft, convinced lawmakers to require margarine manufacturers to dye their product pink because, in the economic climate surrounding two World Wars and a Depression and given margarine's superior price-to-quality ratio with butter, there was no way they could compete without an unfair advantage.

Now we come to 2007, and the media companies having foisted upon us yet another format war for the next generation of content distribution have once again placed all their eggs in the basket of DRM, which having failed in its every single application in the past 30-some years to prevent illicit distribution, was quickly defeated once again, surprising no one, but, it would seem, the people who created it. It turns that there is an encryption key needed to decode the contents of an HD-DVD, and having figured out this key, people began to publish this information on-line. In fact, the HD-DVD specification allows for this key to changed as needed, so while the key that was made public could be used to decrypt HD-DVD that had already been released, new releases would utilize a different key. Of course, the new key is already public before the HD-DVDs that will use it have been released, but I'm sure all the time and energy being invested into this hopeless attempt to stuff the genie back into the bottle makes someone feel good.

Now, to be honest, there are lots of people who will use this information to commit piracy, but the information itself is as harmless as a gun locked up in a firebox in the back of your closet. There is no harm, only the potential for harm if additional, illegal and immoral positive actions are committed. What we have in effect is Congress once again making a perfectly harmless and legitimate activity illegal, in the hopes of preventing some truly illegal activity (illegal in that actual harm occurs) from occurring. Of course, it has never worked in the past, and will never work in the future. The only effect of this kind of legislation is that it is now possible, in a country that prides itself as a bastion of free speech and free association to be harassed and possibly subject to criminal or civil punitive measures for publishing a list of numbers, for instance these:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Since of course consistency is as much practiced by our lawmakers as is common sense, logic and reason in general (i.e., almost not at all), legislators seem perfectly content to engage in such ludicrous activity despite the gaping inconsistencies this introduces. But if we were for a moment to consider what it really being legislated here, and extend it to all other analogous situations using the same reasoning, it should therefore be made illegal to publish books about lock-picking, surveillance, shady accounting practices, how to purchase, or even how to make firearms... perhaps even how best to get elected to Congress. After all, if owning a gun is now considered tantamount to committing a violent crime with it, shouldn't knowing how to acquire one, legally or illegally be also? Shouldn't it in fact be illegal in those jurisdictions that practice gun control to even communicate how the forge your own firearm, or mix gunpowder? Once again, we are faced with a rule, which in its face might, without any consideration, appear to be of no negative consequence and even beneficial to society, which is in fact, if one follows its specious reasoning to its perfectly reasonable conclusion, to be of such outrageous absurdity that it should summarily be thrown out of consideration.

That conclusion is this: The logic behind gun control and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is that if we prevent people from acquiring the means to commit crime, then we can more easily and effectively prevent them from committing that crime. To follow this logic no large distance to its ultimate conclusion means that Congress, if it is going to attempt to instill any amount of consistency in the body of Law whatsoever, must immediately and unconditionally require that all citizens surrender the whole of their intellect and will to the benevolent custody of Mother State, for it is only mindless animals who are completely incapable of committing crimes.

Baiting the Corporate Tyranny

2007-05-01T16:31:00.000-04:00

I would ask all my readers, by which I mean me and maybe my wife and a coworker or two, to humor me in a little experiment. If you are technically inclined and haven't been living in a cave for the past couple weeks, you will be aware of the discovery and publication of a piece of data, the dissemination of which has been viewed very dimly by a particular corporate entity. This data consists of a number. It is a fairly large number, but it is only a number. As we speak, Cease and Desist letters are being issued to sites that are publishing this number, what it means, and how to use it. I won't explain it here, since it is trivial to find, but I will publish the number. I just want to see what happens.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Regardless of whether I am approached or not, the fact of the matter is that corporations are issuing Cease and Desist letters for the publication of a 32-digit hex number, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, one of the many abominations wreaked upon this republic by a Congress able, and more importantly, willing to make every citizen at every time a federal criminal. In other words, merely publishing this information, which has spread across the 'net like wildfire in past week, is causing people to be subjected to legal action, and under the dysfunctional legal system that has metastasized from the elegant and just one established by our Founding Fathers, the mere threat of legal action can guarantee the threatened party financial and legal hardships beyond the wherewithal of the average citizen to withstand, if immediate compliance is not rendered forthwith.

So, tell me, Americans. Do you even recognize this country any more? I am not sure I do. Is there any politician, any governmental entity, any political candidate is not wholly bought and paid for by the powerful and the rich? Are corporations (already legally "people"), in fact, the only "citizens" with any voice in this great nation? 2008 will prove to be a watershed year, and the way things are going, it doesn't look like it's going to be a good one.

Principles of Conservatism

2006-12-20T10:01:00.000-05:00

I read this column this morning and it reminded me of something I have been wanting to post on here for a few weeks now. While Mr. Jeffrey's principles are universal and cohesive in scope, and very well thought out, I too came up with a list of conservative principles and I've been wanting to publish them somewhere where there's ever-so-small a chance that someone other than a few computer nerds would see them. The following is a based on something I wrote on Slashdot shortly after the midterm elections to counter the assertion that the election results were a repudiation of conservative politics and/or some kind of liberal mandate. In fact, it was neither.

Since I have often been one of those people who, as Mark Twain so cleverly put it, wants to have read classics much more that I want to actually read them, I decided it was time to take a break from my normal fare and read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle". The topic of corruption in post-Industrial Revolution American capitalism has always been one that has interested me, particularly since I believe we are entering an entirely new phase of it, exacerbated by the hand-in-hand exponential growth of technology and bureaucracy, as well as the general complexity of life.

I'm only part way through the book, and while it clear to me that Sinclair's style of writing is absolutely tremendous, his story is gripping, and in places horrifying, I am trying to reconcile his documentation of the excesses and evils of early 20th century capitalism with his strong support for socialism. You see, to me, totalitarianism and capitalism are two sides of the same coin. The overarching principle of the world is "Power Corrupts", so any concentration of power, whether by a dictator of a nation or a Chief Executive Officer of a corporation, is bound to lead to evil. Basically we are talking about two extremes of a socio-economic spectrum with capitalism on one end and communism on the other.

The problem with pure communism, which is also the problem with pure capitalism, is that immoral people will inevitably wreck the system and enslave the less powerful in order to engage in tyranny. In fact, any system of government or economics that does not have a very meticulous system of checks and balances, as well as limited and decentralized power will suffer the same consequences. If the powers of regulation and commerce are not pitted against each other, or are at least not controlled by the same people, individuals will suffer. This is why I have a problem with the reaction to "The Jungle" being a call for socialism. If you take a corrupt system, in this book's case the unchecked "Meat Trust", and give control over it to the government, you are handing massive power to an organization that is already powerful. How can you expect the result to be less corrupt? The good will of men? How does that square with my "overarching principle of the world"?

I believe the correct response was the one that was actually taken: Unions, which were limited collectivism to acquire bargaining power, and government regulation, which was limited socialism, not to exert power, but to protect the weak. Of course, in the intervening decades, unions have become too powerful and are often as corrupt as the companies they were created to defend against, and government regulation has become so overly complex and burdensome that it has a direct, deleterious affect on our national economy and quality of life.

If you read the Acts of the Apostles, you will see the early Christian communities lived in what is pretty much a text-book communal (or communist) society among themselves, as did medieval monasteries and other religious communities through the ages. With a small group of people who are like-minded and zealous about their beliefs (as any new adherent to a religion, particularly if he is being persecuted for it, would be), this can work. But of course it didn't last too long, and once the Church became large and successful its wealth and power were often subverted for less-than-Christian ideals, which is one reason today why it specifically eschews political power and uses the vast majority of the wealth it collects and maintains for good works.

Similarly, it's relatively easy to have a startup company with, say 8 people, where everyone is top-notch, hard-working and delivers good results. It's practically impossible to have a company with 1000 people where everyone is of that same caliber. Similarly, communism doesn't scale. It can't scale. You can have a large company that is successful, but communism can't work at all unless everyone is equally invested and committed to it. Socialism bypasses the corruption stage and goes straight to tyranny. Capitalism can be subverted for evil, and will be if there is nothing to stop it. No system is perfect as long as we flawed humans are a part of it.

That said however, I still find the conservative principles to be qualitatively more sound than the alternatives.

Here's my take on "conservative" principles. Some of these are no doubt compatible with "liberal" principles or are at odds with "conservative" principles as espoused by some "conservative" politicians. Many of these are probably more accurately called "libertarian" principles, because at this point in the game, the entire body politic of the United States is hopelessly mired in big government, grotesque complexity, and obsession with tweaking details on issues when the overall strategy is hopelessly flawed, and any concrete steps towards solving problems is a step away from government interference.

I think that is a good thing that my ideas don't fit into the rigid molds our public discourse has created. Political philosophies in the U.S. have become too issue-dependent, and are often, even usually, not philosophies at all but merely a laundry list of grievances against specific practices or perceived and real problems, regardless of their causes and effects, and irrespective of the best way to address them.

My principles are:

Equalize opportunities, because you cannot equalize results.
People can generally take care of themselves, and they should be expected to, until they prove otherwise.
Help people when they truly need it, but if aid to someone doesn't also come with a cost, it will be abused and ineffectual.
The rights of the individual take precedence by default. Anything that compromises individual rights and opportunities will compromise their chances for success.
Any aspect of government should be as local as possible. There are very few things that truly require implementation at the national level, or can be effective at a national level. This is especially true in a country as large and diverse as the United States.
Real education is the best tool for any person, and the best way to prevent any problem. Investments in education will always pay off (but remember #3). Moral education is the most important kind.
Humans are the best and most important natural resource on the planet. Human life, therefore, should be held in the highest regard, and its protection should be the highest priority.
We are stewards of the Earth, we neither own it or are owned by it. We have a right to use it and to change it to suit our needs, but we have a duty to protect and preserve its value.
There will always be evil. Be prepared to neutralize it, or you will be defeated by it.
Liberty is not license. Freedom necessitates responsibility and duty.
Sovereignty is a right for both individuals and groups. People have a right to associate with whom they please.
You have no right not to be offended by others.
Life isn't fair. You can't make it fair. Get over it.

Here are some notes and thoughts on these items, although I would hope they stand on their own:

#3 was the hardest to word succinctly. Here's what else I wanted to say:

Any social safety-net or entitlement will be gamed as much as possible and is guaranteed to be inefficient. Compassion is the most easily subverted intention, the easiest to take advantage of. People should not be allowed to starve or live without shelter, but without a real chance to fail, many people will simply let the system take care of them. Even more are trapped in a cycle of dependency because there are no concrete options that allow them to escape it. (See #1 and #6).

#10 is particularly important and is particularly misunderstood in this day and age. Liberty can only exist in a people whose individuals are willing and able to be self-governing. And yes, that implies moral absolutes. Liberty without morality is another name for anarchy. Since we rapidly losing (and disposing of) our morality, we will have to lose our liberty to maintain order. I think very few people understand this, and as a result, our government is having to become more and more controlling as we, as a society, are ceding more and more responsibility to control ourselves or our children. And as I said in princple #5, the best government is the most local. Nothing is more local than governing yourself, and anything else is by definition, less efficient.

In terms of the United States, #11 means individual states should have the right to secede. We are united because in unity there is strength, but if it is forced, there is no true unity. As much as I am opposed to the idea of slavery, I think it was wrong to go to war to preserve the Union. And slavery wasn't the real reason the southern states seceded. In fact, they seceded for many of the same reasons the 13 colonies revolted from England in the first place. Ironically, the American Revolution was caused by an order of magnitude less government interference than we now deal with on a daily basis. The way things are going now, I believe it is likely this country will face this same issue in the 21st century.

#12 and #13 are specifically addressed to so-called liberals.

Why is my new 200GB harddisk only 186GB in size?

2006-12-18T17:24:00.002-05:00

Or, Marketing Lies 2006.

Actually, this one is easy to explain.

Technically, a kilobyte is 1024 bytes (i.e., 2 to the tenth power), which of course is close to 1000 and of course "kilo-" means 1000. But we computer types always like to count by 2's and powers of 2. 1024 makes much more sense to a computer. It's really a coincidence that the
numbers work out like this.

Similarly megabytes really means 2²⁰ bytes or 1,048,576 bytes, but of course it's much easier to say it's a million bytes.

A gigabyte is really 1,073,741,824 bytes, although we humans (and especially lower life forms like marketing types) like to think it's a billion bytes.

So when your harddrive claims to be 200GB but your computer only reports it as 186GB, they are both correct. The marketing people just take the version of "gigabyte" that is most convenient for their purposes, whereas your computer uses the "correct" definition from a computer science point of view. The computer science gigabyte is 7% bigger, which explains the discrepancy. Of course, if your hard drive claims to provide 200GB of storage, you can rest assured that you are getting 200,000,000,000 bytes (give or take, formatting the disk takes up some of the space). Of course, since the price per byte for harddrives has dropped by a factor of about 20,000 since I bought my first harddrive in 1989, I'm not too worried either way.

There have been two proposals to fix this confusion:

1. The first proposal is that we use a different prefix when referring to the "computer science" versions of kilobyte, megabyte, etc, since "kilo-" is universally accepted to mean "one thousand", "mega-" universally means "one million". The idea proposed is to contract the word "binary byte" with the Systeme Internationale numerical prefix, so that 1024 bytes is "KIlo BInary BYTES" or "kibibytes". This also gives us "mebibytes", "gibibytes", etc. This has not caught on for two reasons: First, it is hopelessly pedantic, and second, it makes the speaker sound like he has some kind of speech impediment.

2. The second proposal is something I am making at this moment. A very dangerous plague that affects many parts of the world, especially third world countries, is that of land mines. There are millions of land mines around the world just waiting for some innocent person, years or even decades after the war in which the mines were used, to walk across it and lose a limb or even his life. I propose that we create an international task force for defusing all land mines and that they can be very effective by employing a very long stick with a marketing person tied to the end. If you are one of those people who claim (as I actually do) to hold human life precious, you can at least take the less satisfying alternative of mocking marketing types whenever possible, or at least buying a Dilbert book where it is already done for your convenience.

If you feel ripped off by the marketing legalese that gives you 7% less disk space than you think you are getting, be glad you weren't buying backup tapes in the early 90's. I didn't discover until too late when they described the capacity of a backup tape, they would assume a compression ratio of 2:1, meaning when they claimed the tape stored 120MB, that meant it really stored 60MB, and they "assumed" that you would use compression. Needless to say, this was much more dishonest that the "gigabyte" controversy described above, especially given the fact that the stuff I was backing up was usually compressed to begin with. I don't know if they do that any more since I haven't bought a backup tape in over a decade, but I wouldn't be surprised if there had been a class action lawsuit.

There actually was a successful class action lawsuit over the size of computer monitors. When describing the size of a monitor, the monitor manufacturers would describe the diagonal size of the cathode ray tube, a good inch to inch and a half of which was not usable because it was inside the frame of the monitor. The class action suit resulted, like all such suits, in some lawyers getting millions of dollars, while those of us actually affected by the wrong-doing got an insultingly small amount of money, and only if we went through some laborious process that would cost 5 or 10 or 20 times as much, given the value of our time, to actually receive. But at the least the monitor makers stopped this particular instance of lying.