6/15/06:
Sometimes, in dealing with people, you will be amazed in the wrong direction.
Step 1: Put up protable generator on CraigsList, heading "3.5kw Portable Generator, never used, almost new but not in box"
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Recieve an email which says "HOW MANY WATTS WOULD THAT BE???????"
._0 Holy shit people, are teh pow4rs of teh ten s0 h4rd? One again, I find myself questioning my faith in humanity.
5/20/06:
$> mkfifo IO # Ceci n'est pas une pipe
5/4/06:
Presenting EJK's Quantum Theory of Notebook Paper:
Before being opened, all sheets in the notebook are in superposition of states, all of them tearing out both cleanly and uncleanly at once. When you try to take a sheet out, all the remaining sheets fall into the same state of tearing out as the first.
Corollary to QTONP: You better hope the first sheet tears out cleanly
3/25/06:
Reading about the debacle with the Christian convert in Afghanistan, I'm left with one question... How can one man converting to Christianity "humiliate" all-powerful Allah? Then again, if we're going to ask that, we might as well ask why an omnipotent being would want the worship of infinitely lesser beings. Philosophical musings aside, this situation has a lot less to do with religion than opportunism. After all, the same clerics are in power, the same laws govern the region, and the same old crap keeps on happenning.
When America invaded Afghanistan in response to 9/11, we easily toppled the Taliban. However, we did nothing to topple the true rulers of the country: The clerics. In the middle east, the Islamic clerics are the ones with true power. They either rule in collusion with the government, are the government (Iran, Taliban), or they fight a neverending war against the government (Iraq, Afghanistan). We see how this is the case now in Afghanistan, where their demand for the death of Abdul Rahman has politically screwed President Karzai: If he compiles, he loses a great deal of goodwill from the West (Fanatics win). If he refuses, they incite an uprising against him (Fanatics win again). But what can we do to topple the clerics?
The more I think about it, the more I come to believe that the solution is to build a gigantic wall around the middle east, 100 feet tall, down to the bedrock, and 25 feet thick.
3/20/06:
Seen on `O:{) <-- OMG a depiction of Mohammed!
3/17/06:
Some people claim that the US Constitution provides no right to privacy. That's because when the Constitution was written, privacy meant closing the door, whispering, and having someone stand guard. The Founding Fathers didn't see the need to enshrine one's right to do something so obvious in law. We need an Amendment to shut them up.
2/21/06:
I realized that I put the wrong year below. I also figure I might as well weigh in on the insanity going on in the middle east over the Mohammed cartoons. Well, um, WTF? I think the Fark headline put it best: "Muslims offended by caricatures proceed to act them out." I mean, this is simultaneously amusing and incredibly scary that anyone could get this worked up over CARTOONS.
Now for something more cerebral than the obvious jokes (As Jon Stewart put it: It's easy to make jokes about this. Real easy. So incredibly easy I feel guilty about taking the paycheck).
First of all, this makes it clear that either A) Muslim countries don't understand freedom of the press or B) They created a self-fulfilling prophecy to prove how evil we are. I'm referring to the demand for an apology by the Danish government. Problem is, the Danish government had nothing to do with these pictures, doesn't control the Danish press, and can't/won't/shouldn't apologize for something beyond it's control. So naturally, when they don't apologize, it's proof that the Western world hates Arabs. I suspect that the masses fall under category A and the Imams stirring them up knowingly fall under category B. Oh, and even though the cartoons came from Denmark, were reprinted throughout Europe, and the cavernous, gaping vagina called the American Media proved Jylland-Posten's point about self-censorship to a tee, it was only a matter of time before America got blamed for them. Anything that goes wrong in the Middle East is somehow our fault - you just wait and see. This also brings up the issue that Muslims seem to believe that they have a right not to be offended. No one can ever have the right not to be offended, because if we ban or censor things that might offend someone, it won't be long before everything is banned.
But in the end, I'm just left hanging as to what, exactly, can be DONE about this without throwing the principles of freedom and democracy out the window? Appeasement doesn't work. It didn't work before World War II, and it won't work now. If you try to appease extremists of any flavor (Nazis, Islamic fascists, extreme right-wing religous nuts), the end result is not unlike that to be had from a bully: they keep pushing a little more every time, until you finally have to either bend over completely or stand up once and for all. This presents several general courses of action. We can give in right now, which I don't believe is a viable course of action. Giving in would mean the end of our support for the corrupt governments we prop up all over the middle east, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, as well as withdrawing support for Israel. Leaving the middle east while we are still addicted to oil is tantamount to economic suicide, and withdrawing our moderating influence from Israel would cause a rapid degeneration of the situation. The second option is to try and appease enough to keep the pressure cooker from exploding until retreat is practical. If we could just get over our phobia of nuclear power, we could become energy self-sufficient (since it is the Western world that has most of the world's Uranium and Thorium) and let the autocracies fend for themselves. That way, when the region collapsed into anarchy and the religious fanatics made sure that life continued to suck for the people, they wouldn't be able to blame us. The President could go on TV and say "Screw you. We did what you wanted, pulled out of the Middle East, and no longer have any economic interest there. The problem isn't America, it's your religious leaders!" This still leaves Israel, but the situation will hopefully become more tractable after a general withdrawl. With the danger from Islamic fanatics to us lessened, we could apply more pressure on Israel to be moderate (maybe? ugh...). Or we can push back forcefully right now, but unlike in past times this will not help. Once the Germans and the Japanese realized that they were defeated, they stopped fighting. The Arab world acts the exact opposite, like the Vietcong; The harder we strike, the more fanatically devoted they become to their cause, right or wrong (Which is part of why America's military budget makes no sense - Gureilla war is an effective answer to superpower armies). If we attempt to carry on the War on Terror as we have been, fighting like it were a conventional land war, we are doomed to be defeated and forced to give in to their demands as we were in Vietnam. We will win every battle fought with bullets, as was the case in Vietnam and as is the case in Iraq/Afghanistan, and it will be pointless. God this is a depressing subject to write or think about.
Second, the rioting masses have failed to see the real problem here: that their corrupt, repressive, dictatorial governments are intentionally throwing gasoline on the fire to distract them from the fact that they are failures of governance that have created nothing but misery and obscene poverty despite the vast oil wealth they possess. Some of the worst protests and violence have come from the poorest city areas, where disenfranchised youth have nothing else to do. Yet the people in these areas just don't seem to want to see through the smokescreen.
The middle east is just plain screwed up. They've been at war with each other for 3000 years and more, and nothing we can do is going to stop them. Best to just get the hell out of there at our earliest convenience.
2/6/05:
I decided to move my anti-Sony rant here. I figure anyone who knows enough to care has already seen it:
Do not buy any Sony product ever again. Do not download or buy any music from them or their labels either. They have decided to Install a rootkit as part of a Digital Rights Management scheme on their copy-protected CDs. Now it turns out that another one of thier DRM schemes introduces security vulnerabilities - And so does the patch! If you are from Sony, you can stick your CDs up here (NSFW) and revel in the fact that, because of your obsession with trying to control me, I now tell 100s of people a month to boycott you. Congratulations, you facist pricks! I will celebrate the day your sorry asses go bankrupt. Update: It appears that their DRM corrupts your computer even if you decline the EULA. This gets better and better. Any individual who did this would be in federal prison by now.
10/19/05:
Every drug commercial on TV ends with "Not for women who are nursing,
pregnant, or may become pregnant." Is there any medicine on earth that
these women CAN take?
9/17/05:
All small transistors (the kind you plug into IC holders) should have
their pins arranged as "C - B - E" or "E - B - C", so that if you plug
them in backwards you can turn them around WITHOUT rewiring a circuit
board.
9/6/05:
When you work a muscle, it hurts after. You can imagine how my head
hurts after working on Calculus homework for the 7 hours I was
supposed to be sleeping.
7/6/05:
Attention graphic subsystem and windowing system people: Can you guys
get together with the mathematicians and standardize (0,0) as being in either
the lower-left or upper-left? According to gluOrtho2D, it's the
lower-left. According to the Cartesian system, it's
lower-left. According to X and KDE, it's upper-left. Stop making me
use y = height - y to convert between the two...
5/26/05:
Why is it that whenever computers screw up, they screw up in a big way?
And always when you're racing a deadline?
5/6/05:
How strange is it that when I leave my room at night, I turn off my 15
watt fluorescent ceiling lamp like second nature but constantly forget
to turn off my 250 watt CRT monitor?
4/21/05:
"History teaches us that men and nations act wisely when they have
exhausted all other alternatives." - Abba Eban
4/20/05:
No, No, never mind, I can't think of anything to write.
3/23/05:
Wisdom from the California Driver's Handbook: Never attempt a U-Turn
on a one-way street.
3/22/05:
1880, your rainfall record is going DOWN! About 3 more inches of rain
and us Southern Californians will have had the wettest rainy season on
record. And it's pouring as I type...
3/16/05:
All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing
there. Use them together. Use them in peace <-You can tell I
overdosed on 2010 that day
3/15/05:
Why does Netcraft count it as an outage when my damn IP changes? I
hate dynamic IPs.
3/7/05:
Why is it that everything BUT OpenOffice (The one application I
actually print something from occasionally) can print correctly on my
printer? Including OOo exported to PDF?
3/6/05:
It's confirmed - BSD + Apache 1.3 is the most stable web server
configuration around. According to Netcraft, 39 of the 50
longest-uptime web servers use Apache 1.3. 41 of 50 use some
form of BSD. Windows 2000/IIS 5.0 is second with 9. The
minimum uptime on the list is currently 650 days. Some of the sites
present include the National Bank of Slovakia and a server at
UCSD. Fascinating... and utterly irrelevant to our daily lives
:)
OTOH, the server's back to 53 days uptime. Only 2 more years to
reach the top 50 list :)
2/17/05:
Of crackers and passwords. What I believed to be a cracker when I
tried to remotely log into the server via SSH turned out to be an
expired password.
11/25/04:
Why do game shows like Jeopardy have to insult science? They ask
in-depth questions about almost very other subject, ones that your
ability to answer correctly implies that you studied the subject to at
least some degree. But then they ask what one goddamn cycle per second
is. Gee, good one. I bet you looked in the back of a grade school text
book for that one! Whoo, anyone who didn't pay astudious attention to
their AP Physics class would be stumped by that one. I suppose you'll
ask who writes Harry Potter? In what year the American colonies
declared Independance? No, that's something anyone who's ever given
the subject a thought ought to know.
Now I'm obviously in full rant mode at the moment. But personally, I
think this is a sign of a deeper problem with America. It seems like
the persons in charge are trying to create a nation of science
illiterates. On the other hand, science is all about critical
reasoning and thinking skill. You don't want people to question their
leaders, do you? But you have to take 4 years of english, so you'll
understand every word they say. Yeah, full irrational rant mode
indeed.
11/20/04:
I'm still hating myself for accidently kicking the UPS power switch to
the server when it had 72 days of uptime. Proof that id-10-t errors
are usually to blame for server downtime. Urgh... now I'll have to
keep waiting to find out how long until the server crashes. Crap...