Cerebrate's Contemplations

Tax Reform

It is that time of year again at which I must again advocate that most important of tax reforms: the abolition of withholding of income tax, so that everyone, not merely the self-employed, must go through the delightful procedure of computing their total gross income, and then in turn computing from that figure exactly how much of it the IRS – and their local state Department of Revenue – demands, and then finally write the check and mail it off to them.

And having done that, I must also advocate the abolition of sales taxes and other one-slice-at-a-time forms of taxation, and that the collection of those funds be rolled into the income tax, too, or at least into the same annual return.

After all, an informed population is supposedly a Good Thing for democracy, so what objection could anyone have to eliminating the obfuscatory salami tactics that make the average chap distinctly unclear as to how white he’s being bled?

First Lines

So, via Elizabeth Bear’s LJ, the First Lines Meme.  As she says, “The idea here is to post the first lines from various WIPs, because this will magically cause them to become finished works. Um. Through incantation do we command the demon to appear.”

Well, it would be nice.  I’ve never been satisfied enough with the progress of any of my notional works-in-progress to actually, you know, finish one yet.  But I do have three ideas kicking around in my head, albeit untitled, at the moment, so here are some first lines in the hope the magic will work for me:

I.: “Valuematic Vending, how may I direct your call?”

II.: “So, once again,” the customs supervisor said, “you wish to offload 288 million suspended infugee mind-states whose last memories are having their heads cut off by flying hunter robots?”

III.: The Arrival was heralded, as the technology of relativistic starflight makes inevitable, by a new star in the sky, blue-white and baleful; fortunately, this being a modern and rational age on the planet below, no new religions were founded around this celestial oddity, and its appearance merely resulted in a socially acceptable level of rioting and apocalypse-cultism.

…and on we go.

Enabling .CHM Help Files on Network Drives

Security updates to Windows XP and to Windows 2003, as well as the default configuration of Windows Vista, prevent HTML Help (.chm) files from running from network shares. While this is a useful security precaution in general, in practice - for those of us with either utility software running from the intranet or e-books in .chm format - it's also bloody hindering awkward.

This ability can be restored by adding the following registry information (.reg file format) to the registry:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\HHRestrictions]
"MaxAllowedZone"=dword:00000001
"EnableFrameNavigationInSafeMode"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
"MaxAllowedZone"=dword:00000001

This requires that the location of the .chm files is recognized by Windows as part of the Intranet Zone, which may need to be configured separately. While it is possible to permit .chm files to run from other security zones by changing the value of MaxAllowedZone, I for one strongly recommend that you NEVER DO THIS. EVER. I MEAN IT.

(And if you do, you acknowledge that I told you not to.)

Foreigner, C. J. Cherryh

I am so very behind on my booklogging.  It’s not quite so bad as it might seem, looking at the dates, since over the end of December and half of January I also had what amounted to a serious reading-speed slump, so I just plain haven’t been getting through them as fast as I might like, but still, the pile’s back up to nine, and that’s more than I really want to see on there.

This also means that it’s taken long enough for me to get around to some bits of my booklogging, like this one, that I’ve forgotten a lot of what I wanted to say about it, but I shall nonetheless try.  As you may recall from my comments on the Chanur series, way way back when I first started booklogging, the reason I like Cherryh so much is her ability to realize alien societies so well, both in making them alien, and in showing that alienness to us, the presumably human reader, in a way that we can come to understand over the course of the book.

The alien culture in this book, the atevi, upon whose planet the human ancestors of our protagonist were inadvertently deposited by an superluminal accident, is indeed excellently realized, and both it and the plot (although somewhat slow to start, it rapidly develops once it gets going) are most rewarding to examine for the thoughtful reader.

Recommended, therefore, for said thoughtful readers!  And worldbuilding/xenoculture mavens in general, too; this is how it’s done, and it’s how it’s done right.  I look forward very much to the next nine books in the series.

Death Is A Preferable Alternative To Communism

Liberty Prime said it first.  Who am I to disagree?

And seeing as I don’t disagree, here’s the T-shirt.

Supreme Court Decision

What does "Citizens United" mean to us in practice? Why, that foreign corporations will be able to influence, persuade, and lobby the public directly, instead of the dirty underhanded foreigner tricks - say, slipping an envelope full of used hundreds under the door of a Senate toilet stall - that they use now. We should applaud. That's the American way.

The Underappreciated Filibuster

Well, I'm seeing a lot of complaints these days about the filibuster, and the difficulties of passing a bill despite a 59-41 majority. Which seems to be a tad ridiculous, in the popular opinion.

(Not just yours, Kenn, although yours are the most recent I've seen - and come with the handy geometric-and-starting-to-look-exponential graph.)

Well, I would like to take a moment to sing the praises of this underappreciated political maneuver. Quite apart from a personal belief that 59% is a crappy basis to get all mandatial over, it is doing very well at performing the Senate's intended function of slowing populist wackiness down to a crawl.

And, hey, as long as both sides of the aisle are dominated by lunatics, thugs and procurers, anything which both defeats the attempts of *either* of them to act substantively, and which *neither* of them are willing to abolish for fear of the other... well, then, that's just the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Debt Forgiveness

So, I see we’re forgiving Haiti’s foreign debt to us.

To which I had two reactions: (a), nice gesture, and (b), well, while it IS a nice gesture, with the shambolic state of our national current balance sheet, are we really in any position to be forgiving anyone’s debt to us?

Of course, then I read the above-linked article and discovered that Haiti’s total public external debt is of the order of $1.8 billion, and the total owed to the Paris Club members that are forgiving the debt is a fraction of that at $214 million, and since that includes Canada, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK along with us, the amount of debt we’re actually forgiving would, were we to collect it instead, probably not even cover the State Department toilet-paper budget.

And let’s face it, even if it was collectable before, it sure as hell isn’t now.

Yeah.  Nice gesture.

Send More Luxury Liners To Haiti

Damn, but I am seeing a lot of people getting their ass in a knot at the thought that cruise liners might still be docking at private beaches in Haiti (outside the earthquake zone), despite the whole present crisis.  And, sure, looked at emotively, it does seem like it might be a little in bad taste, mightn't it?

At least until you stop and consider with that other, thinking part of your brain exactly what the alternative is.

So, what, they should all go home and deprive the poorest country in the Western hemisphere of one of the few sources of income (and hard currency) it has, right when it's suffered a natural disaster?

Sheesh, people, try to think of the consequences rather than just emote. The luxury liner passengers are doing more to help Haiti in practical terms than all the Outraged, Outraged About This folks in the West - at least their rum cocktails are paying for someone's kids to eat.

How Not To Deal With Paranoiacs

In a 2008 academic paper, President Barack Obama's appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs advocated "cognitive infiltration" of groups that advocate "conspiracy theories" like the ones surrounding 9/11.

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled "Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures," in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine" those groups.

[…]

Sunstein, whose article focuses largely on the 9/11 conspiracy theories, suggests that the government "enlist nongovernmental officials in the effort to rebut the theories. It might ensure that credible independent experts offer the rebuttal, rather than government officials themselves. There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however. The price of credibility is that government cannot be seen to control the independent experts."

…seen to control.  Nice phrasing, more so in context.  Doubly more so in recent-healthcare-study-news context.

Sunstein argued that "government might undertake (legal) tactics for breaking up the tight cognitive clusters of extremist theories." He suggested that "government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action."

Estrin notes that Sunstein advocates in his article for the infiltration of "extremist" groups so that it undermines the groups' confidence to the extent that "new recruits will be suspect and participants in the group’s virtual networks will doubt each other’s bona fides."

Congratulations.  By saying all of this in public, you have now successfully VALIDATED the paranoid worldview which most conspiracy theorists exist within, by proposing an entire schema be created which looks exactly like the sort of thing that they’re paranoid about.  Nice job, well done.

Idiot.

Good Stuff Seen On The Net Recently

The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage, from the conservative lawyer attempting to overturn Prop. 8:

“Many of my fellow conservatives have an almost knee-jerk hostility toward gay marriage. This does not make sense, because same-sex unions promote the values conservatives prize. Marriage is one of the basic building blocks of our neighborhoods and our nation. At its best, it is a stable bond between two individuals who work to create a loving household and a social and economic partnership. We encourage couples to marry because the commitments they make to one another provide benefits not only to themselves but also to their families and communities. Marriage requires thinking beyond one's own needs. It transforms two individuals into a union based on shared aspirations, and in doing so establishes a formal investment in the well-being of society. The fact that individuals who happen to be gay want to share in this vital social institution is evidence that conservative ideals enjoy widespread acceptance. Conservatives should celebrate this, rather than lament it.”

Nice to see that this conclusion isn’t as limited as I expected it to be.  Although I suspect his ongoing argument is a bit too libertarian to convince many conservatives, even the non-religious clade.

A British perspective on America, courtesy of the NYT.  See, folks, it’s not just me!

The first thing I ever heard about Americans was that they all carried guns. Then, when I came across people who’d had direct contact with this ferocious-sounding tribe, I learned that they were actually rather friendly. At university, friends who had traveled in the United States came back with more detailed stories, not just of the friendliness of Americans but also of their hospitality (which, in our quaint English way, was translated into something close to gullibility). When I finally got to America myself, I found that not only were the natives friendly and hospitable, they were also incredibly polite. No one tells you this about Americans, but once you notice it, it becomes one of their defining characteristics, especially when they’re abroad.

[…]

If the typical American interaction involves an ostensibly contradictory mixture of the formal (politeness), the casual and the cordial, what happens when one moves beyond the transactional? Like many Europeans, I always feel good about myself in America; I feel appreciated, liked. It took a while to realize that this had nothing to do with me. It was about the people who made me feel this way: it was about charm. Yes, this is the bright secret of life in the United States: Americans are not just friendly and polite — they are also charming.

[…]

You can see all of this in operation on flights back across the Atlantic from America to Euroland. At first we are under the spell of America. Instead of plunking ourselves down next to someone without a word, we say “Hi.” Maybe even indulge in a little conversation, though this American readiness to chat is counterbalanced by the fear that once we’ve got into a conversation we might not be able to extricate ourselves from it. By the time we’re mid-ocean, a kind of preparatory freeze has set in. As the flight stacks up in the inevitable holding pattern over Heathrow, we begin to revert to our muttering and moaning national selves. But, for a week or so after landing, a form of what might be called Ameristalgia makes us conscious of a rudeness in British life — a coarsening in the texture of daily life — that had hitherto seemed quite normal.

…read the whole thing.  I endorse it all!

They’re all mad.  Mad! Wash. lawmaker wants to banish negative language:

SEATTLE (AP) -- Decades ago, poor children became known as "disadvantaged" to soften the stigma of poverty. Then they were "at-risk." Now, a Washington lawmaker wants to replace those euphemisms with a new one, "at hope."

Democratic State Sen. Rosa Franklin says negative labels are hurting kids' chances for success and she's not a bit concerned that people will be confused by her proposed rewrite of the 54 places in state law where words like "at risk" and "disadvantaged" are used.

The bill has gotten a warm welcome among fellow lawmakers, state officials and advocacy groups.

…as a related side-note, in the event of my, say, losing a leg, anyone who uses any term but “crippled” to describe my then state will be beaten soundly about the head with a crutch.  Have we not learnt yet that changing the word doesn’t actually make it any nicer – it just makes you sound like a condescending git.

And finally, some hopeful political news, inasmuch as it seems we’re almost ready for cyberdemocracy:

45% of voters would rather pick names randomly from the phone book to run the country than have the present Congress do it; and that number rises to 51% among independents.  And 59% of Republicans, although that’s less surprising.  (I bet if they polled libertarians, they’d get an even higher figure.  But then, I suspect most of us would rather have the random number generator in charge…)

Rasmussen poll here.

Some Rights for Some People (Sometimes)

I hear a lot of people these days saying "All Rights for All People!".  Or even "All Rights for All People, All The Time!".

Sorry, you can't claim that.

Even I can't claim that, and I'm a mad-dog deontological libertarian.  I support gay marriage (as long as no-one's compelled to perform one) and oppose the security state.  I believe in every single one of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, and that without all the qualifications edited into them by legislation of dubious constitutionality and bad Supreme Court decisions over the years.  I believe in the unfortunately not legally binding unalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the one Locke mentioned that the Declaration didn't, property, and the really unfashionable one implicit in the right to liberty, freedom of contract.  And just to demonstrate the depth of my attachment to principle, here, I'm also deeply dubious as the the legitimacy of birthright citizenship¹ as a violation of what someone else might call the right of self-determination (if they allow it to be applied to individuals at all), and I would classify under freedom of contract, namely, the freedom of the individual to contract with a state for governmental services.  In short, even among anarcho-capitalists (of whom I am not one), I have yet to meet, read, or hear of the man who supports a more extensive view of natural and civil rights (in their proper, negatively-phrased, sense) than I, and when I do, I shall doubtless amend my opinions, or at least have a good, hard think about them.

And even I can't say it.  A good part of that because of the large number of entitlements bruited about as "rights" these days (so-called "positive rights").

But the other part of it, well, now, that's a matter of the subdivision of rights, and why it bugs me.

(Now, to be clear, I approach this from the point of view that the unalienable rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness - parsed as the Greek eudaimonia - are the foundation of ethics.  As an atheist, I'm not of the view that we're endowed with those by our Creator, of course, but I would argue that they are inherent in the nature of sophont existence. [This argument is lengthy and off-topic; apply separately if you really want to see it.]

This is, of course, axiomatic.  Since it is no more axiomatic than anyone else's deontology and considerably less than most - and since anyone who talks in terms of "rights" is implicitly deontologist² - frankly, this doesn't bother me all that much.)

You see, I don't believe in a "right to marry", or a "right to privacy", or a "right to bear arms", or even, if it comes right down to it, a "freedom of speech".  I believe in life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, by which all these individual things are implied, and of which all these individual things are strict subsets.  So this slicing down of the rights pie, as it were, bothers me because it shouldn't need to be stated.  Of course there's a right to marry³ - it's right there under "liberty", along with freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, the right to party, the "right" to jump up and down on one leg while singing the Marseillaise, and damn near everything else.

Which is fairly trivial, I suppose, except inasmuch as phrasing often reflects thinking.

But it also bothers me for the same reason as it did many of those who opposed the notion of having a Bill of Rights in the first place.  For example, I find myself in the rare position of agreeing with Alexander Hamilton in his argument that a Bill of Rights would act to limit our rights to only those enumerated in it, and presumptively allow control over everything else:

I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and in the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted⁴.

I certainly find - it is indeed very easy to find - examples of people, legislatures, and indeed courts,  the purported defenders of our rights, up to and including the Supreme Court, who while being pleased to defend or even create by tortuous interpretation one or another narrowly defined "micro-right", are all too happy to nibble away at the edges of rights only defined as broadly as those enshrined in the Bill of Rights, while rarely a day passes without some new infringement upon the very unalienable rights upon which this country was founded - usually advocated for, voted for, and cheered on by the same people who, in another context, fight for one or another micro-right.

(Of course, those systems which have lacked a Bill of Rights, such as the British system, have fared even further down the road to tyranny than we have - but half a loaf, in this case, is only barely better than one.)

Including, of course, just about everyone who demands "All Rights for All People!".

Now, really, this is a modest pecadillo in most ways and cases, if for no other reason than its sheer ubiquity among people - I am, as I mentioned, a self-aware mad-dog libertarian, and yet I still occasionally have outbursts of thinking "There oughtta be a law!" before I get a chance to sit myself down, speak sternly to myself, and remind myself that it's almost certainly none of my damned business - albeit one that occasionally rises to the level of amusing hypocrisy when you see someone flip from "don't impose your morals on me!" to egregious prodnosing and back in the course of a single conversation, or indeed sentence.

But leaving aside my pedantic irritation at the fact that "All Rights" never appears to mean "All Rights" in any but the strictest personal sense⁵, I could just wish the consequences of characterising rights this way, as a collection of "micro-rights", were more apparent to more people.

For a start, everything gets fought as its own tiny battle.  Don't misunderstand me; I'm glad when one is won, and more people receive their due; that is an undeniable good.  But while we may win one battle in one place, over one group's one specific rightlet, or one individual's case, Leviathan leaps forward everywhere else, with a hundred laws, a thousand regulations, and ten-thousand bureaucrats busily engaged in narrowing the scope of life in areas that we aren't paying attention to right now and/or that don't have a big or noisy enough pressure group.

But more importantly, establishing a whole archipelago of little, disconnected rights-to-this and rights-to-that creates a climate, presumption, and even doctrine that, as Hamilton warned us of, those narrowly defined, pinpoint rights specifically enumerated at any given time are the only rights we have.  Presumptively, then, everything else, the entire remaining sphere of activity, is subject to regulation and control.

And surely you've noticed that this is how politicians talk and it is how governments act, even here in the so-called "free world".

Now, if you are a totalitarian (or just deeply ideologically committed to the expansion of the State or the politicization of the personal), or merely are convinced that all right-thinking people agree with you, are in the majority, and always will be, and furthermore all wrong-thinking people should be corrected, or even are just content with the micro-right privileges handed out to you, well then, I imagine you're okay with that.  "Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."

But if you're not, then, I beseech you, consider the harm that accepting this frame for the debate does.

1. It's isomorphic to signing up to an open-ended, unwritten, unilaterally-modifiable-by-the-other-party contract in which you waive the ability to sue for specific performance and (in many cases) damages - which would merely be stupid, except you can't not sign up.

Under any other circumstances, no-one but a madman would call that just, fair, or reasonable.  And yet...

2. To the utilitarians in the audience: if you're not willing to entertain and defend as morally just a hypothetical scenario in which the net positive hedonic utility to homophobes of banning gay marriage or indeed stoning all the gays to death exceeds the net negative utility of doing so, and therefore it should be done forthwith, you've got some deontology in your ethical theory.  Sorry.

3. Or, rather, a right not to be prevented from marrying.  A "right to marry" is fairly ludicrous, since if interpreted the same way as other "rights", it implies that someone has to provide you with a spouse if you don't have one.  Although it is more catchy slogan-wise, I admit.

4. And I defy anyone to claim that the abuse of the general welfare clause of the Constitution, the outright perversion of the Commerce Clause, and the coercive manipulation of funding of states by the federal government, do not constitute "claiming more than were granted".

5. Since it's usually an extension of our legal rights, it's not those approved by the courts.  Since many of them aren't found in the Bill of Rights, it's not those either.  They're not the Lockean natural rights, or the UN Declaration of Human Rights, or whichever document you care to name, and since most people who say these things are definitely against, as I am also, letting democracy or the popular will "put people's rights up for a vote" - well, just where do they come from?

Avatar

Well, finally got around to seeing Avatar. Sure looks pretty, would be my first reaction. And it's nice to see an interstellar starship for once that actually looks like a spacecraft might look. Anyway, very well executed, in essence.

ObRealismQuibble about humanoid aliens, but I guess it's hard to show a romance betwen two blobs. That, and playing to the humanoid-chauvinist audience, I suppose.

Plot-wise, well, as Amy said to me partway through, TV Tropes has ruined us for these things - take Humans Are Bastards, stir in a soupçon of What These People Need Is A Honky, garnish, and serve.

I know I'm politically mandated to be offended by the latter, but really, I'm more so by the former. Seriously, we made it halfway through the 22nd century and still haven't learned the lessons of the 19th? I think Humans Are Bastards more than ANYONE I know and even I'm not that cynical.

More to my immediate gripe, anyone remember when SF was about hope?

Similarities in Statolatry

Incidentally, to submit another minor piece of evidence in favor of the already tediously well-documented thesis that fascism and socialism are, at core, essentially the same school of totalitarian statolatry wearing different suits and silly moustaches, surely I can’t be the only person to have noticed that the Mussolini quotation I adopted to title my last post:

Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.  (“Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato.”)

And that oft-quoted progressive/left slogan (and one becoming at least de facto accepted across most of the political spectrum, distressingly):

The personal is political.

Are basically the same “Yay, serfdom!” meme wearing different hats?

Everything Within the State, Nothing Outside the State

From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

There are few things as mystifying as the dissonance of modern American progressivism. And nowhere is that dissonance more apparent than on the bright line dividing foreign and domestic policy.

For the past eight years, the dominant strain of progressive thought railed against neoconservative foreign interventionism. It abhored the use of coercive hard power -- military might -- to achieve ostensibly desirable goals such as the spread of democracy. Progressives found the promotion of American values through brute force arrogant and even cruel.

[…]

The progressive notion that American power projection is problematic on moral grounds and dubious on empirical ones remains strong today. In a pre-Christmas piece on The Huffington Post, Tom Englehardt recalls that in 2001 the Bush administration "had expansive dreams and gargantuan plans." The neocons were "desperately in love with the U.S. military and complete romantics about what it could do." Alas, "in the biggest dreams" we find "the largest miscalculations."

[…]

Yet turn the subject to domestic policy, and what happens? Progressives eagerly embrace the use of coercive hard power to achieve their aims. Force industry to adopt a cumbersome cap-and-trade policy to reduce carbon emissions? Check. Force the country to adopt a health care "public option"? Check. Threaten people with fines and even prison to impose an individual mandate? Check.

So much for the concern about "social engineering" and well-intentioned but "heavy-handed meddling." When it comes to domestic policy, progressives are just as eager as neocons are to embrace "expansive dreams" and "gargantuan plans." Just as hopelessly romantic about what the threat of force can achieve. And just as arrogant about the rightness of wielding it. (Writing on the Web site Open Left, for example, Adam Bink defends the individual insurance mandate thusly: "I don't care if people don't want health insurance . . . .Pay up, folks.")

Well, progressives might say, lower carbon-dioxide emissions and universal health care are greatly to be desired, and they cannot be achieved without government compulsion. What's more, progressives do not see themselves as cramming policies down an unwilling public's throat. They see themselves as rescuing the public from the bad guys: corporate polluters and greedy insurance companies. Fair Enough. But by the same token, neoconservatives don't see themselves as bullies, either. They also see themselves as rescuers -- stopping genocide and liberating the oppressed from the yoke of tyrants such as Saddam Hussein and the Taliban.

[…]

Of course, everything that has just been said about progressives could be turned with equal validity against conservatives of the talk-radio right -- many of whom think Americans should push the rest of the world around, but leave one another the heck alone.

Nice to see an article in the mainstream press from time to time that acknowledges the essential similarity between our two major factions of State-worshipping jackboot fetishists, although I personally might append that most so-called “moderates” are no better than the immoderates when it comes to the jackboots, whether wearing them or just licking them.

Austerity

Headline seen just now: White House hints that FY2011 budget will be “austere”.

Thanks, Mr. President.  I needed a good laugh this morning.

Lost Access to Local Shares with VPN

Problem: When you connect to a VPN (under Windows), you can no longer access any of the local shares on your network, even though (a) you aren’t doing Windows Networking on the VPN, (b) the default gateway isn’t on the remote network, and (c) you can ping all the servers on your local network that the shares come from perfectly well enough.

The error message you are getting is: “The specified account does not exist.”, or another access denied error.

Cause: Windows obligingly caches the username and password you’re currently using for you.  In this case, that’s the ones you used to log on to the VPN.  Since your local network has no idea who that person is – as that’s, if you’re seeing this error, a different username and password than your local logon – when your client presents this cached credential to your local servers, they bounce you.

Solution: Delete the cached credential as soon as the VPN is dialed:

cmdkey /delete /ras

That’s all it takes.  Without that credential in there mucking up the works, your local access should work fine.

Side-Effects: The cached credential is what lets you connect to resources on the VPN (with “NET USE”, etc.) without having to state your password explicitly.  If you want to keep your local shares, you’ll have to start stating your password explicitly with these.  But, hey, at least you get to keep your local shares, right?

Hyper-V and “A required privilege is not held by the client”

Problem: You get “A required privilege is not held by the client” when you try to create a new virtual machine in Hyper-V Manager.  Maybe you didn’t when you first installed it, but you do now, and you can’t make the error go away no matter what you fiddle with in the Hyper-V settings, or even if you reinstall Hyper-V.  Aaargh.

Speculation: You’re doing something somewhere else on your domain that needs symbolic links, aren’t you?  And so you’ve fiddled with the members of the “Create symbolic link” user right using Group Policy, haven’t you?

Reasoning: Hyper-V uses symbolic links when it makes VMs, and so the special “Virtual Machines” token needs to have the “Create symbolic link” user right, or else it doesn’t work, as above.  Your GPO stomps on this.

Solution: Create a new GPO to apply just to your Hyper-V hosts.  Save the following .INF file (which assigns that right to Administrators and the “Virtual Machines” token) somewhere:

[Unicode]
Unicode=yes
[Version]
signature="$CHICAGO$"
Revision=1
[Privilege Rights]
SeCreateSymbolicLinkPrivilege= *S-1-5-32-544,*S-1-5-83-0

and import it into the Security Settings section (under Computer Configuration –> Windows Settings) of your new GPO, do a gpupdate on the Hyper-V host, and lo and behold, you will be able to create virtual machines again.

So say we all.

The Gathering Storm, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson

(See Amy’s review of this book here.)

It’s that time at last!  In which I shall finally get around to my Gathering Storm review, and yes, I did read it much much earlier than this, but, hey, sometimes it takes me a while to get around to writing these things up.

I shall endeavor to remain spoiler-free in detail, just in case, but I may let a few generalities slip here and there.  But then, you all read it a long time ago, huh, so that shouldn’t be that much of a problem, I think.

Well, that was a roller-coaster ride, huh?  The pace of events now speeding right along.  As I may have mentioned, I thought we were seeing something of a return to form with Knife of Dreams, but Sanderson writes Jordan moving along a lot faster than Jordan ever did.  (A thought to contemplate: and given that he ended up cutting the last book into three while writing the plot at this pace, would anyone care to speculate how long it might have been, or how many volumes we might have ended up with, had Jordan been writing them?  Whew.)

Nice job on the voice, too.  Sanderson does a very good job of writing in a style that fits the world – as Amy said - (although I did have a few concerns along those lines during the first part of the prologue, with the Borderlands farmer) without falling into the trap of producing a Jordan pastiche, or worse, cod-Jordan.  Also, along similar lines, good capturing of the original characterization, although here I must follow almost everyone else who has written a Gathering Storm review and complain about Mat, who isn’t quite his old self.  Ah, well.  Hopefully that’ll settle down by next book.  (Although, on Mat, I do hope that his Extended Horror Movie Sequence has some point, purpose or payoff later, too, because I’m not entirely sure it was worth it on its own.)

Not sure how much more I can say without spoilage, so for now, just a quick summation: Excellent book!  Recommended if you have read the series up to now, and recommended if you gave up in the past, and recommended if you haven’t started yet, ‘cause if you start now, you might just be ready to finish with the rest of us.

Diversity in Adultery

Further signs that the world has gone insane:

Here's my real question, though: What's with the whole Barbie thing?

No offense to anyone who actually looks like Barbie, but it really is striking how much the women who've been linked to Woods resemble one another. I'm talking about the long hair, the specific body type, even the facial features. Mattel could sue for trademark infringement.

This may be the most interesting aspect of the whole Tiger Woods story -- and one of the most disappointing. He seems to have been bent on proving to himself that he could have any woman he wanted. But from the evidence, his aim wasn't variety but some kind of validation.

I'm making a big assumption here that the attraction for Woods was mostly physical, but there's no evidence thus far that he had a lot of time for deep conversation. If adultery is really about the power and satisfaction of conquest, Woods's self-esteem was apparently only boosted by bedding the kind of woman he thought other men lusted after -- the "Playmate of the Month" type that Hugh Hefner turned into the American gold standard.

But the world is full of beautiful women of all colors, shapes and sizes -- some with short hair or almond eyes, some with broad noses, some with yellow or brown skin. Woods appears to have bought into an "official" standard of beauty that is so conventional as to be almost oppressive.

Clearly, we must correct this problem of underrepresentation by introducing quotas, or maybe some form of points system, to ensure that everyone in Our Great Nation sleeps with a group of people statistically representative of the greater population on an annualized basis.  (Alas for those who are determined to remain monogamous, unless their spouse happens to have exactly the right genetic background.)

Seeing as the personal really is political, and all…

Drastic Times Call For Drastic Measures

So, I’ve read several arguments this morning on the general incoherence of the healthcare debate from both sides, and I can’t honestly say I disagree with any of them.  The whole thing really is becoming distinctly wearing.  So, here’s a new, simple, cutting-through-the-Gordian-knot, one-point plan to solve all our healthcare cost issues in one fell swoop (well, almost – it does have high first-year costs, but then, it’s hugely revenue-positive in subsequent years, so that’s a win):

• Immediately euthanize everyone who thinks their health and/or life is so all-fired important that they should be able to rob other people to pay for it.

The subsequently reduced population should place much less of a burden on the system, and as a bonus, the ones who are left won’t have a problem with it.  Or at least not this particular problem.

Elegantly simple, no?  Really, is there any problem that can’t be solved by mass killing?

(Well, underpopulation, I suppose.)

((Ab, bs pbhefr V'z abg frevbhf.  Sbe gur ybir bs Tbq, crbcyr...))

E pur si muove!

You know, however damning the Climategate e-mails, etc., may be in the event that the deniers – note, not the skeptics who are called deniers by the warmistas, the deniers’ equivalents on the other side who are equally immune to facts – are right, and it’s all one big conspiracy theory…

…they’re even MORE damning if we do their authors the elementary courtesy of assuming that they believe their own theory.  And not just to their authors, but to the entire portion of the scientific community that has stood up to defend this farrago of misbehavior.

Science and its ancestor, philosophy, have had in the past a long and glorious tradition of standing up for the truth, come what may.  Socrates drank the hemlock rather than submit to what he believed false.  Galileo had to be silenced by the Inquisition to preserve geocentrism, and even then, it yet moves!  Science has taken on popular opinion and religious doctrine and communism and Nazism and any other half-dozen ridiculous beliefs you care to name in the name of truth, and has generally come out the other side vindicated, because all the mummery and fluff and dogma in the world can’t change an is-not to an is.

But in the course of what we see here, we see statistical manipulation to make the results – to borrow an appropriate word - “truthier”; we see evasion of legal requests to obtain data which, was, of course, not provided in the first place; we see evidence of corrupting the peer review process to obtain “friendly” reviewers and hide contradictory literature.  Now this may well be, as some would claim, the way science is generally done.  None of it may, in fact, amount to misconduct, malfeasance, or fraud.  But no-one with any pretence of intellectual integrity whatsoever would call it standing up for truth – the real, objective kind of truth that admits to things it can’t explain.

(Unless you would have supported defending Newtonian mechanics from its critics in the late 1800s by covering up the anomalous precession of Mercury’s orbit, in which case, well, you’re an idiot.)

And whatever else we may see in them, irrespective of whether we do or do not see misconduct, malfeasance, or fraud, what we definitely see is scientists running scared of arguments with dissenters, Canadian statisticians, politicians, bloggers, and the dread spin machine of the Republican Party, et. al.  None of which, to the best of my knowledge, has the capacity to threaten anyone with bullets, the rack, or a lifetime in a Siberian gulag.

Sic transit gloria scientia.

Countering “Sex Sells”

Well, your biggest problem with countering “sex sells” in gaming terms, it seems to me, is that, looking at the numbers, it seems to work pretty awesomely in practice.  Indeed, it works pretty awesomely in practice in just about any industry, judging by, well, every advertisement I’ve ever seen for anything, anywhere.

(Even in industries where they can’t really be too blatant about it for the sake of realism, even by Adland standards, like laundry detergent - “Wash your sheets in New! Improved! Tide! and everyone will want to sleep (with you) on them!” – it should not escape the observer that the people doing the laundry are all implausibly attractive women [with the occasional implausibly attractive man thrown in, who in Adland are presumably all gay].  And let us not forget the soft drink commercial with the implausibly attractive women drinking said soft drink in the office only to have a bunch of implausibly attractive [and totally non-ickily sweaty] male construction workers get semi-naked outside, an advertisement which had very little connection to any qualities of the product, but appeared tailor-made to create mental associations between the drink in question and warm squidgy sensations.)

Now, of course, just that it’s normal doesn’t mean it’s not deplorable, or else I would have a much shorter list of People, Institutions and Things that need to Get Theirs, Come The Day.  But the weight of evidence, shall we say, is overwhelmingly in favor of its effectiveness.  Unless you go overboard on the crass, but good grief, have you seen today’s culture, both pop and allegedly high?  Short of actually moving into Idiocracy-world, you can’t go overboard on the crass.

And considering that corporate executives do have a legally enshrined fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize, maximize, maximize their return on investment, and have bugger all fiduciary duty to Making The World A Better Place where it contradicts with the former one, there’s very little that you can say to the companies to make them stop doing it.  Inasmuch as any CEO or lesser light who decided to put noble principle on this point first would be opening themselves up to dismissal, and quite possibly other fun things like lawsuits, indictments, and other legal crucifixions.  The supply side’s just responding to incentives and the law as We, The People wrote it.

Which is unfortunate, really, since tackling this on the demand side is basically fighting uphill against the icky side of human nature, and that always works really well…

We Need One Of Him Today

I could wish I didn’t find so much to agree with in H. L. Mencken’s writings, if only because my well-buried inner idealist sometimes cringes at the gloating of my less well-buried inner cynic at the predictive value of his peradversations.  But nonetheless, it is so, as with this quotation happened upon when catching up with the Cato Institute blog:

The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man’s mind.  He can imagine and even esteem, in his way, certain false forms of liberty–for example, the right to choose between two political mountebanks, and to yell for the more obviously dishonest–but the reality is incomprehensible to him.  And no wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he lacks completely, and that is courage.  The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural manure.  More, he must be able to endure it–an even more arduous business.  Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without.  The free man is one who has won a small and precarious territory from the great mob of his inferiors, and is prepared and ready to defend it and make it support him.  All around him are enemies, and where he stands there is no friend.  He can hope for little help from other men of his own kind, for they have battles of their own to fight.  He has made of himself a sort of god in his little world, and he must face the responsibilities of a god, and the dreadful loneliness.  Has Homo boobiens any talent for this magnificent self-reliance?  He has the same talent for it that he has for writing symphonies in the manner of Ludwig van Beethoven, no less and no more.  That is to say, he has no talent whatsoever, nor even any understanding that such a talent exists.  Liberty is unfathomable to him.  He can no more comprehend it than he can comprehend honour.  What he mistakes for it, nine times out of ten, is simply the banal right to empty hallelujahs upon his oppressors.  He is an ox whose last proud, defiant gesture is to lick the butcher behind the ear.

In His Majesty’s Service, Naomi Novik

We actually bought this book by mistake.

Oops, omnibus.  Not a new one, then.  Our bad.

So, yeah, I won’t be talking here about these versions of His Majesty’s Dragon, Throne of Jade, and Black Powder War, because, well, I’ve already read and booklogged those in the original mass-market paperback form factor.  On the other hand, we will be keeping this book too, because it does contain new content in the form of the (exclusive) short story, “In Autumn, A White Dragon Looks Over The Wide River”.

And I know I’m succumbing to the publisher’s devious marketing campaign to sell completists a lot of redundant page-count that way, yes.

On the other hand, a story of the series’ usual excellent quality covering Lien’s first arrival in France and her relationship with Napoleon is totally worth it.  I regret nothing!

World of the Month (December 2009): Meta Change

December’s Metaplace Museum world of the month is Meta Change, a collaborative effort to provide a central hub for charities, non-profits, and other general Doers of Good:

The Tragedy of Andrew Ryan

So, yeah, I just finished Bioshock today.

And now I must ask a question of all of you who believe that Bioshock is one big Take That to objectivism/libertarianism, or, to put it as one review did, believe that “[Ryan] believed in his idiocy to the end” – were you even playing the same game I was?

[cut for some spoilers (quotations from audio diaries) – if you’re reading this on LiveJournal and worried about spoilers, SKIP TO THE END NOW]

Metaplace Tutorial 001: Hello World

So, I got hold of some video editing software, and I made a very quick “How To Write Hello World In MetaScript” video tutorial, just to test.  Not too bad for extempore, I think:

Got myself a new studio world – big and empty and suitable for filming stuff – to make these in, too, just in case it gets to become a habit.  Feel free to visit, if you like.  You can see my virtual Xbox 360 that displays your gamercard there, too.

The Lesson of Afghanistan

…is that we cannot do any form of sustained military action any more, since in attempting to steer a course between the hawks demanding action and the doves demanding inaction or retro-action, every administration will invariably split the difference in trying to fatally offend the minimum number of people, and go straight for “half-assed action”.

Essentially, if we want our military actions to be effective, we need to make them short enough to be over and done with before the bitching, kibitzing, and armchair quarterbacking starts; and at the same time, brutal enough to get the job done in one.

Or, to put it another way, preemptively eliminate essentially every option between “commando raid” and “nuke ‘em”.

(And as a bonus, you don’t need approval from Congress for either of those.)

Writer’s Block: Smoke Screen

Today’s LiveJournal writer’s block:

What are your feelings towards smoking? What rights do you think smokers and non-smokers should have?

Speaking for myself, I don’t particularly care to do it.  I have enough vices already (caffeine, alcohol, sarcasm, Bioshock, …); and, knowing the risks involved and having tested the reward, it comes out a pretty clear negative.

However, that’s me, and to rule upon other people’s risk-reward tradeoffs is the act of a presumptuous jackass.  If anyone wants to smoke, so long as they don’t do it around my books or hard drives, I’ve got no problem with it.

As for rights: well, obviously, the same rights as everyone else, most especially the right to do as they damn well please up until it butts into the rights of others.  In practice, and getting to what was probably meant by the question – although putting it in “rights” terms is vaguely silly – this means the following:

• In open, public volume, smoke all you want.  There’s plenty of space and the atmosphere is huge for it to disperse into.  When the EPA comes up with some figures showing a statistically significant ppm of tobacco smoke components in the air at large, then we’ll talk, but until then, regulating smoking in the open air is just plain idiotic.
• In other people’s homes and on other people’s property in general, you have the right to respect the property owner’s wishes or leave, really, just as you have in re absolutely everything else.  (And yes, I know that’s not necessarily true in law, but we’re talking “rights” here.)
• In your own home, or your own property – which specifically DOES include business or other property open to the public, and for that matter, your vehicle too – you may do exactly as you see fit.  Any attempt to tell you that you cannot smoke or permit others to smoke on your own property is an intolerable impertinence, and should be opposed to the hilt by all right-thinking people (even if you’re a non-smoker, if you start allowing people to tell you what to do on or with your own property, how confident are you, really, in what they might come for next?).  It’s your damned choice, and “a man chooses, a slave obeys”.