May 2007 Archives

Right. So, lots of folks are all het up regarding SixApart's decision to purge any LiveJournal whose interests are even vaguely suggestive or troublesome after some so-called "Warriors for Innocence" made threatening noises and invoked the magic "p" word.

Let's get the dumb argument out of the way, first: free speech. This isn't even remotely a freedom of speech issue. Freedom of speech in no way guarantees you access to somebody else's printing press. If LJ wanted to, they could delete, purge and annihilate all journals whose usernames began with the letter 'q', just because they felt like it, and you'd pretty much be in the same position, here. Their servers, their rules.

Now, having dealt with the dumb argument, let's talk numbers.  LiveJournal has 13 million accounts.  Granted, most of those aren't active, but per LJ's own statistics, nearly 1.7 million are "active in some way", and roughly speaking, over a million have updated in the last month, 600,000 in the last week, and 200,000 in the last day.  A count of paid members is harder to get, but is generally accepted to be less than 2% of users - so, something under 35,000 active paid users. At, on the generous side, something like $2/mo. We can, I feel, assume that advertising revenue for any given free user is rather less than this, given their business model. Given these assumptions, go figure what a typical LiveJournal user is worth to SixApart's bottom line...

That's why, even given the 1996 precedent, SixApart will toss any given one of them off the service whenever any pressure group that might even vaguely hint at litigiosity or threats to the revenue stream come along. This time it was WFI - but it could have been the RIAA, or the MPAA, or Black Chinese Zoroastrians For Arming Bears, for all they care about. Hell, the individual LiveJournal user, and even groups of them, isn't even worth enough to them, bottom-line-wise, to make it worth paying people to sort out what absolutely needs deleting to ensure they don't get sued when a broad keyword sweep will do just as well and still not impact them significantly.

This is business, sweethearts, and economics is a bitch.  Don't expect someone to risk a bullet for you for free, and in civil law, even if you win, it can be really damn expensive.

If you have something controversial to say, something that you might get sued over, or someone might threaten to sue your host over, at the least you need to go out there and get yourself some web hosting. Not the cheap-ass $4/mo. kind, either - they're working on a shoe-string too and will shit-can you as soon as trouble hoves into view - but once you're paying, say, fifty to a couple of hundred dollars a month for your server hosting, then they might think about listening to your side of the story before killing your site. If they're reasonably confident that the threats of litigation are hollow in fact.

If they might not be, or you're cheap, buy your own damn server, and take your own risks.

C'est la vie.

(Hat tip: Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler.)

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration will announce increases in immigration application fees Wednesday that will nearly double the cost of citizenship and almost triple the cost of becoming a legal permanent resident.

…

Under the increases, which cover almost all immigration benefits, the cost of bringing a foreign fiance or fiancee will jump from $170 to $455. The price tag for a green card, or a legal permanent resident visa, will rise from $325 to $930, and the cost of citizenship papers will increase from $330 to $595.

Even having paid the former two; and even being aware and agreeing with the position that a nation can set whatever conditions on immigration it damn well feels like; and even realising that USCIS probably do need the money: this in combination with the We Love Illegal Immigrants Just As Much As Even More Than The Legal Ones Bill leaves me feeling really remarkably screwed.

Thanks muchly, guys. May I have another?

See here.

(Applications to other, analogous forms of DEATH!! are left as an exercise for the reader.)

As Samizdata informs me, on a belated reading, the Cutty Sark (also, a fine tribute here) has been partially - considerably - destroyed in a fire. Fortunately, much of the ship had been removed as part of a long-term restoration project, and they hope to be able to restore her, but this is still a very sad thing to happen to a ship I knew from my childhood.

Except, that is, that the police seem to suspect arson.

Which, if there is any truth in it at all, transforms it to a very enraging thing. I've never understood - except in the most clinical of senses - what motivation lies behind the urge to destroy for the sake of destruction, but I am absolutely confident in my belief that those that give in to it are among the lowest kind of filth our grubby species can produce.

Even if they throw the book at the responsible party or parties, it will not be a tenth what they deserve.

• A new birth-control pill has been invented and received FDA approval that stops the menstrual cycle entirely. A boon, surely, a boon to those women out there suffering from period pain, PMS, heavy bleeding, and other assorted things, or even who just don't care for the inconvenience. And it's not as if anyone's forcing anyone to take it.
  
  Nevertheless, I'll take anyone's bet that over the next couple of weeks, the feminist lobby is going to go apeshit that such a thing was invented, probably led by the nature-worshipping-home-birth-feel-my-magic-blood-power loonies, but probably even seeping into the so-called mainstream. This I Foretell.
  
  (On a lighter note, see this list of menstruation euphemisms. I like "attracting the lesbian vampires", myself. Although I'm also amused to see the Onion's addition of "Falling to the Communists".)
  
• The Volokh Conspiracy points out that over 2006, solemn Kyoto promises notwithstanding, the US's carbon emissions have decreased while the EU's have increased. Chortle. Leaving aside the still-being-debated reasons behind this, as someone who's frequently commented on the EU's habit of coming up with new rules and regulations which the Franco-German Axis then blithely ignore if they feel like it, I do so enjoy the predictability of it all.
  
• Mass hysteria (no link, spoilt for choice) over this executive order. Am amused to note that most of the intelligent people I know personally who are indulging in this have not actually read said executive order. Am rather unamused, on second thoughts, to realise that on the basis of reading said executive order and comparing it to the hysteria, most people haven't taken the time to compare what it actually says vis-a-vis the accusations from the Commie Wing¹. You know, people, in a professional setting rather than the ever-amateur field of politics, this behavior would be considered not only incompetent, but dangerously so.  I know an Ermächtigungsgesetz when I see one, and this, sir, is no Ermächtigungsgesetz.
  
• Identical twin parent baffles paternity test. No, not the parent of identical twins...

1. As I said in a comment elsewhere talking about this, I take the slightly controversial view that even if they call themselves "socialists" or "progressives", or position themselves as part of another non-toxic movement like "feminism" or "environmentalism", or otherwise disguise it, if I can smell the Marx-Hegel dialettic or its offshoots in what they say, they're damn Commies.

Well, now, it seems to me that there's been a lot of talk in recent days about things that people claim aren't terrorism, but which unfortunately seem to strongly resemble terrorism for all practical purposes.

From the People I Usually Disagree With, come the cases of a fundamentalist Christian bombing an abortion clinic (story link I can't seem to locate right now) and the 19-year-old who brought incendiaries to the Falwell funeral to (allegedly) use on protesters¹; from elsewhere (hat tip: Captain's Quarters) comes the case of an animal-rights arsonist, thoroughly lionised by his sister in the LA Times.

And, you know, they're all right. All of these cases are terrorism (by our recommended Standard Terrorism Definition), all of the persons involved are, to steal a good phrase, cancers on rational society, and frankly, we know what to do with cancer, these days.

We poison it, or cut it out.

Hang the scum.

1. Who, by and large, would also have been scum, even if he wasn't talking about the Fred Phelps mob; but if you even begin to think that that justifies throwing incendiaries at them, get the hell out of my universe.

One of the annoying aspects of the modern disease of escalating feeling over thinking is a particular tic I have observed recently about the blogosphere -- particularly in the sinistral blogosphere, but I suspect that's because it's an activist tic, and it has been my observation that the political left more commonly self-imagine as activists -- namely, the "Anger Is My Trump Card" tic.

You know the one. It's the one that goes:

• "If you're not angry/outraged, you're not paying attention."
• How can you not be angry/outraged when X is happening/about X!
• It's wrong to be polite/calm/dispassionate/moderate about X! (for values of X equal to any bad thing)
• (or alternately and conversely) My fucking use of bad fucking language is perfectly fucking justified, asshole! Because X.
• (blah) anger (blah) outrage (blah) frustration (subtext: because I am so goddamned righteous and they won't listen to me!)
• and so on and so forth...

Now, it doesn't take a genius to explain that anger clouds the ability to think. It doesn't take Googling for, say, diminished responsibility or crime of passion or any of many studies on how the in-built fight/flight reflex doesn't work so well in the modern world where responding to a situation with some, y'know, actual thought rather than "hit it with a stick, and run away", or how we train it out of people who might experience it in the course of their work because it leads to bad results...

It just takes a little common sense.

So, why exactly should those of us who are interested in rational debate about an issue and its solutions bother talking to you at all?  You've just announced your proud, voluntary abdication of your reasoning faculty, so it really seems quite plain that attempting to involve you in a debate will be a fruitless waste of time.

At best, we'll just note whatever fragment of point's buried at the heart of your anger and discuss it between ourselves at some later date.  More likely, we'll shrug and dismiss you entirely as a frothing-at-the-mouth-and-brain irrationalist.

But then, you know that already, don't you?

(Hat tip: RISKS Digest) I quote:

Accepting satellite-navigation directions without sufficient thought has caused another accident.  A young woman in Great Britain followed its directions onto a country lane which was blocked by a gate.  At first she thought it was a dead end, she said, but "the sat nav insisted it was the correct way so I opened it and drove through."

After the first gate there was a second one, so she got out to close the first gate and open the second one, apparently not thinking about why there might be two gates across a road, or why there was a sign saying to proceed "if the light is green".  (None of the news reports I found says any more about that light than that the sign existed.)

And while she was out of her car, a train came along the tracks and demolished it.

Now, for my readers who aren't experienced with the UK, let me just say that railways are... kind of common in the UK. If you drive at all, you will almost certainly have encountered a level crossing (railroad crossing, for my US readers - the kind where the paths of car and train actually intersect), and you will absolutely certainly have had to answer questions about all the various kinds of them, including this kind, when you took the written examination that's part of a UK driving test (again for my US readers, please take my word that these are rather stricter than US driving tests).

And yet, the principal narrative in the news reports, rather than the RISKS Digest, is that - well, in the lady's own words (from the BBC story):

"I put my complete trust in the sat nav and it led me right into the path of a speeding train," she said.

"The crossing wasn't shown on the sat nav, there were no signs at all and it wasn't lit up to warn of an oncoming train.

Except for the light, sign, and red circle on the gate, as she also mentions, which is pretty much normal signage for a level crossing with manual gates. Again, if you passed the written driving test, you can't not know this.

"Obviously I had never done the journey before so I was using the sat nav - completely dependent on it," she said.

[...]

"I can't completely blame the sat nav because up until there, it did get me where I needed to go," she added.

"If maybe I had been more aware of the situation, I wouldn't have had the accident.

"But I would be a bit more wary of the sat nav next time because they try to take you the shortest route, and not always the most accessible route and not always the safest route."

Right. So, let me get this straight. You ignored the road signs, and the sat-nav is (mostly)responsible for telling you to.  Do you also ignore stop signs, traffic lights, and other road furniture when the sat-nav tells you to turn, proceed, etc.? If not, why not?

Even the police are in on it:

Chief Inspector Paul Richards of British Transport Police said they were investigating the incident.

"We would advise people to use sat navs with due caution," he added.

I weep. This is not a case of a technical flaw in the satellite navigation system. It's not even a flaw in the user interface of the satellite navigation system. This is, it seems to me, an open and shut case of Being Too Stupid To Live, although, alas, Darwin didn't take his due this time.

And I would lay good money, what with the levels of stupidity considered acceptable in today's society, that this dangerously incompetent driver isn't even prosecuted for Driving Without Due Care And Attention, which would at least be something.

So, Jerry Falwell is dead, they tell me.

I have no particular feelings about this one way or another; I think it's pretty fair to say that I disagreed with him about every single issue it's possible for a chap to disagree with another chap about, but it's not like I actually knew the man, and if I went around with a great steaming animus against everyone in that category, I'd never do anything else.

It's unfortunate, however, that the inevitable consequence of this will be a week of public mean-spirited gloating from Set Of People A, followed by another week of flaming of People A along the lines of "Real classy" by Set of People B.  Not exactly an elevated level of public discourse, that.

Whatever happened to "Speak no ill of the dead", anyway? It's not like they're going to be able to get in the last word.

(On a somewhat lighter note, when I expressed that last sentiment to my lovely wife, she replied, "But if they did, people would certainly listen." Heh.)

(Well, it sounded better than "Threat or Menace"...)

So, back in the UK, I had a PayPal account, because let's face it, tremendous pain in the ass that they are, if you wanted to take money from people with credit cards, they were the only game in town.

(Yes, now there's Google Checkout and the Amazon Honor System. That's now. This was then.)

Anyway, after e-mailing them a dozen or so times about the minor fact that I've moved house, country and in fact continent and would they kindly move my account appropriately so that it's held in the right currency and can be discharged to bank accounts that I actually have, and getting no response whatsoever, I eventually just set up a PayPal (US) account when I needed to pay someone from here, and sent my munificent old balance of $0.07 over to said new account.

Which left me with but one problem: closing the old account.

Ok. Follow the links. Three options, I see. One, enter your phone number, and we'll call you with the necessary security code - but all it has is my old numbers, because you can't enter non-UK numbers for a UK PayPal account. Well, that's fine, as it happens I have a UK SkypeIn number at the moment, so I'll add that to the account, and then use it. Clicky, clicky, clicky.

Bugger. I may be able to add it, I may even be able to make it primary, but that doesn't mean it'll let me actually use the damn number. Okay, what are my other options?

Address. Yeah, so they let you use a (UK) address so they can look you up in the (UK) phone book. That'll work.

Ah, other. Pick a reason: Other. Enter a reason: moved continents! Click "Next" - ah, right. Call your customer service number, in the UK.

Hold, hold, hold. Damn good thing I'm using Skype, or this would cost a bloody fortune. Enter phone number. Bleeple. Can't find an account with the 'phone number I'm calling from. Well, no wonder, although that's not the number I entered, either. Hold, hold, hold.

Ah, human! Speak to me, human. What's that you say, human? Use the web site to close my account? Well, the web site sent me here.

No, the page said I had to call you if I didn't have a UK tele-

But, as I said, I don't have a-

I SAID THE WEB SITE SENT ME HERE TO TALK TO YOU, YOU DEAF, MORONIC, SON-OF-A-BITCH! ('hem.)

...right. So you have a solution?

Use the same computer I used to create the account? Well, this is the same computer that I used to create the account, but it's not in the same place, you know?

It has to be the same IP address? Well, that's going to be a little problem.

What do I mean? Well, I mean this is the same computer, but it is the same computer 3 addresses, 2 ISPs and ONE CONTINENT away from having that IP address, and even if I was willing to fly all the way back to the UK, persuade the people who bought my old house to let me sit in their living room for a couple of weeks, get BT via Demon to turn ADSL on a line I don't own, and suchlike, I wouldn't be allocated the same address anyway!

Assmonkey.

Right. So, basically, without having done some freakish IP-address-preservation-remote-access-fu, this account is impossible to close, and will sit there like a giant untended security-risk pustule on my ass for the rest of eternity...

...ah, I see. It'll be easier in three, or maybe four, you aren't sure, months once it goes inactive? And that's the only way? And you're sure that when I call you again there, you won't try to get me to log in to the site to close it that won't activate the account again and put me right back where I am now?

Well, okay. I haven't the time to argue this with you now, as I have to write a nice long blog post about how people who run organizations like yours ought to be strung up by their thumbs and flogged with cheesewire cat-o'-nine-tails.

So, by a 26-21 vote, the 53-member UN Commission for Sustainable Development has elected Zimbabwe to head them - a country which in addition to the usual African pathologies like brutal repression, dictatorship, and a "land reform" programme that manages to create starvation, homelessness, etc. in a former net exporter of food, but has recently achieved the signal honor of the highest rate of inflation in the world.  That would be something over 2000%, for those not playing the game at home.

Some people wonder why people on the right side of the political spectrum don't take the UN seriously or wish we were out of it. Me, I wonder how anyone can manage to take it seriously with the number of times something like this happens...

In other news, my local paper informs me:

Apparently there's a new term developing: ecosexual.

An Internet search yielded various definitions for the word, ranging from a person who's interested in hybrid cars and recycling to a person who considers “keeping green” just as important to his or her romantic life as anything else.

Sigh. Some people need their word-coinage licenses taken away. Or at least they would, if it wasn't a useful politicizer-detector.

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6641421.stm)

Unfortunately, it's likely to take more than a girl with a bucket of water to finish off Gordon "Red" Brown, but we can only hope...

When they learned to decompile the results of the Human Genome Project, the following were found in the resulting source code:

/cognitive/cortex.d:

    // Can we rewrite some of this crap?
    //
    // How many layers of abstraction does one brain need? Plus, they
    // keep spitting up undocumented priority interrupts.
    //
    // And having to do THE MOST IMPORTANT PART single-threaded is just
    // lame.

/digestive/intestine/appendix.d:

    // What does this do? Why is it here? -- A
    
    // It's been obsolete for the last couple of revisions, but Gabe
    // bitches any time we try and take it out. Leave it - not like it's
    // doing any harm where it is. -- B

/nucleus/dna.h:

    // This language has only 20 operations? What sort of
    // half-assed system designer wrote this, anyway?
    
/nucleus/dna-validate.d:

    // FIXME: Come back and do this later, the boss says, so...
    //
    // FIXME: Still no time to do this. Bring it up at the next status
    // meeting.
    //
    // FIXME: Project's nearly done. I'm going to be working late on this
    // shit, I can tell.
    //
    // FIXME: Crap, crap, crap. Shipping Thursday, still not done, and now
    // a code freeze. No-one else in the office seems bothered,
    // but they didn't write the bloody parser, did they? One-bit
    // errors will crash this totally, and probably fork all over
    // the bloody place.
    //
    // If it fucks up, don't blame me. I tried.
    
/nucleus/metabolism.d:
    
    // Didn't have time to write this properly, so I stole some
    // energy-generating classes from the guys down the hall. If
    // I hook 'em up right, it's not like anyone will notice...
    
/nucleus/metabolism.d:

    // HACK OF DEATH
    //
    // No, really, we handle death in this bit.

/reproductive/spermatozoa/sperm-replicate.d:

    // What asshat did this design?
    //
    // Welcome to O(n^1000000) land...

/respiratory/lung-manager.d:

    // Believe it or not, metabolism.h doesn't provide any interface to
    // find out how much oxygen we've got.
    //
    // UGLY CO2 HACK FOLLOWS

/sensory/optical/interface.h:

    // So, we contracted the design of the eyeball out, right? Turns out
    // the monkeyass bastards we hired to do the job built us a perfect
    // eyeball to spec, except they didn't put a public interface on it.
    //
    // And since they're management's fucking blue-eyed (sic) boys, we
    // can't get them to fix it, oh no. So now we have to stick hooks into
    // their private space, and that's going to overwrite chunks of the
    // vision buffer.
    //
    // Well, it'll see *something*, anyway.
    
/skeletal/spine.d:

    // This code is tense!
    
/utils/cAMP.d:

    // Not sure what this does, but if I take it out, everything stops
    // working? - C
    //
    // Seems to be referenced a lot, anyway. Maybe we can put a mock
    // in here instead, see if we can trace what's using it? - D
    //
    // *****************************************************************
    // * *
    // * IF ANYONE ELSE TOUCHES THIS CLASS I WILL PERSONALLY RIP THEIR *
    // * LUNGS OUT! *
    // * *
    // * HOW DID YOU PEOPLE GET A JOB HERE ANYWAY? *
    // * *
    // *****************************************************************
    //
    // I think that's a bit uncalled for.
    //
    // Bollocks it is. You've broken the build six days running.

As below, so above.

(Hat tip: Laban Tall) Sacred cow ordered slain... literally.

Potentially an interesting religious freedom case, here.

So, the folks over at the Carpetbagger Report are all het up that Ted Poe (Republican, Texas) used a Nathan Bedford Forrest (mis-)quote on the floor of the House.

Now, it's certain that Forrest was a controversial figure - a man with his early and extensive involvement with the KKK can hardly be anything else, although honest assessment would note the change of heart he seems to have had in his later years - but it seems perhaps a trifle odd to bring in selected chunks of the man's life history which seem irrelevant to the point that Rep. Poe was making, a military one.

Generally, in military arguments, after all, it is considered quite appropriate to cite brilliant generals of various ages. Erwin Rommel is cited quite often, for example, and he didn't exactly work for a fluffy bunny regime.

But here's the real simple point. If you're going to argue seriously, you have to be able to separate the argument from the person.

If you can't do that, you're just institutionalising the ad hominem, which, as I shouldn't have to remind any of my readers, is a logical fallacy.

And thus, you're pretty much per se not qualified to make a rational argument.

Stop trying.

'Islamic radicals' charged with plot to kill Fort Dix soldiers.

So, let me get this straight. These six men, who have trained by playing paintball, were planning to attack an Army Reserve base with maybe 10,000 soldiers there, who have trained perhaps a little more effectively?

That's probably the single dumbest plan I've heard of since that cretin tried to rob the bank on the same floor as the regional FBI office. At lunchtime.

So, one of the amazing technological innovations that everyone's talking about on the web these days is this shiny little gadget from Wiebetech: the Mouse Jiggler. For the low, low price of $30, this USB device will keep your mouse pointer jiggling back and forth, back and forth, so that the computer never gets the urge to go into sleep mode or screensaver.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Who would want that - couldn't they just turn the screensaver off?

Well, according to their site, their Mouse Jigglers are used by:

• Computer Forensics Investigators use Mouse Jiggler to prevent password dialog boxes due to screen savers or sleep mode.
• IT Professionals use Mouse Jiggler to prevent password dialog boxes due to screen savers or sleep mode after an employee is terminated and they need to maintain access to a computer.
• IT professionals or office workers use Mouse Jiggler when downloading/installing programs to keep overactive screen savers from interfering.
• Not many can resist watching the reaction of a coworker encountering the fast Mouse Jiggler for the first time.

Well, that's all jolly good, then. However, it's still somewhat ridiculous in the field of overkill for most people. Really, an entire USB device, $30 worth, just to jiggle a mouse pointer? Unless you're one of the forensics guys, etc, mentioned in their FAQ who can't change the software configuration of the machine, a simple software solution should do the job nicely. Well, except maybe for pranking, and who cares about that?

Like this one, for example, which took about 8 minutes of coding, including the time it took me to remember SendInput():

http://www.arkane-systems.net/freestuff/products/MouseJiggle/MouseJiggle-1.0.zip

(Requires .NET Framework 2.0, nothing else. Has no fancy options, but doesn't really need them. Source available freely to anyone who wants it, MIT License, etc., but not actually published until the new site is up and running so just e-mail me if you want it, m'kay? avatar@arkane-systems.net )

Scott Hanselman has the cure here. Or a hyperlink to the cure, anyway, which is just as good.

Be advised that my mirror of the WOTFAQ has moved from:

http://www.arkane-systems.net/faqs/WOTFAQ/

to

http://www.siliconcerebrate.com/faqs/WOTFAQ/

This is a permanent change.  While a redirection is in place so that the former URL will continue to function for the forseeable future, please update your bookmarks, web pages, mental notes, pieces of paper, and other mnemonic devices accordingly if you use this mirror directly rather than through the http://linuxmafia.com/jordan redirector.

That is all.