Search for Balance

Republicans Make US Government Look Bad

2007-06-18T22:09:00.000-04:00

Reference: this article

Summary of article: Republicans, some high ranking officials, have e-mail addresses with the Republican National Committee and the contents of those accounts have been deleted.

On this surface this isn't a big deal. Technically speaking, the RNC is a private organization. The members of our government are also private individuals.

The problem arises that is it possible to be a servant of the government at high levels and continue to have private communications that are completely separate from their private lives especially in regard to political party communications. Communications of public officials need to be saved and recorded and available for review in the case that they use private communications for official communications.

The deletion of these e-mails and e-mail accounts raises the possibility of unethical, illegal or problematic communications having occurred in this medium. As an official, they should have known that such activity would raise concerns - and once again on an international stage questions are raised about just how 'good' our government is.

So, the web site and Chinese news outlet Xinhua writes an article that really just has the implication that our government is infiltrated with corruption. Certainly, there isn't any question of the appearance of impropriety. The question is, was there illegal activity?

A question that might be extremely difficult to answer given the deletion of the e-mail accounts and e-mails.

But then again, as a member of the programming population of the world, I understand that few things are completely deleted.

Implications of Scientists Discussing Religion

2007-06-14T23:24:00.000-04:00

A recent article related a discussion in the upper echelons of scientists about the decision to allign themselves with mainstream religion in the fight against anti-science.

As you can well imagine Professor Dawkins was one of the scientists on this panel. Two other scientists were on the panel: The Astronomer Royale, Martin Rees and Steve Jones.

If you read the article carefully you can come up with some implications of the discussion.

1) The Astronomer Royal, Richard Dawkins and Steve Jones are all atheists.
2) The assumption in their conversation is that their intended audience (scientists) are also all atheists.

The three were sharply divided on the topic of aligning themselves with mainstream religion. The Astronomer Royal wants the alignment, Dawkins and Jones did not. It is, of course, amazing that someone in public should actually agree with anything Dawkins says on the topic of religion. Most commentary about Dawkins is so derogatory, inflamed and wild claims that he is a 'fanatic' or bringing about fundamentalist atheism are shouted when he calmly talks about the problems inherent in religion.

The major problem with making mainstream religion an ally of science as described by Dawkins is that it legitimizes the idea that non-rational discourse - or faith - is the key to knowledge in the material world. Any implication of that nature should be avoided I suspect he thinks, because he doesn't want religion to take a role in science.

Yes, of course, he is right. However, religion already has a level of legitimacy. That probably isn't going away. No, we aren't going to run around in an alliance with religion and tell them they can make any scientific statements. Not going to happen.

Politics, by its nature, is about compromise. Right now, there are millions, perhaps even a billion secularists, atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, deists in the world. However, even with this large number of people who are proponents of rational thought we are in a weak position.

The nature of the people in these groups is not toward homogeneous cooperative groups. Fractured in many idealogical realms even united we need allies in the fight against unreason.

Without allies, unreason will once again take over the world. The problem is that at present we are so dependent on reason and the by-products of reason, science and technology, that the loss of reason as a commanding force and moving forward for humanity will most likely result in the loss of human life - and I'm not just talking about a few people.

Anything we can do to avoid that error condition should be considered (even if sometimes outright rejected). An alliance with mainstream religion, on the topic of science and technology and the furtherance of the improvement of the human condition - is acceptable compared to total loss to the propaganda of the fundamentalist religionists which wish to deny science fact, limit the increase of science unreasonably and with all their fighting risk the destruction of humanity.

Please not that I'm not saying that science should not be limited. Genetic modification of any species for the improvement of those species is exciting, but unless we have the restraint to test such changes (even changes to humanity) and understand if they present any dangers - we could be playing roulette with humanity's existence.

Focus, control and discipline are necessary in order to ensure the continued future of humanity.

Republicans, in general disbelieve evolution

2007-06-14T12:47:00.000-04:00

This was a great blog entry. Although I have to say that the results do not really surprise me.

As the author indicates in a comment of his own - it is odd that most people agree with the science they need on a daily basis and accept it such as physics, computing and biology, but when it conflicts with their political or religious agenda, they find all the reason in the world to disbelieve it.

Many people have litmus tests for their vote. Well in no uncertain terms, I will never vote for a person so ignorant as to dispute evolution, unless that person both rejects medical care (the result of biological research) and physics such as the size of the universe, its age and the speed of light - and also does not use computers (which relies heavily on physical science, the speed of light and other physics principles.

Foolishness. We live in an era in which science is central to our existence. Being anti-science, in most ways that it is expressed - is being anti the future of humanity. It is being anti the present of humanity, because there are few people in the world that get by even a single day without using science, the products of science, or don't depend on sciences capabilities to provide the basics of life.

All in all, I'm not surprised about 68% of Republicans not believing in evolution. I'm surprised it wasn't a higher percentage.

Some interesting science articles today

2007-06-14T12:32:00.000-04:00

Some interesting articles in science that have come out today:
DNA/Genetics - figuring out junk DNA - http://tinyurl.com/yt8pns

More evidence for a Mars shoreline? - http://tinyurl.com/2rpwuu

ISS Computers on the Fritz - http://tinyurl.com/3y5knu
I think this is a bit more alarming than they make it out. In my opinion, if they had to abandon station, its orbit would degrade and make it nearly impossible for a new docking. There might also be problems in that since the computer shut down - that it might be hard to re-start remotely.

Baby Monitor Picks up space shuttle video - http://tinyurl.com/2koxv5

I'm not sure what this has to do with Dental plans - but at Dentalplans.com - commentary on activities of two of Saturn's moons - http://tinyurl.com/34dp9s

Now that's really weird, the website just seems to be a collective shop for dental coverage site...

Hope you find the articles of interest.

Honor Killing - a Lifestyle Choice

2007-06-12T18:28:00.000-04:00

Honor killings are back in the news with the recent death of Banaz Mahmod Aga in England. Honor killings are a perversion of justice in that they pitch the ones that should protect you as the perpetrators of your destruction. This case, like the case publicized with video in Iraq, involves family members, this time father and uncle - instigating the death of the daughter/niece.

I have visited England on two occasions and have family located in the country. When I was there I found to my consternation at the time that it was far more a liberal place to live than the United States of America. Now, I understand more about the USA I see that many places in Europe are much more liberal on many levels than people in the USA. It seems to me that anyone growing up in England would get a course in understanding about romantic love and the idea that your live is what you make of it - not the choices made for you by other people.

It is an effort by the past to control the future. In typical fashion this is the efforts of the men to control and subjugate women and keep it that way.

Again, the event center around Kurds. It seems they teach as a founding lesson that killing a person is much better than living with them as the person they have grown to be. In this specific case it seems that the father arranged a marriage for the daughter to a man, it turns out was very violent and apparently felt wife-beating is a virtue.

So, she left him, and fell in love with another man. Daddy and uncle felt he was a bad choice (even though this man was also a Kurd of some sort as well) and decided that as a child might destroy a toy that accidently hurt their hand, they would lash out at the daughter/niece and kill her horribly.

The fact that they were able to find five young men who apparently felt this was OK and killing her by choking her to death with shoe strings and then damaging her body and throwing it in to a suitcase which they then buried in someone else's garden - is despicable as well.

What exactly happened?

"Oh, by the way, my daughter is seeing a man that I don't like, can you please kill her horribly as a lesson to all women that they should not defy the men?"

"Duh-huh, yeah boss, that sounds like a great thing to do. I think I'll even get some of my buddies to help, since I'm not man enough to be able to take a woman out by myself."

"OK, good job, the priests will remember you well for your purification efforts."

Here are apparently a list of other women, killed for who they love, killed for doing their jobs, killed for having jobs. What exactly are humans? It is to be hoped that I am not the same species as these people.

So, as we rapidly approach father's day - we should all ponder that not all father's should be rewarded for the things they are willing to do to their daughters.

Apple The Software Company Introduces Safari Browser

2007-06-12T14:13:00.000-04:00

Now, now, just from the tiel, perhaps I will get razzed by Apple fans. Not to worry, this is intentional. Long before the iMac and the recent resurgence of Apple IT people have recognized that Apple is a software company.

You might state that there isn't a single Apple OS running on non-Apple hardware and you would only be partially correct.

Other companies make the hardware. Apple certainly helps with standards and requirements; however, it isn't Apple that makes these things.

Apple is known for - its operating system. Apple is known for - iTunes. Apple is known for - the user interface for the iPOD. They worked hard, no doubt on the design of the iPOD, but they don't build them.

So, the conclusion of Apple as a software company is almost complete with the release of the internet browser Safari.

Now, let me back up and say a few things:
1) I encouraged and bought my wife's MacBook when she was pregnant with our second child. So far she loves everything about it except the absence of quality games.

2) When my father-in-law was at the end of his latest porrly engineered PC, with our experiences with Apple computers, we got him the Mac Mini. It suits his purposes and even though he is older (78 years old or so) he found the transition not such a big deal.

3) I encourages and my wife bought an iPOD recently, even though she already had a competing MP3 player. Mostly so we can get the connector and control the iPOD directly from my wife's new minivan.

As soon as I heard about it, I downloaded and run sometimes the Safari browser on my Windows XP PC.

There are many great things about Apple as a software company. They are the only ones who have a chance at bringing a varient of Linux/Unix in as a popular operating system. They do good work that appears to not require as much patching as competing Microsoft products. This might in part be due to their control of the hardware side of the equation. The proliferation of even different motherboards can be cause for problems with Microsoft Windows operating systems.

However, ultimately, Apple fails as a software company in the one place where Microsoft shines as a software company - in the Development Environment. I'm an application developer and I've been writing programs for about 10 years. The Microsoft IDE, Visual Studio 2005, is a polished interface that makes writing a multitude of different programs easy and allows a proliferation of third-party software on the Windows PC.

My experience with the Apple development environment, was that it is at least 5 years (or more) behind the Visual Studio IDE. If Apple wants to sell more Apple operating system computers, they need to generate more third party software. A poor development environment just isn't going to do it.

The other major stumbling block to Apple OS computers and Apple's software failure, is the lack of VPN software. I'd love to change over to a Mac of some sort, but it simply isn't possible when the best Developer IDE exists on Windows OS and there simply isn't a way to do my work on an Apple machine.

If they want to boost their sales, Apple would invite Cisco over to create VPN software that works on the Apple OS.

Politics of the Presidential Candidacy: Democrats

2007-06-12T10:59:00.000-04:00

I'll start this blog entry with a brief disclaimer. I am technically not a democrat; although when I first registered as a voter ages ago I may have put down democrat. Really, I have no idea how they think when you register to vote at age 18 that you have any idea if you are going to be a Republican or a Democrat. Even if you do have a good idea, how do you know that is what you'll be for the rest of your life?

I tend to vote democrat for only one good reason. The Republicans are closely bound to religion and the Democrats are not. This isn't to say that this years presidential candidate run hasn't been filled with Democrats blabbing about how god changed their lives, does their dishes or otherwise is a great guy. No, what it simply means is that I, as an atheist, my wife as an agnostic (she's an atheist, but I think she avoids the term for the derogatory associations people apply to it) and my children are to be raised at the very least with an open mind about the topic and certainly explicitly told of the horrible things that religion is capable of doing as well as the things that are immoral and presented as god's doing in the bible - are not directly threatened with illegality by the Democratic party.

Republican presidents are littered with comments that appeal to the religious majority and in reality are very threatening to those of us that are not 'godly' or 'religious' - whatever those terms really mean.

I'd wrap up the disclaimer that I think that there have been two evangelical presidents that have server the USA: President Carter and the current President Bush. Of the two, I don't remember President Carter as being the worst possible president that the USA has possibly earned. The other point is that stem cell research has a direct impact on the future of my self and my children. I want to live as long as possible in as healthy a state as possible, and I hope for the same for my children and any grandchildren or onward that I might actually survive to see or live beyond my life. It is pretty clear that it isn't just Bush that is against stem cell research. There are limits to the power one man has, and I'm pretty sure Bush, in his present state cannot do anything on his own.

So, finally, to the subject.

It appears based on recent articles that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are the front runners for the Democrats. If either of them win the candidacy I will vote for them. Why? After 200+ years aren't you tired of the actual and de facto racism that declares that only old, white, protestant, men are qualified to be president of the USA? We have one exception, where JFK was in fact moderately young and Catholic, but I have my doubts in the political atmosphere of the present that a Catholic could run and win at this point in time.

That is what the major problem is with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. In essence the American voters cannot be legislated to do what we do in the arena of regular employment - to be equal opportunity electors.

In the end, you might consider ideas that there should be as many congressmen in the house and senate to match or closely match the percentage of the black people in the US. I'm not talking about quotas, I'm just talking that if people vote with the color of their skin even part of the time, then there should be more black people involved in politics.

The same condition is true for women. Women, in general, instead of capitalizing on the capacity to vote, appear to faithfully vote the way their husbands vote. So, instead of a congress of a relatively healthy mix of males and females, we have a congress that is dominated by men. There are a few women, of course, but a few women isn't close to a healthy representation of women by percentage of population.

Barack Obama fields even more difficult problems. He is perceived as too 'white' for black people to want to vote for and the conservative members of our society would probably never vote for someone who is even a little black.

I think it is important, just as a general measure that finally, we catch up to those British folks that we like to look down our noses. Margaret Thatcher is now a part of their history and lead their country for many years. Meanwhile, we the 'better' people than them - are decades behind them. E-mails flutter across the web about how horrible Hillary Clinton is - and the sexism in them is either ignored by the people nodding their heads or just acknowledged.

There are many liberal minded people out there, that I suspect want to have a government of the people, by the people, but there are also many conservative elements in our population that are controlled by that same ideal - just not those people - black or female, by the people means to them - the same old WASPs that have been running the show for two centuries. The same ones that allowed slavery and condoned the idea that women were second class citizens.

I wouldn't vote for just any woman as there are certainly self-hating women out there that paradoxically pursue political office in order to ensure that women in general don't have power but women in specific (meaning themselves) do have power.

The 2008 election will be a defining moment for the US if either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama are on the democratic ticket.

Hell, maybe if they can get elected, an atheist might have hope of being elected as president.

Not likely, though. Not likely at all. I might have great hopes for my children, but if they grow up like me, their mother, their grandfather or grandmother on my side of the family (both agnostics at best - although oddly very conservative folks) - they won't be electable as president of the USA.

How the Nintendo Wii Will Win in the Long Term

2007-06-11T15:28:00.000-04:00

There have been a multitude of articles (such that I won't link them here) about how the Nintendo Wii will not win in the long run. That, it has yesterday's technology today and three years from now it won't be able to compete with "future-proofed" hardware such as the XBox 360 and Sony Playstation 3.

This kind of argument is ridiculous at best. It presents an idea - that Nintendo, having created the Wii, will do nothing with technology for the next three years (or whatever years on in to the future) and that Nintendo will cower asking for mercy from Sony and Microsoft.

Nintendo has already shown the possible path for the Wii in the way it has worked with the Nintendo DS (yet another system supposedly to be extinguished by a Sony product).

There was the original version which I didn't really take much notice of myself. Then there was the DS lite, which didn't really take my interest until I saw commercials for Big Brain Academy. Then, it completely had my interest.

So, I purchased one - the white one. I played the crap out of it. The New Super Mario Brothers - a game that I'd only seen other people play when I was a kid - I finally had for myself. Big Brain Academy - I beat the crap out of it. Eventually, we got one for my son and my wife and we have a bunch of games - the good, the bad and the ugly. Some, like EBA (Elite Beat Agents) were so surprisingly good that it was an incredible experience to play the game.

So, you find that the Nintendo DS, can play Nintendo Gameboy Advance games. Oohhh, look an upgrade path - that works (Sony could learn from this, apparently).

What is next for the Nintendo DS? Who knows? But I can say this, most likely it will have a touch screen, be compatible with all Nintendo DS games and be better (maybe larger screen) and faster than the current models. Maybe, it would be a Nintendo DS Advance model?

But you can see the progression, correct? You can see how, in a few months, perhaps there will be different colored Nintendo Wii's out there. It probably won't encourage any existing customers to buy a second one, but it would delivery some more sales to the system. Then, maybe two years from now as the system does genuinely age - you'll see Wii v2. It would be able to play all the games that the Nintendo Wii can play - and would have newer graphics and its own games. This would encourage new sales from existing customers as well as new sales from people who may not have purchased the original Nintendo Wii - perhaps they were saving for the XBox 360 or the PS3.

You can easily envision a portable Wii model, no? Take thw Wii, two years of computational increases and put it in an even smaller box with an integrated screen that you can carry with you. You could almost do it now with the current Nintendo Wii. Make it battery powerable and presto - people can take and play Wii games together with networked Wiis.

The very idea that Nintendo, as experienced as they are - will sit on the Wii as it is and leave it that way for 3 or 5 years is silly. They have a base system now, one that can be duplicated and emulated in future systems that will add more capabilities. I can foresee a time, two years from now or three years from now - where there is a Nintendo Wii that has similar graphical capabilities as the PS3 or XBox 360 - costs $250 and of course, has the Wii control architecture.

The biggest problem I see out there - is that Microsoft and Sony will wake up and get their own motion sensing architecture, be able to reverse engineer it in to their current architecture and come out with compelling games - for everyone, not just the gamer population.

Targeting Demographics in Comics and Games - Fruits Basket

2007-06-11T15:02:00.000-04:00

As indicated in this article some types of entertainment are now beginning to target women effectively as opposed to targeting hardcore gamers (mostly men or boys) or hardcore comic book readers (again mostly men or boys).

It is interesting that a society like Japan, where from articles about rapes, treatment of women and equality issues - you see the source of not one but two major pushes toward empowering women. Perhaps Japan isn't as bad as the press would have you believe, or Japan is getting better in this regard (one can only hope for all countries to get better in this regard) or Japan's businesses are getting over targeting the young male because frankly, they want to make more money.

Hey, I'm all for making more money if hand in hand comes the increasing of the equality and perception of peoples.

A good case in point is the anime and manga series Fruits Basket. Perhaps this isn't the normal kind of manga/anime that people concentrate on. There is little fighting that isn't verbal and no spouting necks with their dearly and recently departed heads.

No, it isn't one of those. It also isn't what I would call a traditional female oriented manga (a shojo manga). The reason I say this is because if you watch the events in the show and step back a bit and review it you can see that the show is about horror of a more classic kind. It isn't about the shock horror - 'boo' ah haha made you jump kind of horror. You watch the show and you see that Tohru Honda appears to be just any other girl, but her past is all about loss (and one might reflect that all our lives are about loss at least in part). She lost her father when she was very young. Her mother died fairly recently when she was in high school and other than her grandfather - there is no one for her to turn. In fact, even her grandfather, while a nice character has his limitations. He has other responsibilities with his other grandchildren.

In her, you find the main character - a person that could be devastated and find no real reason to live - and turns out to be a flowering source of strength for everyone around her. People who on the surface appear to be very strong end up exposing their weaknesses to her and it is shown that in turn - she is stronger than them and lends her strength to them to make them stronger.

This is no female formed character playing the role as a male hero with buff body and mostly male characteristics. While this does show a certain strength that it would be nice for women to take up, it appears to be devoid of female or feminine qualities. So, paradoxically, Tohru (which is typically a male name in Japan) contains many characteristics that are typical subservient female - she rises in strength (at least at the point in the manga that I'm reading) to where you can envision her standing up to the head of her friends family and saying that what is happening is wrong, but she likes doing dishes, cleaning and cooking.

I can't say I'm entirely happy with her character. I'd love if she was more outward in other ways - a leader in school, perhaps a promising career as well as being mentally strong. But I'll take pieces of what are really good - and the fact that it is written by a woman as good signs. I hope the writer - Natsuki Takaya enjoys a lot of success and continues to write many manga and that they get promoted to anime as well.

Perhaps, someday she'll write a very strong female character. One to make Tohru proud and yet still be feminine without being subservient.

One final word on Fruits Basket - our example of an industry appealing to the female instead of just the young males - it is with utter disappointment that the anime series ended so abruptly. There is a long road ahead for the series which has not even been completed in manga - that it would have been a joy to see translated in to the anime. Sadly, the way they ended the Fruits Basket anime, it is unlikely to ever become a reality.

My Experience at Charlotte-Douglas Airport

2007-06-07T14:08:00.000-04:00

My first impression of the airport (although I'm pretty sure this isn't the first time I've been there, it is the first time I remember well) is incredibly long lines. As I arrived from Newark I had to fight the lines for security in order to get to the car rental area.

On my return trip I had another impression. My return flight was at 10:00PM, so I didn't have to deal so much with long lines at security (fortunately). No, I had to deal with avoiding being hit by electric carts.

They seemed to be everywhere. Sure enough, there were people in various levels of distress riding on them. Mostly, they were rather large people. I'm technically obese, I think, at 192 pounds and 5' 9". The people riding the carts put me to shame. There were old people as well, probably more old people than obese people riding the carts.

The airport appears to be relatively updated, but there was no provision for the alrge number of electric carts (which are almost car sized) driving around all over the place.

There also seems to be no checklist for the functionality of the carts, as several of them lacked running lights or working beep signals that they were running. I was almost hit by one, partially my fault because I walk around with half of my head thinking about other things. After that, I paid more attention to the carts and my discover that they were everywhere.

After I finished eating my dinner, I found that there were a huge number of the carts parked or taking on passengers in the concourse. Really, I had to say there were probably about 9 of them in the area at one time.

Charlotte-Douglas airport needs a serious update. Either a floor above or below the regular walking area where the people who can't get around well on their own can get around the airport. I saw other people almost get hit by these crazed cab-driver-like cart drivers. There are no rules or lines for these carts to follow and for some reason, I don't know why, but there are more of them in use at Charlotte-Douglas airport than I've seen at any other airport.

The implications, as our US population increases and the number of disabled people through age or obesity increase on building structures for everyone should be immediately obvious. We need either separate access for the disabled or controlled access for everyone. The last thing I think anyone wants to see is someone become disabled because they were hit by a cart to move the disabled people to an airport gate.

A Teacher Railroaded in to Prison by Lack of Technical Knolwedge

2007-06-07T13:13:00.000-04:00

A recent article spoke about a teacher that was released from prison for exposing 7th graders to porn.

Apparently, the scenario was this:
Substitute Teacher is giving class with a computer.
Porn Shows up on the Screen.
Substitute teacher convicted with wrong evidence presented by prosecution to sever decades of prison time.

Now, the first point I want to address is basic law. Means, Opportunity and Motive. Did the teacher have the means to put porn on the computer to show the children, sure and so did just about anybody in the school. Did the teacher have the opportunity, sure and so did just about anybody in the school. Did the teacher have the motive to show porn to the 7th graders? Well, unless the prosecution proved that she was some sick in the head woman that intended to show porn to the children in some beginning overture to having sex with them, I find this pretty unlikely.

So, I find that whatever jury convicted the woman of these criminal actions, they must not have been told that all three factors needed to be proven, or glossed over it completely.

It seems that it would be unlikely that they should convict based on the information in the article.

Now, on to my second point. What exactly is so horrible about sex? What exactly makes it a "felony risk or injury to a minor"? Where these children endangered by the images? Is there some direct link to seeing a few images of porn and growing up to be criminal sexual deviants?

So, it is questionable if there was in fact a crime. If you are going to put someone in prison for "felony risk or injury to a minor" you have to prove that there was damage. Pornography, in and of itself does not pose a direct risk of anything to a minor. It certainly does not perform any damage.

The third and final point is that the courts, judges, lawyers seem to have little knowledge about computers of their own. They depended on an 'expert' to tell them that the woman had done it on purpose. Relying on one expert is a little problematic. But how is it, that no one as a person had not run in to something like this in a personal capacity? Had none of them ever had computers and used them and run in to problems with pop-ups, trojans or viruses?

So, the computer is examined after her conviction and discovered to be 1) Windows 98 and 2) had software on it that would have caused the pornagraphic images to be shown to the class.

#2, is in inference given the articles content and the contradiction of the state's witness saying that she had to have done it on purpose. The state's witness was a police officer with which we are given no information as to his training or how he made the determination that the woman showed the pornography to the children on purpose.

So, who is really guilty, if in fact damage was done to minors? Well, look, you can't be running windows 98 SE as your OS, here in 2007. The software is far out of date and as mentioned in the article, weak on security. Perhaps the IT person at the school should be charged with negligence? Or perhaps the people who pay the taxes for the school should be charged, for not paying enough taxes to buy computers on a regular schedule and protect them from things liket his? Or maybe the school board for not making the decision to have up-to-date and protected computers?

Or maybe they should attempt to find the person who wrote the malware affecting the computer and go after that person? Or perhaps they should go after the websites whose contents were shown?

Maybe they should go after the internet itself??? Who knows where it could stop?

So, they aren't going to re-try this woman for what happened - which was pretty clearly at this point an accident. What would have happened to this woman if the computer had been wiped or the hard drive in its aging case crashed since her conviction?

They were going to put her away for 40 years for this? This batch of stupidity and accident?

I think a few people need a reality check. The basic premise of the case needs to be re-assessed. Prove needs to be given that subjecting 7th graders to pornography once will damage them in some way for life.

The rise of Islam

2007-06-06T23:39:00.000-04:00

I don't typically go to Al-Jazeera's website. I don't speak or read Arabic, but they do produce English articles and some are good, like this one.

The heart of this article blames the decline of socialism and secular governments on their being defeated by Israel in a particularly humiliating manner - that manner was quick and assertive.

So, then apparently, men in these countries became disillusioned with socialism and turned to Islam to restore their honor.

Even the article notes with particular daring that after 40 years of turning to Islam, they are still getting their asses handed to them.

Clearly, the style of government or its religiosity has little to do with being a 'power' and showing military might.

More disturbing about this article is really three points. 1) They blame Israel for the rise of Islam and 2) They think as long as Israel holds lands it seized there will be no peace and 3) their ego is what is important, more important than peace.

There are certainly conflicting ideas in this article. It seems almost nostalgic for the socialist secular governments that are under attack by the religionists. Then it turns and goes after Israel for being what it is - a country. Those countries that attacked Israel, Jordan, Syria and Egypt, did they really attack (or defend) that land because of secular reasons - for the good of those countries as secular entities? No, of course not. They participated because with their three countries to Israel's one - they were going to make those Jews pay for taking land. Because, you know, land is more important than people.

What, did they have some logic that Israel was going to keep taking land until they conquered Egypt? Clearly, after getting their asses handed to them, if Israel really desired to take them over - they could have disabled those governments, so prevention of being ruled by religious people other than your own religion isn't the justification.

So, what, is Islam threatened by the Jews? Are they, with their 2% of the world's population (or less) going to kill or subjugate over 1 billion Islamic people? No. They just live in an area of holy land.

Going back to the article - it seemed that the context would mean - that all because they have bruised male egos - they needed to turn to Islam and try and kill people - and continue to do so because of this babyish idea that they need to save face. Screw it. The land, isn't so important. Children, family and the future are important. What land they live on - isn't particularly important.

Well, if god wants to protect his holy land, he better show his power and do it his damned self. Those people, the Palestinians - that were pushed off their lands - look, it sucks. It wasn't a really nice thing for the Israelis to do. Yes, perhaps a little reparations would be due. But for now, I think we can all believe one thing sincerely. Go find someplace else to live and thrive. Come back when you have made yourselves financially powerful enough to give monetary inducements to the Israeli government to give up its lands.

Just staying there to be subjugated is dumb. Just staying there to raise young children to become men and suicide bombers does nothing for your future, but end it. There is so much Earth and even with 6.5 billion people, there are still plenty of places to live.

To stay there in Israel or near Israel, to stay in the refugee camps in the neighboring countries has no future. You cannot get an education in these places. You cannot plan a future in these places. You cannot earn millions of dollars in business under the conditions your people are under at present.

The best thing to do, is to find a new home or homes. To raise new generations out of the shadow of war. To earn money and cherish life over land. Then, if those later generations think its all so important to go back to Israel and get back your native lands - you go for it. With cash in hand, peaceful plans on sharing the land and cooperation.

US as Police of the World

2007-05-30T14:35:00.000-04:00

Over time the USA has come to represent itself as the police of the world. We were there to police Vietnam and prevent the spread of communism in a domino effect to our doorstep. We have done many things including encourage dictators who torture and kill people just to keep allies in power.

In the end though, what do you expect of the police and when are you most disappointed in the police?

We expect the police to obey the law. We are most disappointed in the police when they break the law.

The USA cannot even have the appearance of breaking the law if it wants to be an effective fighter for justice. In this article it is discussed that a subdivision of a major company in the US is being brought up on charges for aiding in the transport of prisoners to places where there aren't any defenses to these prisoners rights.

I was a member of the US military for 10 years. I have to say that the idea of torturing military members for gain is not only unethical, but is illegal by treaties and laws which bind the US. The Geneva Convention covers military ethics and torture.

So, how is it that civilians are being kidnapped and whisked away to areas where who knows what is being done to them? Who knows? There is a significant problem with this setup in that it does not allow for oversight.

In the TV series 24 unethical actions are performed in cases of severe threat to a large population. Since it is a TV series, these things are well-defined. Nuclear weapon going off in the US territory and things like that.

But who determines what is a severe threat to a large population? What in fact consists of such a threat? Is there a commission that determines that the information x, y and z equals nuclear threat and unethical action should be taken to determine who is doing it, when it is going to happen and stop it from happening? Or is it some men in a closed room, talking to each other, afraid that another 9/11 might happen and going after everyone with the possibility of causing such an event?

Our society in the USA and our technological achievements are indicative of the openness of our society, not the decisions that are handled behind closed doors. McCarthyism is what happens when we enter closed sessions to discuss and jail people. It is the primary direction we are headed in at present.

But if we can't be a moral example to everyone - especially those groups that we go over to police, we simply don't have any authority or respect and no reason these people should follow us.

Public Official Sentenced to Death for Taking Bribes

2007-05-29T13:07:00.000-04:00

Barbaric as it may sound China is sentencing one of its political servants for taking bribes.

China has in the past executed high level officials for this kind of behavior in the year 2000. The whole story is in this article.

We can do a little thought experiment. An administrator at the highest level of a branch of government takes bribes. Due to his actions several people die. Is the administrator responsible for those deaths? Most probably. Should he be prosecuted? Yes. Should he get the death sentence? Maybe. It depends on the circumstances. I think that death - even manslaughter changes in character if it is in the commission of a crime. However, I think death might be reserved for violent activities that result in death.

The current case against this former administrator is less clear. So far, nothing he did directly attributed to the deaths in question (at least according to the article). It appears that he is being punished as an example.

Yet.... Here in the US bribery seems to be rampant. Large swaths of politicians were implicated in a recent misadventure. It would see that the threat of death would be handy to smack our politicians in line. Execute one for taking bribes that result in the death of a citizen they are supposed to be protecting and you might see a lot less of this kind of activity.

Imagine for a moment that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were brought under charges because they brought the US in to the war in Iraq under false information. It really doesn't matter if they believed the data or not. They are ultimately responsible for our being in a war in Iraq at this moment. Going to war should be like executing a criminal for crimes. You can't do it unless every t is crossed and every i is dotted and complete conviction of the problem is outlined.

Clearly, they did not do their due diligence before banging the war drums and taking us off to war. There are many others in our government guilty of this at the time of the start of the Iraq war.

If the threat and knowledge that if they screwed up they could be potentially be put to death by their own government existed in Bush and Cheney when they pushed us off to war - do you think they would have actively pushed so much for war?

I'm not in favor of capital punishment or war except in very specific circumstances; however, Bush and Cheney's responsibility for many deaths and hardships deserves this kind of scrutiny.

They won't get it as there isn't anything in US law indicating that this kind of behavior is even criminal. Still, it is a nice path for a alternate-history science fiction book.

PS3 Woes and Console Marketing

2007-05-29T12:45:00.000-04:00

A recent article discussed the problems with PS3 sales and the idea that a $100 price cut would do little to boost sales against the Nintendo Wii or even just sales in general.

This article indicated that a $50 price drop would be insignificant and that a $100 drop in price for the PS3 would have minimal impact. At the end of the article it is noted that a $200 priced drop could have a significant impact, but that such a drop in price is not expected.

There are concepts; however, that are not discussed in the article.

The model for sales of the Microsoft XBox 360 and the Sony Playstation 3 is to sell the consoles at a loss and then after x number of video game sales per unit they would be flush and after y number of games sold per unit they would make money.

Employing this kind of logic to its end you find that in reality the price of the console could effectively be zero *if* you had the purchaser open a contract that they had to buy a certain amount of games over a specified period of time.

People could take it on and not buy any games and pay a higher than current price (nonsensical).
People could pay the same price with a contract indicating they will by at least 4 games over the next year. This is what Sony and Microsoft hope for anyway, so if they encode it like that it isn't a big deal and the higher price for the base model becomes justifiable - instead of a price increase (which technically it isn't).

For every rung on the price ladder - let's say $100 in price reduction, you have a contract level indicating that the user will buy x number of games over the next 2 years. You could take this all the way down to a price level of $0 for the console and the person signs a contract that they will buy 15 or 20 games over the next 3 years or something.

Listen, the reason people buy these units is to play the games. They want to buy the games. If you make them pay a hefty price for the console, they don't have much money to buy games. Buying a console makes little sense if you don't buy at least 1 game at the time of purchase. You might swing a few people to buy the Sony Playstation 3 while Blu-Ray players are still horrendously expensive, but this is a short-term win that doesn't really appear to be working anyway. The Nintendo Wii comes with a game, but in turn this just makes it easier for Nintendo owners to buy a game when they get the console and have 2 games to play.

The manufacturers want people to buy the games. The people want to buy the games, the only real limitation is the price of the consoles.

So, end console pricing immediately (if you need that kind of help, Nintedo is pretty secure at the moment in regard to pricing their consoles). Contract people to buy games for the unit to a good point where console cost would be absorbed completely. Hell, start up your own Game Club like the Science Fiction Book Club that I love to buy books from, overcharge for shipping, and offer specials on things that don't sell well and don't count them towards people's contracts to own their system!

These guys need to be inventive if they expect to keep this portion of their businesses alive.

Nintendo Wii Stalking XBox 360

2007-05-29T12:18:00.000-04:00

From this article statistics showing sales of the Nintendo Wii (on Sale for approximately 6 months now) are creeping up to the total sales of the XBox 360 which has been on sale since November of 2005.

There have been - worldwide sales of the XBox 360 of 10.86 million units. At present reporting there have been 7.29 million Nintendo Wii units sold.

The fundamental problem lies at two points.

1) Price.
2) Interactivity.

At the low price, consumers can take the risk of the Nintendo Wii being a piece of crap (it isn't). Although the baseline XBox 360 is only $50 US more, it lacks something that the Nintendo does have - which is the perception that it is fun for everyone.

Facing the fact, though, I do have a certain lack of understanding. As a program developer myself I understand that it really wouldn't take much to design your own controls that utilize concepts like the Nintendo Wii's controls. The software would take little longer to develop, granted.

It has been 6 months now, and except for some lame controller by Sony, neither Sony nor Microsoft have announced their own motion controller based initiatives.

Clearly, Sony and Microsoft beat Nintendo in graphics. It is not as clear that this dominance amounts to sales in units. In fact, the opposite might be true all things being equal except for the price of these advanced graphics.

No, the difference is the motion capturing controllers. Another difference are the type of games offered by the machines. Nintendo is definitely geared for fun and while depth and graphics quality might suffer - it is clear that people love things that put a smile on their face.

The dedicated gamers - seem like they are going to work when they play their games and the demands they place on their systems...

Names and US Culture

2007-05-29T11:05:00.000-04:00

In my previous post I admit to discovering that I was spelling Du'a Aswad's name incorrectly, which is very disappointing because the events around her death are very poignant to me.

Then I decided to do a little research. I remember specifically looking her up before I started writing articles about her.

I think her name is Du'a Asswad (two s's), but it seems that people have been cleaning it up to Du'a Aswad. Asswad is a mildly mocking thing to call people, but not what I'd consider a horrible profanity.

So, it seems this mildly insulting term has collided with reality and - a nice clean society that doesn't say things like 'asswad' has conquered reality and probably history as well.

It doesn't matter to me, it is just that I felt a little odd to have spelled her name wrong. It is probably all a result of translations of her name which is most probably in Arabic to phonetics that sound like it in English.

The Honor Killing Will Be Televised!

2007-05-28T23:59:00.001-04:00

Often the conservative Christians of the United States of America go after the media as creating violence. They claim that violence on TV equates to violence in reality; therefore, violence should be eliminated or reduced on TV.

It is easy to explain that this is in fact fascism and attempting to dictate to others what is morally correct and does not have anything to do with violence in reality, the prevention of violence or the creation of a better, safer world.

The honor killing of Du'a Aswad has had a profound impact upon me. Unlike the magazine articles about India and people aborting female fetuses and running a huge gap in the ratio of males to females and similar activities in China - Du'a Aswad's death was visceral.

However, the culture she came from and the entire region despises western movies and television. The video games that people claim encourage violence would be rarely occurring in their society just as computers themselves would be more valued and in fact more expensive.

The question is simple. What is the source of violence in the death of Du'a Aswad? It is clearly not television or movies. The source of her honor killing is both cultural and religious. Cultural in that Arabic culture had this element far before the current religions in the region had reign. Religious in that the religion is now hardly discernible from the culture and that the religious leaders in the region have not in the past, do not in the present and most likely will not in the future stand with a united front and say 'Honor killings are wrong and should not be allowed.'

On the other side of the spectrum you have a country like Japan. Their television and movies can typically far surpass the levels of violence in television in the United States of America. Despite this, their culture has lower incidence of violence in a much more cramped area. The theory that violence on TV and movies causes violence in the real world is nonsensical at best.

The cause of violence might simply be the combination of two factors: 1) The hormones in humans drives them toward violence in the face of helpless circumstances and 2) the lack of people being taught self-control and to override for the betterment of humanity their emotional needs that seem to require violence.

Here is a link to the current wikipedia article on Du'a Aswad (and my discovery that I am apparently spelling her last name wrong).

The de facto win of Cheney's daughter

2007-05-25T13:43:00.000-04:00

I congratulate Vice President Cheney on the birth of a grandchild. It is something I only hope to live long enough to witness myself with my two sons or a third child if we actually choose to have a third child (we're thinking about it).

In this article, Cheney's daughter claims

"This is a baby. This is a blessing from God," she said. "It is not a political statement. It is not a prop to be used in a debate by people on either side of an issue. It is my child."

Ok, so she doesn't want this to be political. Unfortunately, for her, you can choose your friends but you can't choose your family. She is a lesbian. She and her partner now have a child. I mark these both as good things; however, they are events that have repercussions.

For example, perhaps her family and herself are rich enough that matters of health insurance don't have a major impact on her life. For most of us, and I would think most gay and lesbian couples, this does have a major impact.

Right from the beginning - at birth, one wonders what she was able to enter in for father. Was she able to put in her domestic partner or was that not permitted? This has an impact on a whole slew of family issues such as divorce, permission to take the kid out of school when they get sick, etc. I'm pretty sure in documentation she looks like a single mother. That means she (and only she) can perform activities of a parent.

She may be able to file a guardianship with her domestic partner, but I'm not sure how legal this is when there is a current parent in charge of the child's life. Leave it for a minimum that there would be costs associated with setting up such a guardianship so that if there is a call and the little one needs help in school - that she isn't the only person in the world that can pick up the child.

Health insurance, I mention earlier, is also an issue for many of us. Without her partner listed on the birth certificate as in some way a parent, health insurance for the child can only flow from Ms Cheney. But throughout life we all have variations in employment. Most of us run a risk of being negatively impacted through the by-products of unemployment, specifically that unemployment pays some bills, but never really offers enough to pay the bills and for health insurance.

So, in Ms Cheney's case, it would seem this would matter little.

These things need to be thought about. They need legality to be set in precedent. She had a child and I'm sure she views her partner as a parent. Legally, this is most probably not true. This has an impact on her life which is probably minimized by wealth. This isn't true for most of us.

She may claim that her child isn't politics, but it is. It represents a de facto win for the gay and lesbian couples out there in having the right to have children. It also represents children of the future who will need care, in the case of a parent (biological) dieing and who takes over custody? Well, in a regular marriage that is clear. In a domestic partnership which many gay and lesbian couples are forced in to, this is not clear. It is not clear who has the rights of parenthood (and responsibilities, of course).

It really isn't fair that a person should be able to take on the responsibilities of parenthood and be a de facto parent; however, not get any of the rights of a parent.

Proportionality and Honor Killing of Du'a Aswad

2007-05-25T12:31:00.000-04:00

In the USA we have some laws regarding the punishment of crimes. Specifically, cruel and unusual punishment is restricted. This laws have come in to conflict with certain death penalty cases in the US regarding lethal injection.

In the US and most countries we have laws that prescribe sentences for specific crimes. The duration of sentence is set to be proportional to the crime committed. Multiple crimes of the same nature are compounded with sentences often a few years each served sequentially.

This is not to say that there aren't problems with legal systems, punishment and rehabilitation of prisoners convicted of crimes. The system is flawed, but it is an honest attempt to be ethical when dealing with those who have been unethical or downright morally wrong.

So, perhaps a person gets 5 years penalty for stealing a car or life in prison without the possibility of parole if they kill a few people. Arguable, that these serve as punishments and will not likely play a role in the rehabilitation of these individuals.

What crime did Du'a Aswad commit? This is not totally clear as there was no trial of Du'a Aswad. Rumors that filtered to the media probably from her family indicated that she ran away from home to marry someone of a different religion. Later the news outlets recanted this statement. Apparently, she either just liked or was seen with a Muslim male.

So, we will make a couple of assumptions for a hypothetical case.
1) Marrying outside your faith is illegal.
2) As a female, being seen with a male of another religion is illegal.

In the court case, I think it is clear that Du'a would not be convicted of this crime. However, for the purposes of going through the case, even if she was guilty of the crime, what would be an appropriate punishment?

I think capture, annulment of the marriage and perhaps a house arrest plus some education on why this is wrong, perhaps visits from communal leaders saying that they are a small population and that if the women leave their society that their society may cease to exist.

I don't particularly agree with the logic of what would need to be taught, but that is what I would think of as proportional punishment for the crime (if it were an actual crime).

Please note that the punishment of killing Du'a or any other woman in a similar position will negatively impact the population of the small society just as much as if she had left that society. It really doesn't matter that she would be contributing to the numbers of Islamic people around these particular Kurds. They are already surrounded and outnumbered thousands to millions to 1.

Now, she wouldn't have been convicted of #1, but perhaps she could have been convicted of #2 - associating with a male of another religion.

Again, the proportional punishment, even if they went on a date - would be house arrest, education and some kind of probation. In reality, I don't see how such a law would be enforceable as women in a society will need to interact with males of other religions. The question would be what is allowed interaction and what isn't allowed.

By killing her as punishment, the actual perform an action that is against their own best needs.

It is ironic even, that in punishing her they do their own society damage on many levels.

It is odd, that the women of their society due the vast majority of the work and are what is required for their to be future generations of their society, and yet it is the women who live in the restrictive fear-based society. Wondering if any action they do might result in their deaths and afraid to associate with others because to associate with others is to court death.

In the end, the punishment leveled at Du'a is based on increasing the fear in all the women in their society that such actions to keep them in line. The problem with this is that it increases the dissatisfaction of women in their society. This in turn will eventually result in women defecting from that society through things like underground railroads and leaving to any society that might have the smallest trace of treating them better.

Guardians of Du'a Aswad

2007-05-24T13:01:00.000-04:00

What is it about Du'a Aswad's death and its circumstances that make it such a horrible thing for western people such as myself?

First let's look at a definition of a term:
Guardian:

1.	a person who guards, protects, or preserves.

2.	Law. a person who is entrusted by law with the care of the person or property, or both, of another, as a minor or someone legally incapable of managing his or her own affairs.

3.	the superior of a Franciscan convent.

The first two definitions are pertinent in the case of Du'a Aswad.

Often in the USA society, forms indicate parent or guardian when needing permission for minors or children to perform actions. Guardians are a subset of parents. The difference between parents and guardians is that parents are the actual father or mother of a child and guardians are protectors assigned by the government when parents are not available.

So Du'a Aswad's parents are her guardians - charged with the protection of their child. Protection of a child, in my definition, is encouraging that child to live and have a good future, hopefully a better future than your own (as a parent of guardian).

Ending the life of your charge or child is the exact opposite of protecting them as any parent or guardian is charged with doing.

Why would someone destroy their charge? Well, it is simple. They must have believed that it would serve a higher cause. In this case the higher cause was their honor - their access keys to getting to Heaven. In addition, they had a real-world concern that if she defected to Islam, she would have children which would then become the opponents of her birth-family.

Both of these reasons are based on selfishness and are actually lower on the scale than protecting your charge or child.

What good is heaven if your child dies horribly? What good is heaven or afterlife if those you love won't be there? Any parent should choose death for themselves if there is no other choice than death for their child. The child, inherently, has a higher chance of a longer future than the parent. The child, is the result of a marriage not the by-product of marriage. Long after my bones are dust I hope my children live on. I certainly don't care if I live eternity in Hell, as long as my children get a fair chance at a future.

So, in killing one's children or charges you have accomplished the opposite of your goal.

Then the secondary material-world reason for her death is that she would bear children that would eventually be the enemies of her birth-family.

This again, is just selfishness. If she has children and they don't happen to be the religion of her parents, does it matter? What matters is that humanity has a stable society and a stable future. Honor killing your daughter does nothing to advance stability of humanity. It only furthers small ambitions of being a stronger religion because you have more people on your side. Killing her is a way to prevent Islam from having more people on its side.

The survival of humanity depends on a great many things. Variety in the thoughts of humans that are not self-destructive in nature requires that there be different religions and people who do not believe in religions. A stable society depends on laws that are not oppressive to one group over another and that the members of that society obey those laws.

The premeditated killing of a woman in the town streets contributes to the destabilizing of humanity. The idea that justice and punishment is equally valid dished out by any citizen as it is from the government. If that were the case anything could be considered a crime, and anything could be summarily punished without due process at any time.

It seems that the 15 minutes of Du'a Aswad's posthumous fame are already over. CNN has moved on; however, hopefully this will be remembered and the point continued by others that such honor killings serve no-one except for the selfish needs of those performing those actions.

In the end, Du'a Aswad's family are now failures having failed to raise their daughter to maturity, but killing her mercilessly like some bug being tortured by a child.

Respect for Persons : Du'a Aswad

2007-05-24T10:44:00.000-04:00

A long time ago I took a course called "Contemporary Ethical Issues". This was a philosophy course, but it didn't have the dryness that I conceive of when I think about philosophy courses.

One of the ideas we covered years ago was "Respect for Persons". The central idea is "Do onto others as you would have them do to you."

How does this relate to Du'a Aswad and her being killed in an honor killing?

Well, in respect for persons it sets up moral values in terms that if you wouldn't want it done to you - you shouldn't do it to someone else. I don't think there is much question that all the men in the audience and the performance of her killing would not be comfortable with such a horrid death being performed against them. Indeed, it is unlikely these men believe such an act would ever be performed against them.

Respect for persons is only a partial philosophical answer as to why Du'a Aswad's death was immoral. After all people are so very different around the world. In India women have performed suttee, when the husbands die, ritualistically killing themselves in a burning mound. This practice has been abolished, but the question remains.

These women thought that it was perfectly ok for them (or others) to toss them in to a fire in the case of their husband dieing. It is clear; however, that the reciprocal is not true. If a wife dies, the husband does not sacrifice himself.

Clearly, if someone attempted to kill you or demanded that you kill yourself if your spouse dies, you would have a problem with it (unless you were temporarily suicidal at losing someone who had been close to you for a large part of your life).

Clearly, many people have different tolerances to what can be done to them. This results in a morality that would be so variable, so relativistic to be completely unclear as to the morality or immorality of any specific action.

So, all the people that I have read out there claiming that 'Do onto others as you would have them do to you' as being the greatest symbol of morality, you folks have problems. In order for this idea to work, everyone would need to have the same idea of what is acceptable or moral to be done to themselves and this is clearly not true.

A final NOTE: the very idea that Du'a Aswad's death was done to respect women is doublethink (as many middle eastern traditions involving women are doublethink). It is the exact opposite of what actually happened. Claims that middle eastern customs protect and respect the women all pretty much end and are exposed for the control factors they are when public distribution of knowledge that honor killings occur, and that honor killings are not uncommon.

One can only imagine the fear that women in the middle east live with every day that something they might do might accidentally result in their death.

Anime

2007-05-21T20:04:00.000-04:00

Anime has struck a significant chord with me. It started recently with Fullmetal Alchemist. While I had always watched a bit of anime, it wasn't with the avid behavior that I watch it now.

***please note most of the anime I watch is not for children. Some of it is, but this is a general anime entry on the things I like.

I related so closely with the character Alfonse Elric in the show that it was with great horror that I watch as his friend was killed inside his hollow shell. I liked the idea (which may not be true) that the writers were honoring Michael Moorcock by naming the boys last name Elric, which reminds me of Elric of Melniboné from his eternal champion series.

Years ago I saw the movie Ghost in the Shell. It was very impressive, but somehow, I was never the guy to find the specialized shop with the tapes(!) of things most people didn't see here often.

Eureka, I found to be such a great romance story (as well as a great many other things, including some horror elements) and on the whole a message of tolerance an unity between seemingly different beings.

Netflix has been the key to me getting in to anime on a whole new level. Inside Netflix I have explored many series, some good, some bad and many excellent. Some series like Gantz, show exactly what is acceptable in Japanese culture and what isn't in the USA. Gantz is very atheist/agnostic oriented in particular these ideas come out in the second series.

I wouldn't recommend Gantz for anyone under the age of 16. Most people would say older, but I understand and remember where I was mentally at age 16 and that the sex, religion, violence presented in Gantz is something that any 16 year old that hasn't been completely sheltered should be able to watch and ask questions about. Gantz is especially poignant with the trial and prosecution of a 10 year old in the USA along with another child in the beating death of a vagrant (figures in throughout the series).

Too bad, the TV series for Gantz seems to fall far short of the Manga. I have gotten in to reading the Manga for some series and find that the differences are compelling. Just like with books translated to movies there are elements that I wish the Anime appropriately addressed in the Manga. Unfortunately, Gantz is not available in English and the best key to understanding the series is a lengthy Wikipedia entry on the series.

Anyway, this has been a rather generalized view of what I would call my love for both Anime and Manga. It has inspired in me a desire to learn Japanese and about Japanese culture. Hopefully, I'll be able to work on that sometimes. A lot of the time, even though the Japanese pick on the US, I think that the ultimate partnership would be the Japanese and the US. Sometimes, I feel that I would get along better living in Japan, but I understand that just as I don't seem to fit here in the US, I probably wouldn't fit in Japan either, just for different reasons.

I'll write more and more in depth about Anime and Manga on this blog. They are subjects that I would love to share with a great many people, and in writing about the ideas and my own thoughts about these series, perhaps if my sons ever get the chance to read these entries they will understand what I get from these series.

Errors in jounralism - spelling 101

2007-05-21T19:39:00.000-04:00

Recently there have been calls for MySpace to reveal what it knows about child offenders that have been using their site. MySpace refused, indicating that they were prohibited by law to do that. MySpace did take down the suspected child offenders profiles.

Then there was a cry that MySpace is protecting pedophiles and blah blah blah... So, the attorney generals got their act together provided MySpace with the appropriate documentation and MySpace is to release the information to the authorities. This is not MySpace backing down as had been described in some articles.

This is a blog. I make mistakes. I make spelling mistakes, and I make mistakes where the statement sometimes written means exactly the opposite of what I was trying to say. It isn't a big deal, I'm no professional.

However, in this article, which was reasonably well written drops the ball at the end.

"Also an issue is the growing prevalence of spam in MySpace Groups, much of which redirects users to scatological porn sites so shocking and vial they aren't fit for adult viewing let alone viewing by children."

Vial? Did this article actually get vetted by an editor? This might pass a spell checked, but did the writer re-read the article before posting it? The word that is supposed to be there, you guessed it - was vile.

It seems that around the point of the spelling error in the article, the author began writing about morality and what people think is right instead of the facts in the case.

Yes, scatology is disgusting. Not fit for adult viewing? Well, there is certainly a portion of the population that does watch it, so clearly that is a value statement and a false one at that.

I'm not in to scatology or scheisse video (I know the word only because it was mentioned in a South Park episode and I had to look it up). But if someone else wants to have sex with feces all around them - they can go for it.

The Register normally puts out pretty good articles if I recall correctly, so maybe this one fell through the cracks.

Humor - Metallica and The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy

2007-05-21T01:05:00.000-04:00

After that last blog entry I needed to do something humorous - or at least I think it would be humorous.

Do you watch the TV show on Cartoon Network - The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy?

Have you listened to music by Metallica, specifically "Stone Cold Crazy".*

Well, if you fit that - I want you to picture something.

Irwin, from The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, singing "Stone Cold Crazy" By Metallica.

*OK, so you don't know the show, don't know Metallica or don't know that specific song. Here is what/why it would be funny. Irwin, tries to be hip on the TV show and says Yo after a lot of his sentences. Except, instead of being cool, it almost always sounds like he's saying Yo like it is a question. The song "Stone Cold Crazy" has a line in the chorus which goes "Stone Cold Crazy Yo" - and I can just picture Irwin singing this song.... Such a hard core song with such a contrast of singer...Would be hilarious... It would need to go with a video of it as well, though to really be dyno-mite!

Ahh if only I had an ounce of talent to pull this off myself, I would!

An odd Juxtaposition

2007-05-20T02:20:00.000-04:00

On CNN there is an article in the Tech section: Camera phone evolution has only just begun.

CNN typically doesn't change the science and technology articles over the weekend, so it has been there since at least Friday.

In this time the camera phone recording of the death of Du’a Khalil Aswad was released to the public.

The death of this young woman has been entered in to the public domain with many confusing pieces of information. At present it appears she was killed for being a 17 year old girl who liked a male who was not a member of her religious sect.

I am linking to the video here. Please do not watch it unless you have a very strong stomach. I will record in writing the contents of the video for those who cannot stomach watching. Even the written account may be hard to stomach.

Please note that it is a poor day to be a human to understand that this kind of behavior still happens.

Video at this link . Please note that this site has nudity but is one of the few places that had high quality footage of the events that are so disturbing.

It should be noted that this does not appear to be the entire video. I'm not even sure about the web site that is hosting it. There are a few camera phones on the scene (as shown on the camera phone itself) recording the process.

The video starts out with fast movement (and low quality) in a crowd that could be anywhere. You can hear some men talking loudly in a foreign language. You can hear a woman screaming something. There is some tugging in the crowd. The attack (and other videos confirm this) has already been in progress for some time.

You can see another person with a camera phone holding it up high and moving people out of the way to try and get a picture or video of what is going on.

You can see a person in a black shirt move quickly downward with their elbow in what looks like a wrestling move to hit an opponent. Then you see the girl on the ground in her underwear on her lower body, curled up in a fetal-like position.

She is moving, as the movements of a person deep in show, he hand touching her face. The face is not recognizable, but you can tell there is blood on it.

You can see the man in the black shirt again (or another person in a black shirt, kicking her and bracing himself against another person in the crowd.

There is a lot of movement and you lose sight of the woman.

A man walks by her and casually kicks her in the back of the head. You cannot see anything of the man's face, only his lower body.

You can see another camera phone capturing the incident. She isn't moving now, but she is in fetal position. I believe she is still alive at this moment. A man in tan either steps on her or kicks her and then picks her up partially by her red outer garment. She is moving to try and protect herself slightly to no effect. A number of people appear to kick her at this time. The movement may not have been conscious, she doesn't appear to be moving or defending herself anymore.

A man covers her lower body with a jacket. At the same time someone picks up her head and slams her head down on a large rock (approximately 1 ft across) on the ground. She doesn't react and immediately afterward follows a flurry of kicks from various men.

Several heel kicks are administered to her by a male in a black sweat suit with two white stripes running down its side vertically.

It sounds like a sports event. There is a 'ehhhh' by the crowd and an oh. But you cannot see past the person in front of the camera phone holder to understand what was done to the girl at this time.

She might be dead, but evidence from later in the video indicates that at this point in time she is not dead, thankfully, she appears to be unconscious.

When she comes back in to view you see a large cement block leaning on her head. There is no blood around her head on the ground at this point. Again, the individual with the sweat suit and the white stripes picks up the cement block and delivers what I believe to be the killing blow, directly to her head.

It is at this point that you can see the trail of blood leading from her head under her body emerge from under her body on the ground below her.

The individual with the black sweat pants appears to be hopping around and is wearing a red shirt. The trail of blood leading from her body continues to grow. She may not be completely dead and the body, the heart is still pumping and extending the size of the blood staining the road. The blood trail from her head extends in three trails, some which appear to be at least 3 or 4 feet long. This is life leaking away from the body.

There is yelling and what sounds like cheering at a sporting even throughout the sequence.

Concerned for decency, an individual adjusts the jacket that now covers her behind and partially her legs.

There is a lot of commotion, men carefully avoiding her blood trails as the leap around the scene. People taking pictures with their camera phones. One of the picture takes puts the camera within two feet of her head and clicks off a picture.

Someone picks up the block and throws it back down on to her - on the back this time instead of the head. The tell-tale ya yayayyayaayayayoi sound that middle eastern people make often when in celebration is made by one person and then taken up by many. The jacket is once again adjusted to cover her almost nudity.

A casual kick hits her in the back as an irregularly shaped stone (large) is thrown at her. The large cement block is once again thrown on to her dead back.

People are whisling (like at a baseball game) and even yayyyying like a person has thrown a strikeout ending the game in victory.

I am glad that I cannot understand the words coming from the voices recorded on the video.

A person in denim jeans casually walks by, avoiding the blood staining the ground and turns around opposite of the camera phone wielding person.

Being careful not to get blood on his shoes, one individual is standing on top of the irregularly shaped stone - balancing slightly most probably looking down at the dead girl. This person, I think gets down.

Another individual climbs up on one of the cement blocks and uses that same irregularly shaped stone to balance and kicks the dead girl twice, mostly with the heel.

He stumbles a bit and probably gets some blood on his sneakers. Someone knocks one of the cement blocks off her body.

After a lot of talking - a brief shot of the faces (not clear) of the people on the other side of the circle of men surrounding the dead girl.

There is a lot of jostling movement, in which it is hard to determine what is happening.

There is someone speaking loudly, with a beige shirt on , and pointing at the dead girl's body with the fingers of his hand. It appears that he has a teenage boy in the clasp of his hand and he forces the boys head in to camera view and back again. As if to say "See , this is what we do."

I'm not sure what this individual is doing, he appears to be attempting to pick her up or re-arrange her body. Blood drips from the side of her head that was on the road.

After some time passes , a man in a orange/red shirt crosses over her body, possibly kicking her in the process, he face is clearly visible (and why we cannot see exactly what his feet are doing).

A shot of many faces watching in close quarters. An enormous crows is revealed as the camera is raised to show everyone is there. It is not clear that all the people are there for this girls killing, but later on it will be apparent that they are.

There is a lot of confusion, people standing and talking. A man straddles the head of her body standing, apparently needing a better position to talk.

He and a few others begin moving the body. One man adjusts the jacket covering her underwear covered behind. Mustn't see the females uncovered behind. No, just kill her brutally. That's much better.

There is a lot of confusion and talking for some time. A man in a black jacket grabs her dead arms to pick her up.

Other men are helping him pick her up and they carry her almost like a dear on a post being carried between hunters.

Her body is being partially dragged and the jacket almost comes off her lower body. The men stop and adjust the jacket.

They begin to carry her again and pass a pile of large cement blocks like the two or three that were used on their victim.

The camera angle moves upward and the visibility of her body goes away. Now you see that along with the three or four people carrying her unceremoniously, that there are a number of men walking along as her body is being moved.

The camera angle changes again - to an overview of the crowd. The entire crowd moving in the same direction (with) the movement of her body.

That is the end of the video. We cannot tell exactly where the large group are taking her body.

There are a number of comments that I would make on this video and the culture behind it. It is clear that the primary participants in this film were her family and not Muslims.

However, the honor killing of this young girl is a cultural - pre-Islam Arab practice, which is indeed practiced by many Muslims in the region. Of course all Kurds, and all Muslims are not the kind of people who can do this.

My family knows Muslims who live in Trinidad and they are nothing like this.

It is, however, the enabling male-oriented religions that allow and endorse this kind of behavior. But it has taken me some time over the period of two days to even compile this description of the activity on the video. Tomorrow, it will be time to write about not only how wrong this is, but why it is wrong.

I'd offer my condolences to the family, but it appears that they are the cause of the death and deserve only condemnation.

Stem Cell Research

2007-05-17T16:42:00.000-04:00

This article describes a break-through in stem cell research. It isn't the life-saving kind of break-through; however, it is a break-through in making sure men can have their hair when they get older.

I'm not totally against this kind of research. I believe stem cell research is important. What I don't believe is the order of precedence that we are engaging in with the research. Curing illnesses that threaten lives is far more important to pursue than curing baldness.

Scientists should find that it is ethically more important to cure diseases that are real ailments rather than a minor progression hair degeneration that occurs in many men and some women.

Then again, at age 35, with long, full white hair - I don't have anything to complain about.

My only hope is that some of the funds gained in curing baldness will trickle to important discoveries with stem cell research like stopping the degeneration of the brain under the balding head while we get older. There will come a time when I don't care about what my hair looks like, but surely there won't be a time when I don't care that I'm losing my mind.

Sony PS3 sales vs Wii

2007-05-16T16:42:00.000-04:00

Sony has pitched a claim that their sales are brisk and that it is hard for them to keep PS3's on the shelves.

But this is totally untrue. Many people have been writing comments on articles indicating that the PS3 is easy to find in stores where people have difficulty still in finding the Nintendo Wii.

Sony released information today that came out in articles like this one - which indicates that they have overproduced Sony PS3s compared to what has actually sold.

The article states pretty clearly that Sony has produced 5.5 million Playstation 3s and sold 3.6 million. So, nearly 1.9 million Sony PS3s sit on shelves or worse, distribution centers that have not sold.

They have indicated already that they don't make money on selling the console so the money invested by Sony in these devices is more than the $600 price tag. So, at a minimum Sony has $1,140,000,000 in PS3s that have not sold. Check that folks, 1 billion 140 million dollars with of PS3 gathering dust in warehouses and store shelves somewhere.

This isn't the kind of thing you hear from Nintendo, who apparently missed their mark for sales because they couldn't produce enough of their game console. This is bad too, but not like Sony.

A lot of the articles out there say this was a bad year for Sony, but that things are looking up. We'll see. One of the main problems with manufacturing is cost of storage if you produce too much when demand is down. Currently, I'm sure Sony is being optimistic and continuing to produce more PS3s. But they are already 1.9 million units in the hole, and the number of units on hand will only increase unless sales really goes up.

The problem with supply and demand in this case is that Sony's supply is really high, but demand doesn't really appear strong. Typically this would mean that Sony's prices would have to come down (significantly) to encourage sales; however, since they already don't make money on the consoles, they really can't lower the price any more without cutting significantly in to features or digging a deeper hole for each console sold.

H1B Visa - my experience

2007-05-15T13:17:00.000-04:00

This blog entry was inspired by reading this current article on CNN.

There are many anecdotal stories about how someone they know lost work, compensation or benefits due to H-1B Visas.

I have my own story - and this story didn't happen to someone else - it happened to me. This is a first person account. I will leave the names of the company out of it. Although the diligent reader can scour my blog for my name, my name is so common that I could be anyone throughout the country.

There is a company that I have done work for as a consultant in the SAP scope. It is a large company of about 12000 people. I wrote a specialized system in .NET to handle their warehousing needs. They have two primary facilities and one central warehouse. The goods need to get to the primary facilities, regardless of if SAP is up or down. The programs need to run on small form factor devices such as Microsoft Windows Mobile devices.

So, my system, connects and posts data to SAP, connects and retrieves master data from SAP, contains its own custom database and a series of services that run periodically to get the data and perform postings when SAP is down. It is a fairly complex system written in .NET, where I also wrote the custom function modules in SAP to perform postings and there is custom data inside of SAP including custom tables to record errors and transactional data. There are other subsystems for specific activities such as inventory counts to overcome some of the problems inherent in the SAP system. (Inventory Counts in IM can only have up to 300 items and the client has thousands of items in each storage location)

The client is composed of two major segments. There is the primary company and there is an external entity which controls all the IT aspects. I interact a lot with both segments. Some time ago I was offered a job by the IT segment.

This seemed like a really good thing. I would be able to get really in to the system and do things that people can do in the long-term instead of just short 2-month contracts.

A few months later I find that the IT company has hired an H-1B Visa person on, and the opening for me was mysteriously consumed by "We have some internal problems with budgeting." So, I was pot luck out of a job, no big deal at this point.

Then, on my last contract with the client, guess who I had to train? The H-1B Visa employee they just hired. I spent a considerable amount of my last contract training him, because it appears that they hired him - he had the wrong skill set. He had no experience with .NET and he had no experience with SQL Server and he had no experience with SQL Server Agent jobs (the facility I use for writing services) and I had to teach him, not only the business end of the transactions, not only the infrastructure of the system, but I had to teach him the basics of .NET programming, SQL Server architecture, SQL Server interaction with .NET programming (how to interact with the database, call stored procedures, parameterized queries, regular queries), the SAP .NET Connector, how it works, basic database funcitonality, SQL Agent operation, the use of the classes I used for file transfer protocol, and how the web pages look and work on the handheld devices, everything I knew about how the handheld devices operated, etc...

And there is a lot of etc, and there is a lot of me having to go over things multiple times and there is a lot of explaining basic architecture over and over again before we even get to explaining the business side of the transactions.

He took very few notes. Since then, I haven't had any more contracts with the client. It is possible that the primary client may hire me, but may also be prevented from doing so because of non-solicitation and non-compete clauses.

So, now I don't have that opportunity for work, the possibility of me getting a job to support my family vanished (and this need is greater now since with two young children I want to work for an employer instead of with an consulting company). There are actually lots of reasons why I'd like to work for an actual employer.

But, this is how H-1B Visas affect people in the real world. The H1-B visa holder is young, single, not from this country, doesn't own a house, and has relatively low expenses and relatively low experience.

The point of the H1-B visa is that companies, when they cannot find people with the knowledge they need in the US, go to H1-B visa to get people from other countries that do have that knowledge.

Clearly, the intent of the program was completely violated. I am the ideal candidate for their job as the person that wrote the system, but still they went with a H-1B Visa holder and transferred it over - and they are probably paying him tens of thousands of dollars less than I would demand. I'd probably demand 120K. They are probably paying him 80K.

Something wrong with 'Mom saves Daugter' video on CNN

2007-05-14T16:12:00.000-04:00

I watch the news videos on CNN, some are very good and it beats watching TV and commercials.

So, naturally as a parent I am attracted to a story about a Mom saving her daughter - who is 4 years old just as my son is 4 years old.

The story is here . Apparently, a mother loads her little girl in to her minivan and forgot something in the house. She goes in to the house to get it leaving her little girl in the car with the engine running.

The little girl went to change something on the CD player and put the car in gear and launched the vehicle in to reverse where it landed in a lake. The car sunk quickly, but the mother actually saw the car sinking and rescued her daughter.

I am very happy for her and her daughter for surviving.

So, you say, what is wrong with this story?

I'll tell you my surprise to see the make and model of the van that the story is attached to, a Honda Odyssey, and it appears to be the same year as my Honda Odyssey - 2007.

Now, Honda, for more than a decade, locks out the gear selector when the car is in park - unless - you depress the brake. This is not a Chrysler, who claims to be very family oriented, but still doesn't do this on my wife's grandmother's new Chrysler 300.

So, I did a test, I walked out to my car and I turned it on, and without depressing the brake, I attempted to move the gear selector. With all my strength (5' 9", 195 pounds, male, moderate strength) I could not move the selector. I'm pressing the button down and everything. The only way to move it would be to break it, and I'm not sure even I have the strength to do that.

So, someone is lying. Either a) the mother left the car in reverse when she went to get the stuff or b) the little girl pressed the brake when she moved the girl selector or finally the locking mechanism for the gear shifter didn't work (very unlikely).

All I have to say is these people better not besmirch Honda or attempt to sue Honda on this, unless they can prove their claims that the gear shifter locking mechanism didn't work.

Information Insecurity

2007-05-10T00:05:00.000-04:00

100,000 people had their security breached because an institution did not practice adequate security. This kind of breach is terrible even if it doesn't lead to actual issues with the individuals whose information has been compromised.

The risk, of something happening to any individual security office has gone up. How many of them would need to be compromised for there to be a serious security breach?

Not to mention that the TSA officers that have weapons information were listed on the hard drive as well. It really isn't that hard to find employee types and determine which ones could be holding guns, despite some articles stating that the TSA indicates it would be difficult to determine.

It doesn't matter how difficult to determine it is, whoever has the drive has it indefinitely.

Basic questions the TSA has been asked about this drive that they don't know. They don't know if it was encrypted. How can they not have anyone who knows if that drive was encrypted or not?

It isn't like only a few people have been affected by security breaches. I am a veteran and was notified during the last major breach that my information was lost. Fortunately, it was recovered by luck.

But where is the liability on the part of these institutions? Unencrypted personal data. Unsecured laptops outside of secure facilities. Portable hard drives with 100,000 records of private information?

The government needs to make new rules in regard to information security. It won't be the grunt terrorist that gets us in the future, it'll be an information leak that affects thousands of people and then they all go to capitol hill to complain.

Reference Article: Air Marshall info among 100,000 records lost on TSA Hard Drive

IE 7 - slow to open up tabs, slow to start

2007-05-09T09:54:00.000-04:00

I do have an appreciation for IE 7. It is a nice web browser. However; sometimes it really makes me wonder.

When I start up IE 7, it is almost always slower to get its UI up on the screen. Then it ponders for a minute to open up the initial web page. This got so annoying to me that I set my home page to blank.

Then, when you open up tabs it has an annoying habit of telling me how great tabbed browsing is and that I just opened a new tab. How wonderful - for a complete novice. And did you notice? It took a long time for IE 7 to connect to the text file on your own PC to bring up this little informative note on tabbed browsing.

So, I quickly set that to blank as well. Oddly enough, my machines are not slouches and it still takes a bit of time to get the blank page up with IE 7. Once you get going everything seems to run smoothly. The browser seems to work well in most cases.

Firefox in task manager takes up 21,068 k of memory, opened to a blank page in a single tab.
IE 7 takes up 37,588K opened up and with a single blank page on a single tab.

And this is part of the major difference between the browsers. If it takes up less memory during operation then it takes less time to load that application in to memory. Microsoft has a horde of programmers and most of them are very good. They need to apply themselves to various issues inside of Internet Explorer. Reducing the memory footprint of the application, increasing start-up speed, increasing new tab creation speed.

All these things add up to a browser that is good, without being great. That is disappointing given Microsoft's advantage in size and availability of manpower. Honestly, they should be able to squash Firefox into nonexistence by releasing a better performing, more capable browser.

It is nice that they compete with so many software providers on so many fronts; however, the bast majority of people who purchase new PCs will be sitting there going on the web and using their web browser. To get name brand recognition and be out in front of people with a good face all the time, IE 7 needs to not only be better than Firefox, it needs to triumph over Firefox.

This is the same position many domestic auto manufacturers find themselves. After years of mediocre performance - they need to produce cars that are far in excess of the Japanese high sellers to gain market reputation that leads to them triumphing over the Japanese and not just a competitor.

Firefox Handly Feature - Web Page Search

2007-05-09T09:43:00.000-04:00

Recently I wrote an blog entry on Firefox, and a commenter indicated that Firefox was an incredible tool in which Microsoft's IE 7 was a tool that made things harder to do.

Well, here is a concrete example of the difference between IE 7 and FireFox.

When you are on a web page and hit control-F to find text on that page what happens?

In IE 7 (and previous versions, this functionality appears to have avoided update) a small dialog window pops up over your page covering some of the text you are going to search. You type in what you want to search for and the page scrolls to the text and moves your search window down. It highlights the text, but it isn't entirely what I want in a search tool. You can close the search tool as necessary to stop it from blocking the text, but to start up the search again you have to control-F to bring it back up.

Firefox will perform actions that at first you might think are similar to the IE 7 way of handling searches.

Firefox will open an extended status bar, with an entry box for your search text. You type in to it what you are looking for and hit next. It scrolls the web page as necessary and highlights the text. You can hit the next or previous button as necessary to continue your search of go back to a previous search hit. The search bar on the browser does not block any text. It stays at the bottom of the screen waiting if you need it again - it need not go away for you to read a paragraph of text.

It is a vital difference (to me) in blocking or not blocking text when I'm performing a search on a web page. Why? Because I fully expect to read the paragraph where the hit happened to determine if what was found is what I need or if I have to search again. On the IE 7 model (or just IE for the past 10 years...) this involves more actions on my part to clear up the text to read what I'm looking for - either moving the dialog window or closing it completely. This works out to be a huge annoyance when what I was reading turns out to not be what I'm looking for and I have to re-open the search dialog.

So, definitely, score 5 points to Firefox for the previously mentioned session recovery capability. Score another 2 points to Firefox for making text searches of web pages easier.

Score: Firefox 2 - 7 , IE 7 - 0 .

Wii Scary

2007-05-09T00:29:00.000-04:00

I own a Nintendo Wii. Unlike many people, I didn't spend hours in line waiting for it. I was lucky. I went to the local target that I knew was going to get 70 Wii machines and waited an hour before opening to ensure that I got my machine.

There is little doubt that Nintendo is making money on the console itself, unlike Microsoft and Sony. Even if Nintendo was not making money on the console itself, they would have made money on the number of games alone that I have purchased for the device.

1) Wii Play
2) Rayman's Raving Rabbids
3) Zelda
4) Sonic and the Secret of the Rings
5) Excite Truck (which I use as an MP3 player sometimes)

Virtual Console Games
1) Mario 64
2) Sonic the Hedgehog

Accessories:
1) Nunchuck Controller
2) 1GB SD card (not nintendo)

Perhaps that isn't enough, but a number of titles upcoming and out already are on my list of games I want to get. There is a FPS (First Person Shooter) that comes in Rayman's Raving Rabbids that has totally turned me on to the idea of a FPS for the Wii - a full one. Rayman's only let's you control where you fire like some arcade shooters, where I am from the Castle Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Doom 2 generation - and yearn for full control of motion.

Soon, I'll have my choice of an Alien Syndrome FPS and Metroid Prime Hunters for Wii will be coming out soon.

Not to mention that I've gone totally Japanese and own three Nintendo DS devices - one for me, my wife and my 4 year-old son. My favorite game has to be Big Brain Acadamy. It is hard though, to neglect Elite Beat Agents and New Super Mario Brothers.

So, for the Wii, I can't wait for Big Brain Acadamy. I'm even thinking of getting a Pokemon game or two - as long as there is a way to inter-operate between the Wii and the DS. I think, with a little work, a motion sensor and WiFi connection, the Nintendo DS could even be used as a controller for the Wii.

This would be a combination of two great worlds. Motion sensing controlling and touch sensing. I could imagine a game where you are playing by waving your DS around (hopefully with a strap of some sort) and then quickly struggling to scribble on its screen or do something on the DS screen.

Anyway, my thoughts for the moment on the Nintendo. I think they will do well against their competitors.

Illigal Immigrants and Terrorism

2007-05-08T23:53:00.000-04:00

Fully 1/2 of the alleged attackers planning to attack Fort Dix were illegal immigrants to the US.

Illegal immigration is a very complex topic; however, it should be noted that while these guys were in the country, they were illegal (inherently breaking the law), they drove cars with no license, drove cars with no registration, car insurance or even a basic training course.

Of course, in New Jersey where property tax is a hot topic - all three illegals went to high school here and cost their neighbors money for their free ride in school.

And what do they do with their free ride through school? They try to kill us...

So, a definite connection is made now between illegal immigrants and terrorism. I don't want it to be impossible for people who want to be here to come here. But our system right now doesn't do anything on a local level to enforce immigration laws. That's a problem.

Fort Dix Terror Plot

2007-05-08T23:32:00.001-04:00

I live here in New Jersey. Currently I live close enough to the World Trade Centers to see the smoke in the aftermath.

But most of my life I lived in Howell, New Jersey and for a number of years I was a member of the New Jersey Air National Guard ad McGuire AFB.

I knew Big Blue when it was Big Blue and not what it is today, Big Beige. I was around to know the guys and talk to them about a certain club on base that used to be a stripper club.

So, headlines about a proposed attack on Fort Dix which shares boundaries with McGuire AFB certainly brings in my attention.

I've seen some pictures lately of the base in a lot of the articles and I'm happy to note that Fort Dix is now a closed base. When I was over there the Air Force Base was a closed base (meaning it had guarded gates) and Fort Dix was wide open. I even remember getting kind of lost leaving from a drill weekend and wandering around in Fort Dix.

Perhaps it is a result of 9/11 that the army bases are closed bases now, but it is a good thing in general for security. In a world with so many people in it, and a country like the USA with a large population as well, it would be difficult to imagine that there aren't people who don't wish us all well.

How we react to that fact will determine what kind of people we are.

Even with the newer gates on Fort Dix, I find that the gates themselves are targets. People commute in to the bases on daily basis. The gates themselves in these circumstances have a lot of people at them (in cars waiting to get in plus the soldiers running the gate).

It would be foolish to think that the gate itself wouldn't be a target. Our roads in the US are designed to be long and straight where a suicide bomber in a large truck could build up momentum. So, I think that a general (not a frantic and scared) review of the entrances of the military bases and their defensibility from suicide attacks should be in order.

Some recommendations would be:
1) More gates or gates that allow more cars to pass through at a time (meaning we'd have to have more people to man the gates to certify vehicles as they go through the gates as well).
2) No straight roads moving in to the bases.
3) Speed bumps of significant size to impede high speed vehicles.
4) Watch towers manned or unmanned and remotely controlled with weaponry.

There was a base in Germany that I heard about (a US base) in which the gate was armed with a system that would push the cement (and the car on it) up and away from the gate if someone attempted a breach.

Now, that would be neat. It was unfortunately, in the story told to me, used on a normal person coming through the gate. The guard asked for ID and didn't see it, even though it was offered (which can happen) and got nervous and fired the mechanism.

I wasn't told of anyone being hurt. But it does show that every day use of a gate needs to be weighed against over-the-top security.

Anyway, I'm glad these guys were caught and that no-one was hurt.

Shaving Cream Cans

2007-05-08T16:46:00.000-04:00

You know sometimes I wonder at the mental faculties of large companies.

There is a problem with shaving cream cans - at least with the metal ones.

They are made of a metal that rusts. That rust is encouraged by the high amount of water vapor present in a bathroom, where the shaving cream can will reside.

So, this isn't nuclear science. They have a couple of options:

1) Don't make the shaving cream can out of a metal that rusts.
2) Make the shaving cream can as usual, but coat it in a substance on the bottom so it will not rust.
3) Make the bottom of the shaving cream can out of something that doesn't rust

Not only is it a waste to use such a good amount of metal for a stupid shaving cream can, but it rusts wherever it is placed in my bathroom. Then, that rust is never easy to remove. Somehow it appears to bind itself to the surface making extraordinary effort in scrubbing to remove the offending rust.

What, do the people that work at these places and create the packaging not use the products? Do they enjoy removing the rust in their bathroom?

Do they think I might enjoy a little rust on my bathtub so my kids can rub their hands in it and then stick it in to their mouth? (Nevermind that they really shouldn't be doing that, kids do whatever they want to no mater what you tell them. Currently, my 4-year-old is in a state of - let me do exactly the opposite of what daddy asks me to and see if he gets pissed off.)

Camera Storage Capacity to Detail Captured

2007-05-08T14:41:00.000-04:00

I recently purchased a new still camera, the Fujifilm S700 or S5700.* This is a 7 Mega pixel camera with a 10X optical zoom.

Our current camera (and we are keeping it) is a 6 MP Fujifilm E550. Part of the reason we purchased the S700, was because it was really cheap for getting a new camera that was newer and better than our old camera.

So, we bought the camer, - it was $220 at BJ's, with a $20 rebate and then we purchased $28 - 3GB SD card to go in it.

2 GB! I hear there are people working on an 8 GB SD card, if it isn't out there already.

So, where is the problem, you say?

Well, technically, there isn't a problem. So far as I can tell, the S700 is a better camera in every way than our E550, with the exception that they are different camera types and the E550 is a slimmer model.

No, the problem is one of perception. I have a SD card, that is 2GB's in size and it will hold something like almost 900 pictures.

Now, I like taking picture, especially of my kids, but the chances of me using 900 picturs in a single setting are pretty slim. The chances of the camera even being able to take 900 pictures on a single charge are also, pretty slim.

So, the problem is this, I think that digital cameras in general, should be able to utilize the storage space they can potentially have. To me that means that cameras should have huge sensors that capture an array of the current sensors data. If you had an array of 4 sensors the same size as the current sensor you would be able to capture a lot more data (and need a lot more lens) and still you wouldn't fill up the SD card with 100 pictures (which is what I take on average)!

These MP monsters would be so detailed that it would be an incredible feats for eyes.

Anyway, overall the camera is really good. I'll probably talk about it more later. Like I said, it handily beats my E550 in every way except for physical size. The photo quality, to my non-professional eye - is great. Very few blurry auto-focus missed shots except when I do a sequence of pictures in a row (an experiment I admit) and the video quality appears to be very good.

*The nomenclature was about as clear as mud. At BJ's it was a S700 on the tag, S5700 on the box. There I was wondering if I had the correct camera. Then, even in the box and documentation there are some discrepancies as to the name of the camera. Good thing it is a good camera or I'd be confused and pissed off, right now I'm just confused.

Firefox Browser - Continued Innovation - vs IE 7

2007-05-08T14:02:00.000-04:00

I first wrote about the FireFox browser in March of 2005. Since then I typically install it on all of my Windows PCs (but not the Macs, Safari is good enough in that realm).

There are still some disturbing problems with the browser. Most of these problems, I suspect come from web pages that support IE only. Since IE added multiple tab browsing the scales have tilted back towards Microsoft's IE 7 if it weren't for one very special attribute of FireFox.

I've been having some trouble with one of my PC's. It needs a bios update, but it has Pheonix Bios, and you just can't download any update, it has to be one for your specific motherboard and I don't remember what it is. I'll take a look at it sometime and see if I can figure it out.

The end result is that this machine crashes, typically in multimedia operations. No blue screen, no - hey you might want to save before the ship goes down, just down and bounce in a reboot instantly.

FireFox, which I've been using for the most part, has a way to recover sessions. The best part of it is that all you have to do after starting FireFox in order to recover your previous session is click a button.

This is particularly handy in that even in cases where I've been writing in a text box in a tab, this information will be saved (not in every case, though). It remembers your cookies, and even if you were logged in to Comcast e-mail.

This is powerful stuff. I think there is even a setting for it to remember your session even when you just close the program. I'll think about that one, there could be benefits and detractions to it.

But in terms of saving the information as I was writing an entry on IIDB forum, boy it saved me a lot of anger and frustration. Saving frustration is important to me. IE7, doesn't do this, or at least not yet.

I noticed when IE 7 came out that Microsoft employed a neat way to close the tabs. FireFox, you had to move your mouse all the way to the right edge of the screen to close a tab. Microsoft had it right on the tab. Shortly afterwards, FireFox fixed this. It certainly seems a lot like one-upsmanship, but FireFox really did something useful with the session recovery.

Good job guys, it is nice to see programmers to go, since I am at least in part a programmer.

Angelic Layer and Science

2007-05-08T13:32:00.000-04:00

It might not have come out yet in this blog, but my wife and I are huge anime fans. I've been watching just about anything that I can from shows on cartoon network, Adult Swim, Netflix rentals, YouTube (Japanese recordings with English Text) and even a fan site BleachPortal.net to get in my fix of anime.

I search for anime shows that my son can watch. I'll let him watch stuff that is much more violent than most parents - I don't believe that what people watch on TV leads to what people do in reality. If this were the case then it would be quite clear that Japanese culture should be far more violent than United States Culture - and this is directly opposite to available information.

To the topic of this particular post: Angelic Layer is a low-violence and low-person violence anime that my son likes to watch. Young children control dolls on a field called the Angelic Layer where those dolls become capable of following the user's mind commands to do things on the layer. There is a lot more to this show, like a slight sexual tension between the main character and one of the male characters that so far in two disks hasn't resulted in anything more than a he likes her - and the guy getting all embarrassed. The main story line follows the main character as her doll battles other dolls on the Angelic Layer and she becomes a competition player. So, the violence that does happen in the show are dolls fighting dolls, no blood, still a little violence; however, it is clear on the show that the fighters are not people - even though they look like people.

Recently there have been articles like this one - depicting a game system with an add-on device that allows the user to use their mind to control the actions of their character inside of a console game. This immediately brought to my mind the idea of Angelic Layer. The art of moving things in the real world is far more difficult (especially given the activities of the dolls in Angelic Layer) than moving pixels in a game.

On the other hand, we are increasingly becoming more capable in the robotic arena. If this is the direction we are going with in gaming, there isn't a reason why we couldn't in ten years create something very much like Angelic Layer.

Bioethics of biology used to destroy

2007-05-07T14:22:00.000-04:00

In an article: Fire ants may have met their match on CNN they discuss a very important finding. The use of a virus that naturally occurs within fire ants to destroy them.

Is it ethical to use a virus to deliberately kill insects? I think it is. The fire ants in question do not naturally occur in the Northern United States of America and have no natural predators in this region. The article briefly talks about importing another species in to the US that is a natural predator to the ants. I think that this would not be an optimal solution. Introducing a second species even if successful still leaves you with now two introduces species competing with local species for limited resources.

The question is if the implementation of the virus to destroy as many fire ants as possible will be ethically done - and not to the ants, I mean to other species, the ecology and to humanity.

Whatever pathogen is generated to go after the fire ants will need to be significantly tested against all species of insects that are rungs in our ecology. Imagine if they don't do such testing and ants that we need are also killed? This would be a bigger disaster.

I think appropriate testing can be done. I hope the testing will be done. Currently there is no legislation forcing companies using biological agents to perform such testing. The FDA doesn't hold any authority in this scope, as the product does not impact (directly) food eaten by humans.

So, here's to hoping everyone does the due diligence and tests any solution in development appropriately.

Childhood Horror

2007-05-07T13:54:00.000-04:00

Ages ago (at least it seems that way) I used to have a recurrent nightmare/waking dream. The idea was very simple, that there were spiders in my ears (or some other insect).

So, a CNN video shows a kid that has lived through it. Apparently, two spiders crawled in to his ears while he was sleeping in the top bunk of his bed. Perhaps, being closer to the ceiling the spiders thought it was an inviting place to live.

His parents took him to the doctor, and flushed 1 living and 1 dead spider out of his ears. Let's hope they didn't lay any eggs.

I think, I've gotten over the horror of what it would be like to have insects burrowing under my skin or in my ears or attempting to eat me. I understand now that this kind of thing happens although infrequently here in the USA.

In Africa many predatory insects eat portions of the human body. Worms burrow in through the skin on the feet and things like that. Heck, there are of course worms that can take up residence inside your intestines. Knowing about the thousands of mites and things like that living in the bed, eating your dead skin, spiders crawling around your bed and accidentally falling in to your mouth at night. I mean, insects are simply something we need to live with, and on a close proximity despite the fact that we aren't really aware how close they are on a daily basis.

So, anyway, have pleasant dreams.

Mac Mini Update

2007-05-03T12:48:00.000-04:00

Well, we finally took the Mac Mini and the LCD monitor that it doesn't work with over to the Mac Store in the Mall.

They tried a few things and in the end the guy at the store said, "Maybe try a different monitor."

I know for a fact that there isn't anything wrong with the monitor. We get the grey opening screen for the startup of the Mac and that is it.

I also know, that when I installed Windows Vista on the machine that used that monitor, I experience the same issues.

So, what did OS writers forget about monitors with their next generation OS?

Bleh, so I want my father-in-law to have a larger monitor than that 5 year olf 15" CRT. I guess I'll have to buy something, but I'll be wondering when I buy it - will this work with the Mac Mini?

Censorship and Digg

2007-05-02T19:48:00.000-04:00

Censorship is abhorrent to people even if the removal of that knowledge would be beneficial. There are many TV shows, Anime and movies about people who don't remember their past (or parts of it) and the show is the journey to learning the truth about the past.

So, encryption algorithms were 'smuggled' out of the country in a book - the source code and keys a long time ago. This was when the US government was passionate about keeping the highest level of encryption only in the US. I know, it was a really stupid idea on the US part.

I mean really. All they did was prevent US software security firms from competing on a global level. Now other businesses have that business. The economics for these companies in the US to have multiple versions of the software just to have lower power security on the stuff they ship out of the US - foolishness.

Especially in the age of the internet when this book with the source code probably wasn't the first way that source code left the US.

So, now we have a problem with encryption again. We are not a culture that believes in censorship (as a whole) and yet we let a law pass that basically states that if you have any discourse on the security of multimedia products, you are liable.

And this blew up on Digg. Digg was told to remove content because the articles contained an encryption key to secure new style media. The users revolted.

It isn't that all their users are interested in ripping HD-DVD content. It is the fact that they are being told they cannot read material.

The media companies have made their own problems. Unfortunately for the, by not allowing discussion on the weaknesses of their encryption - their encryption is breakable - and it appears that it is relatively easy to do.

I'm glad Digg changed their mind. If they face a lawsuit I think it will be a first amendment battle to end all battles. Copyright vs Freedom of Expression. If we go in order of precedence in our government documents - 1st amendment should outrank copyright protection. They really need to amend the constitution to mandate censorship - and they should be forced to do so if they want to limit public discourse.

Gene Therapy for the Blind

2007-05-02T18:02:00.000-04:00

As a parent of two children when I read about some of the horrible diseases out there that can affect children and on in to adulthood I find that the world sometimes can be a scary place.

So it is nice to read an article on a horrible disease that scientists are working to cure or at least alleviate the problems of this disease.

The disease is Leber's congenital amaurosis. Basically as a child gets older their eyesight degenerates and will be blind by their 20s. I couldn't imagine if my children had this disease.

Here is the article that first brought this science exploration to my attention through Google News.

The treatment involves gene modification. Years ago there were a lot of debates on the ethics of gene modification therapy. It was noted in other places that this kind of debate ceased in the popular media when the procedures yielded results that will actually cure children's diseases.

There are dangers with this treatment. It is a technology that is still in its infancy. There is an incident mentioned in this article about two children who underwent a similar surgery being infected by the carrier virus and developing cancer. One hopes they are using a different carrier virus and that this is in fact the cause of the cancer.

Right now, modeling the human body well enough for computer simulations to map out how these operations will affect the human body are not possible. Until then human trials will be necessary to determine the efficacy of a procedure.

One can only hope that the scientists need a minimum of iterations to determine the correct methodology.

Here are some additional articles on this subject in the news:
Docs Perform Gene Therapy Operations
Hope in Sight
eCanadaNow

This is my 100th blog entry.

WWYD

2007-05-01T14:22:00.000-04:00

There are lots of battles about the existence of Jesus. Some are scholarly battles, some are emotional battles and some are simply two entrenched sides that simply cannot communicate.

I humbly offer my thoughtful argument about the existence of Jesus.

What would you do (WWYD) if you had Jesus capabilities?

Make a list.

Then compare it to what Jesus did.

Decide if you could have been a better Jesus than Jesus was. If you think you could have been a better Jesus, then perhaps, the all-powerful, all-knowing Jesus did not exist. Clearly if you can conceive of what you would do as Jesus and Jesus didn't accomplish those goals, he either didn't exist, wasn't as powerful or knowledgeable as people claim.

So, I've come up with my own list.

1) I'd create a series of books containing the knowledge of science that can be attained with a human mentality. These books would be written in all the existing languages of the time and all future languages, because as the son of god, I'd be able to do that.

2) I'd write many stories showing the commonality of human existence and that tolerance of others is really tolerance for yourself.

3) I'd live for as long as possible to ensure that my healing abilities and wisdom would be available for as long as possible. Consider, that since Jesus was the son of god he should be able to live as long as Methuselah, Noah, or Adam. So, Jesus should be able to live for hundreds to a thousand years with no problem. In fact, Jesus should be able to live longer since he's the son of god and not just your ordinary human.

4) I would be able to change the minds of the leaders of humans whenever they were going down the 'wrong' path. By wrong, I basically mean the path for fighting over resources, ideology, etc. This power is demonstrated by god against Pharaoh, so it should be no problem. Even if, as Jesus, I wouldn't have complete control over the country's leader's mind, at least highly influence would help prevent some death and destruction.

5) I would note in any common calendar form (of the present or the future) the time and place of natural disasters that would result in massive loss of life. This way, people would have full knowledge of their decisions in terms of Earthquakes, hurricanes, meteor hits or any other natural disaster that foreknowledge would result in saved lives.

6) I'd have lots of children. Since Jesus is 1/2 god, then his children would in turn, be 1/4 god. That presumably would be more god than the rest of us have. The children of Jesus, I should think, would have better capabilities than ordinary humans and could serve to fill the Earth with people who are healers, can read and write, have knowledge beyond the knowledge of the average person and can act as judges in conflicts to preserve the existence of humanity and the improvement of humanity on in to the future.

7) I would take the time to educate people personally and found institutions for learning. Further, I'd bless or aid the graduating students who have learned a lot with good luck (better than the normal person) so that they too, could be a path to helping other humans.

8) I'd teach about and in turn have others teach about basic hygiene. God might not want me to prevent disease totally but paradoxically allow me to treat disease; however, I can do what I can to prevent disease from spreading. If I could I'd have a powwow with god and request that diseases not be of the lethal variety.

So, did you have any good ideas on what you would do if you were Jesus (WWYD)? Better than my ideas or in addition to my ideas? I'd love to hear about them.

But the critical questions should be asked. Why didn't Jesus do them? Why did he foolishly waste his life when his living for hundreds of years was more than possible and the amount of people he could have helped directly could have been many times greater than committing suicide by governmental execution? Having a line of Jesus descendants through time helping humanity - is there some reason this would be a bad idea? If there was one person that needed to have a few hundred kids over his lifetime, it would be Jesus.

If he offered proof of his existence to the people of his time and they did not need faith, his existence on through time wouldn't have affected people being able to go to heaven (if in fact anybody gets to go to heaven) so why not choose to live?

Elite Beat Agents - Nintendo DS Game

2007-04-30T16:16:00.000-04:00

There are some games that are produced for Nintendo gaming systems that are incredible.

Elite Beat Agents is a fun game for anyone that enjoys music. You really can't tell from the package just how much fun it is to play this game.

You might have to get over the cheesy story lines that go with each mini music game, but they are so cheesy that you can't help but laugh sometimes.

In essence, there are destination where you need to dance with your Nintendo stylus with the music and the beats in the measure that the game shows you on the screen. There are a few variations to what you need to do to hit the bit (or up-beat) or dance with a long section of music.

Hey, and you can't knock a game too much that has Men at Work's YMCA on it!!!

But I do have some problems with game play, the opening tutorial and content.

The opening training/tutorial section doesn't take you through the experience very well, in fact the only thing you'll really know how to do is the spinning you do for bonus points.

Game play is great! If you have a really good sense of timing. There are two levels of game play, but I think they get things a bit wrong on the lower level of game play. Specifically, they reduce the number of times you have to tap the screen to the beats, but this doesn't necessarily make it easier.

I suspect the answer to both of my points is to have a tutorial mode, where you are hitting on the beat for the most part, like we do when we're just bopping around to music or something to get in to the habit or style of playing and listening to the music.

Please NOTE! The game asks you to listen to it, I suggest you do what it says! If you play the game watching the circles closing in on the circles, you are sure to miss a lot of beats.

My 4 year-old son loves this game, but he can't play it. There is no child mode which would be incredible to have. I'm sure he'd be in to this for hours trying to get everything just right. Now he just gets frustrated and wants to watch me play it.

I'm hoping that they get more titles like this - perhaps Elite Beat Agents 2, 3, 4 or different themes and music. Once they have the primary engine down (and they do, game play works flawlessly) it should be a simple matter to port more music over and the comic art intros and action shouldn't take too long to create.

It is an opportunity for a lot of rich content that shouldn't cost a lot to make, but that I think people would be willing to pay for.

At least I would be willing to pay for it.

Brutal Supidity

2007-04-30T10:51:00.000-04:00

A woman is killed in an accident by a roller coaster at a Lego-Land amusement park.

This might be good enough for a Darwin award. It isn't that it was something not in her range to control. She wasn't a customer. She was the ride operator. A ride takes several operators. At least 2 people, if not usually 3 people. One to operate the controls, one to make sure the people are on the ride and give all clear and one to make sure everyone got off the ride and give the all-clear.

Well, this woman was probably one of the people helping people on or off the ride and giving all clear. I've been a ride operator at Six Flags Great Adventure. I remember the training. If her training was anything like what I received, they probably send something like 'Never get on the tracks. If someone losses something, you have to call maintenance and they may get it.'

So, some guy says to her (and this guy is the epitome of stupidity as well) that he lost his wallet and that it fell on the tracks. Who in their right mind would ask someone to get their wallet from the tracks of a running ride? At most, he should have said that please, I hope that when the ride isn't running there is a way to get my wallet back.

Certainly not go jump down there and get my wallet please.

Or maybe, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and he mentioned it to her and she took it in to her own head to go down there and get the wallet.

The net result of all of this is that this woman is dead. It is a sad thing when people die for stupid reasons. My heart goes out to her relatives, her parents and her friends.

Blame also goes to all of these people. You have to have appropriate decision making abilities to work a ride or do just about anything in life. Somebody didn't teach her those decision making skills well enough to be doing what she was doing.

She was 21 years old. So, she wasn't some little girl. She should have known and valued her life enough to tell this guy to bugger off.

I'm sure there will be major lawsuits against the park and the ride manufacturer and that everything about what a person does in the process over there will be reviewed by legal people.

Really, though, what it comes down to in this case is a person having the sense not to jump on tracks of an operating ride. The same kind of sense that involves not walking on railroad tracks of an operating railroad or not walking in front of moving cars.

Fragile Infrastructure Logic

2007-04-30T10:30:00.000-04:00

A recent road accident in California raises attention nationwide, mostly because it is on CNN's front page.

This accident involves a tanker truck filled with gasoline. Involved in a single vehicle accident in the early morning hours today it is fortunate that no person was killed.

However, the massive amount of fuel spilled and then burning on the road destroyed a major commuting artery in the San Francisco area. This in turn will cause major problems for months in the San Francisco area. This in turn will cause major economic losses to businesses and people in the local region.

I've worked up in this area and taken flights to San Francisco and drive up to a client C&H Sugar. Everything comes to a pinch point at the bridge out there. So, perhaps you want to blame the people in California for making such a fragile system? This would be incorrect to do. Most major metropolitan areas come down to pinch points. Thinking of the tens of thousands of commuters that drive in to New York City from New Jersey on any given day and a similar accident on the George Washington Bridge??? That would be all bad.

You could blame the infrastructure in terms of roads and bridge conditions as San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom does, but this too would be incorrect. Think about it for a minute. You have thousands of gallons of volatile liquid being spilled and then combusted on the roadway. This fuel gains its potency from burning hot when combined with Oxygen which is all around us. Any time a tanker truck spills its load on to the road and burns you are going to have major damage. If that particular roadway is an overpass or a bridge you can expect the metal components to come under stress.

There was a similar incident over in New Jersey on Route 80; however, it wasn't a bridge and just damaged the road to make it impassable. This was fixed relatively easily.

However, these tanker trucks drive millions of miles every year and for every mile drive it increases the chance of there being an accident or a sever accident. Each one of these tanker trucks represents a ticking time bomb to local economies.

There will be losses of fuel as people have to spend more time or more miles to get to their employment because of this accident.

It will take additional funds of unknown source to fix this roadway. It will cost more to fix because there will be lots of pressure inside and outside of the government to get this fixed as soon as possible.

Prices of local goods will go up (temporarily one hopes) and cost residents more money.

Major businesses that transport goods through the area will be heavily impacted.

Now, if we worked on a way to eliminate roads this wouldn't be a big issue. We can do this and reduce our risk as a society. This is only a preview of accidents to come. If this happened on the George Washington Bridge, it would affect me directly. It would most certainly affect millions of people as well.

At some point we need to stop the onward rush to do things and think and plan how our future will look and how secure it will be. All we are doing now as a society is madly rushing around like a chicken with its head cut off fixing the problem of today and not concentrating on the future.

There is a problem when almost all major road construction has to take place in the off-hours because on-hour construction would create traffic snarls that would damage the economy. Moving the time of construction treats a symptom, much like cough medicine, but does nothing to alleviate the underlying problem.

Adding more roads will help alleviate the symptom as well, but when I watched a show on the addition of infrastructure in the New Jersey area, it indicated that the new road will help in the short term - the next 6 months, but then the new roadway will also be running at over 100% capacity.

This appeared to be an affect of people wanting to go to places where it was easier to drive and get to. The new roadway offers this until there is no more capacity left. Then matters are as bad or worse than they were before.

Geodesic Dome Home

2007-04-27T15:27:00.000-04:00

Many years ago when I was a teenager I was an avid reader of Popular Science Magazine. I still am a avid reader of that magazine. It was there in the back of that magazine that I fell in love with an idea. The idea of a geodesic dome to live in as my house.

There are so many advantages to a geodesic dome compared to a standard one that I find it hard to imagine that people even want the traditional home. In this age, the era of conservation of resources, a home that takes less material to build, consume less energy on the day to day basis and offers more space is more in harmony with world-wide trends.

It seems likely that I may get the opportunity to build a geodesic dome. As long as the local governments do not frustrate me with regulations I plan on gowing forward with this idea. I can't be totally sure of when.

This opportunity offers a lot of elegance as well. An elegant idea to build a geodesic dome as an addition to my wife's grandmother's house - which in turn was built by my wife's grandfather who has long since past away.

It would be a blend of the old and the new. It would offer, with its additional strength, safety in this times of an unknown climate.

It still won't help the fact that we count as a coastal population and that if the seas rise an extraordinary amount it may well be an underwater dome; however, it seems at the moment unlikely that the climate will crash that much.

Super powered hurricanes? Yeah, probably, despite the current idea circulating about wind shearing and the prevention of the formation of hurricanes.

Extremes of weather at odd points in time. Yep, already experiencing that. We'll see how it goes.

Anyway, there are quite a few manufacturers of geodesic domes. Currently, we are investigating Timberline domes (the one of two manufacturers of geodesic domes that still advertises in the back of Popular Science.)

Heaven and Justice

2007-04-27T14:12:00.000-04:00

Not too long ago in the debates on Internet Infidels Forum there was a debate in regard to justice.

It seems like a ritual that religious people come to IIDB and challenge us on what we believe and usually approach us with the attitude of I'm superior because of my faith.

The core of this person's argument hinged on Hitler. Basically, he indicated that there can't be justice in the world if there isn't a hell to punish people like Hitler.

In fact, I recall reading an article about a religious person in college opening up the debate with atheists or non-religious people with asking 'where do you think Hitler is now?'

The first thought in regard to justice and hell is that in the bible it is indicated by Jesus that few people get in to heaven. Let that sink in and unless you feel you are a paragon of virtue, please put yourself in the hell column - right next to me.

The second thought is that many people go to hell for many very different reasons. Hitler is in this mythological hell because he unjustly killed millions of people. I'll go to hell because I deny the existence of god. Nearly half of the people in the USA get divorced and who knows if the big 'g' man agrees that divorce is legitimate. Who knows, maybe 54 percent of our country that are divorced people and re-married will simply be regarded as adulterers. And as previously indicated unless you are a paragon of virtue you will end up in hell. Maybe you'll end up in hell because there are witches or wiccans in your area and you allow them to live. In any case the point of my second thought is that there are no different levels of hell. Sure, in Dante's inferno, a fictional work there are levels of hell. But nothing in the bible supports this idea. So, if you are in hell because you got divorced you suffer the same level of torment as Hitler. There is no justice in this idea. There is nothing to prevent a person from realizing, "Hey, I'm going to go to hell for killing one person, why not kill as many as I can?" After all, once in hell, it can't get much worse.

My third thought is that even Hitler or Stalin doesn't deserve an eternity or infinity of torment. Place yourself in the shoes of god. You receive Hitler's soul and need to decide what to do with it. Well, you tally up all the pain he caused and you make him experience it. You take him through all the lives that will never be because he killed their ancestors or parents. Maybe you multiply the pain by a factor of 10 and you punish him for 10,000 years or more of horror. Maybe a million years. Or maybe until you can tell in his soul that he has changed in fundamental ways and more than just understand what he did was wrong, but has internalized in his thought process that he would actively figt against such a thing. Regardless of what you do to Hitler, something less than the infinite amount of time available at hand has passed and he has completed whatever, you as god, have determined as his punishment. He's done, then. That's all. Same thing with Stalin or any other genocidal idiot.

The fourth thought for now on this topic is that god ultimately is responsible for our behavior. It really doesn't matter about free will or anything like that. God, contains all the knowledge of everything (allegedly) and as such knows the outcome of all this including any fudge factor of free will religious people want to throw in there. There is the old idea of "If you could travel through time and kill Hitler, would you do it?" Well, god is all powerful. He looked at that problem and for whatever reason decided that it was a good idea that Hitler order all those people killed and that his followers were believers in him enough to go ahead and do it and not step up and say "You know, I think this isn't a good idea, I'd like to go home or go on vacation in Hawaii for a few weeks instead of kill all these people, see ya."

So, the question in the fourth thought is can god hold Hitler, Stalin, Pharaoh or Judas responsible for things in essence god is doing through them? Pharaoh didn't even have a chance. God went on in to his head and made him cold hearted so he could try out his new toy - the kill the first born of everyone without goats blood on their doors toy.

With all these thoughts I cannot see how a world with heaven and hell is any more just than a world without them. In fact, I think heaven and hell make matters far worse for justice. The real world has a lot of problems and good people don't always win (or even live) and bad people do bad things and don't always get their karmic justice. So, what? That is life.

We do what we can and we catch the bad people we can and punish them within reason. All those thousands of people who steal cars don't deserve to fry in hell infinitely. They deserve (but may not always get) to be caught, tried by a jury and placed in jail for an appropriate time. They should also apologize to the people they stole from and once they get out of jail they should pay those people back for their financial loss.

It wouldn't be perfect, but you know it isn't horrible either.

The Government Wants You Dead

2007-04-25T01:29:00.000-04:00

Periodically, a new story comes out how an aging person is being denied benefits because they have in some way shape or form been reported as dead.

Now I understand that government is a group of very complex processes; however, the governments knowledge of you being alive or dead should be very clear and easy to understand.

Either the responsible agency has an official death certificate for the person or they do not. In the absence of such a document or legal copy they cannot and must not assume for any reason that a person is dead.

Insult is added to injury when a person is reported dead and no one reaches out to that person or their family on the phone to make the official determination. The government is acting on unknown and false data or hearsay to make an official action.

Not to mention that they may be hurting the people who need the monetary and medical help the most and people who have lived long lives as good citizens of our country in the absence of evidence!

What a person is 95 years old do they assume they are dead? Would you want this to happen to you?

In a world where many people live long lives and the average life expectancy is in the 70's - the government needs to step in and say that in the absence of evidence a person is alive. If they investigate and they find the person has died, that's different.

But all too often the government is taking actions not in accordance with its directives.

High Salt Diet Damages Human Body

2007-04-20T13:53:00.000-04:00

Recent articles on the web have been indicating that the high amount of salt in American's diet is causing us to die early.

Fortunately, help is on the way. In a recent Popular Science article they described a product that will turn off the bitterness receptors on the tongue. This means that foods will not need as much salt or sugar to be tasty to the human mouth.

Now, what they described was an artificial product and that implies that it could have negative impacts on the human body that are relatively unknown; however, the product is in testing now, and could be released shortly (but oddly enough there is no requirements for it to be on labels of packages of food) and this could be a great boon to humans.

If we can reduce hypertension and other related problems to consuming the amount of salt in our diets, then perhaps in the long term we may be able to live longer happier lives. Not to mention that this artificial product will also enable lower sugar in foods to make them taste good which would have an impact on things like diabetes.

And honestly, I waited until I was over 30 to have children. In 2005 on Christmas my mother-in-law passed away at the age of 60. If my children wait until they are older to have children, I want to be alive to see my grandchildren grow up. I want to be there for them.

Dead people don't do anything. The loss of my children's grandmother will affect them negatively in many ways (including my older son's fascination with death...) and my younger child never actually knowing her. Anything that can increase the duration of our lives so that we can be there for our families, is in the best interests of humanity, in a selfish way, in the interests of those who are related to me.

I guess I feel this is more important since both my grandfathers passed away before I ever really got to know them. Both of my grandmothers were really concepts instead of people that I interacted with.

So, I want my children to have the things I didn't have with that kind of relationship. A relationship in a family way where it isn't just my parents that are working hard to make sure I have a great future.

But already, I have failed in this - at least partially. With my father-in-law over 75 and my parents lackadaisical attitude toward their own health the best I might be able to do is be there for when my children have children.

If I could live for a few hundred years and this kind of longevity would be passed on to my descendants, I would. There is too much to see in this world to be able to see it as a wage-slave and with a limited life-span.

National Geographic

2007-04-19T14:08:00.000-04:00

I subscribe to National Geographic magazine. It isn't my favorite magazine; however, every so often it produces a gem that in my view justifies an entire years subscription.

Humans have devised many ways to torture and kill each other over time. Imagine my surprise when not long ago (but certainly not recently) there was a picture in the back of National Geographic that astonished me in terms of how humans can torture and kill each other.

The picture on the last page of National Geographic magazine is typically something 'off the cutting room floor'. This picture that entranced me so much that every time I see a National Geographic magazine I think about it is about a post sticking out of the ground probably 12 feet or so. It bends at the top and has a cage on it that is similar to a bird cage.

However, this is no bird cage. It is a cage to hold a human uncomfortably out of reach of help until they die.

Rarely does National Geographic even mention something so disturbing. It was a touch of reality that made the magazine for me, intense and acknowledging the fact that what they study, human society and the animal realm, isn't always cupcakes and soda.

The archetype - The Hero

2007-04-19T10:26:00.000-04:00

Watching the video of Cho Seung-Hui on the computer with my wife and I was reminded of something from you youth. Fantasies of being the hero were something that went through my mind often. I guess it was because physically I always felt inferior to others (at 135 pounds and 5' 9") and emotionally I felt that I wasn't going to participate in the "dream" of well being married, having a wife, children and indeed a future.

The fantasy, in general, goes like this: Love interest of the moment (and there were many, sometimes I wonder if I 'loved' all women to a certain extent in my youth) was in terrible danger (oh, no!) and there I was at location that I normally see her and there are many enemies, in fact enemies all around me! Hah, then I do x, y and z and beat those enemies to a pulp destroying them utterly. The fantasy would end around there with the corny - you know what's going to happen next as she falls in love with her hero.

I see echoes of this in books, comics and movies all the time. It is a common theme. It is the fantasy I think in some exaggerated form which drives terrorists to suicide bombings and Cho Seung-Hui to kill a bunch of his 'enemies'.

This archetypical fantasy has many benefits to the young male mind. You get the satisfaction of doing something for your cause (be it a woman, your country or your religion), you get to prove your physicality by beating foes who are typically in a stronger position than you are and of course you attain your goal. It is nice and simple. It is the format of some first person shooters like Doom. You have enemies that are far more powerful than your actual self. There is a goal which will save lives, etc. You acheive this goal by pounding the enemy to a pulp in various ways. Eventually, you succeed and become the 'hero'.

These fantasies I think are partially driven by the helplessness in general young males have with regard to their lives. We all feel to some degree that we are nameless parts of a billion person body and we move with the tides and inertia of that body. By becoming this hero we achieve control over our destinies and we achieve our goal - the thing we want most at that time.

Of course, there is a huge difference between having a fantasy of killing to achieve your love interest or country's freedom or religious goals - or playing a video game in which you perform violent actions to become the hero and actually fulfilling your fantasy in a more active manner and actually running around killing innocent people to realize your fantasy in the real world.

At least that is my theory why Cho Seung-Hui became a mass-murderer and my theory on why people do things that otherwise normal people can't even consider, like suicide bombings or flying planes in to inhabited buildings.

These people all want to be the Hero. And they have discovered that this is the way they can achieve hero status in the real world.

I don't know if there is really a way to battle this fantasy except for each young male to engage in normal activities to gain a sense of achievement to understand that their goals are not unattainable.

Hell, it seems part of Cho Seung-Hui's problem was that he couldn't get a relationship with women. I'd rather he went and found a high-class hooker willing to act out some of his fantasy then believe that what he wants in life is utterly unattainable.

In the end a hooker or a sense of achievement might not have been enough for Cho Seung-Hui. The achetypical fantasy lived in him, that much is clear from his video, but he probably had mental problems or chemical imbalances that exaggerated this fantasy until such point that he felt he 'had' to act it out - maybe to protect his imaginary girlfriend from the pollutants of the students on campus. The pollutants, that I suspect Cho Seung-Hui felt were going to pollute him and turn him into a frivolous college student.

War in Iraq

2007-04-19T03:33:00.000-04:00

I've got ten years total service in the military (including 2 years inactive as part of my enlistment). I'm not thrilled with the military. I find some of their mistakes in even the simple matters such as uniforms to be scary when the leadership of the military are in charge of decisions that can determine if you are going to live or die.

Still, some things shock me and it isn't the military to blame. I remember when the magic number of 2000 troops died happened. There was a lot of press on the subject and a resurgance of pro and anti war discussion.

Today, I read an article that indicated that 3200 troops have died since the inception of the current war. Did I miss the agitation this time around or is it simply old hat and when we passed 3000 troops dead in the current war it simply wasn't newsworthy?

I don't get it. I don't agree with the war; however, when people die in our wars we need to honor them and acknowledge their deaths regardless of our view of the war itself. I recognize that this is difficult to do all the time and would make our news very dire, but at least on every 1000 war dead, we should shout out their names and say this person died for their county! It should not be a matter of politics that releasing this information would damage the war effort so we shouldn't acknowledge our war dead. These people are dead and the things they had to do in life, the children and spouses they have left behind will never recover from their passing.

Recognition for dying in a war shouldn't have to wait 20 years. Recognition for dying in a war isn't best done with some cold monument.

Governor Corzine's Auto Accident

2007-04-19T01:38:00.000-04:00

It seems that with great revision the truth comes out about Governor Corzine's car accident which has caused the governor great harm.

1) The Suburban he was riding in was going over 90 miles per hour
2) There was a state trooper driving the vehicle
3) There was no emergency reason for the vehicle to be moving that fast
4) Most likely the accident was caused by Governor Corzine's vehicle
5) The vehicles emergency lights were running

We should be straight on a number of things.

It is hard not to notice that the vehicle you are riding in is going ninety miles per hour when you are riding in the front seat, regardless of if the rider can see the speedometer or not.

A state trooper should obey the driving laws as much or more than regular civilian drivers as an example to regular civilian drivers.

More than likely Governor Corzine requested to go faster or that the vehicle travelling at that speed and with the emergency lights on. This is likely to be the norm for past driving for the Governor.

Driving at high speeds appears to be the norm for Governors of New Jersey. A break in the speed limits was partially driven through the state laws when former Governor Christine Whitmans limo was caught travelling at high speeds on one of the states major highways.

Now, in Whitman's case, she wasn't in an official emergency vehicle and potentially this was even more dangerous since there were no flashing lights to show other drivers her car as it was speeding by.

Then again, flashing lights tend to make motorists, in particular newer motorists very nervous. This is in particularly true when they are travelling down major highways and most probably speeding a little themselves. The driver that was 'spooked' by the Governor's speeding car is no doubt a member of the new drivers club as indicated in some articles and this was responsible for him driving erratically and probably scared whitless about the speeding police car approaching him from behind.

I lived in Howell, New Jersey for a number of years. When I was a senior in high school or around there a police car was speeding down Aldrich road during the early morning hours. Unfortunately, a man was getting an early start on his commute and as he entered Aldrich road he was slammed in to by the police officer. The speeds in the accident are similar to the speeds that the Governor's car was travelling, but on a 45 mph road. The last I heard of it both the police officer and the commuter were living of large amount of blood being fed in to their bleeding bodies. I doubt either one of them survived.

Often I see police officers taking advantage of who they are and the car they are driving and performing blatantly illegal actions. Often, even if they do get in a minor accident it is likely to be blamed on the other person (i.e not the police officer). I see them frequently in Linden, Clark and Cranford running red lights (with lights on or off) chasing the green light (sitting in the straight lanes at Exit 136 and then deciding to go left across the solid white line and then through the now red left turn light on to Raritan) just for their own convenience.

This present a clear and present danger to everyone on the roads. If it is an emergency put your lights on and get to it, people. If it isn't sit at the light and be a good example to everyone around you - and you know what its part of your job, because sitting at the red light keeps other people alive.

Frankly speaking the only thing more dangerous on the roads than some of the activities or liberties police officers take while on the roads are the illegal immigrants, who have no driver's license, no car insurance and are driving unregistered vehicles. Get hit by one of those folks and it seems likely that no matter how hurt you are they are going to run and leave your bleeding ass there - to ensure they don't get deported to their home country.

I wonder where the statistics are on officers that get in accidents? It should be tracked, and the circumstances of those accidents should be tracked so that people can understand the danger some police officers present to everyone driving on the roads.

For the record; however, with the governor of New Jersey on board his car, I'm sure the police officer did a) everything he was told to do and b) everything he felt Governor Corzine wanted him to do. He shouldn't be punished severely. The only punishment I wish for in this instance is serious discussion on the illegal activities that our police officers take on the roads every day that present a danger to us.

I even recall a person that got in to an accident with a police officer that was doing something illegal with his car, and that person was the one that got in trouble! Imagine, their surprise when they were told that the officer was heading toward an emergency without his lights on! I find this doubtful at best. After all, we pay our police officers to be trusted with guns, and the officer couldn't remember to turn on his emergency lights on his way to an emergency!

Come on folks! You can claim to be the best and then use I screwed up something simple as an excuse when you perform something illegal with your police car.

Cho's Explosion

2007-04-18T15:19:00.000-04:00

A lot of writing on the web indicates that Cho Seung-Hui had an explosion or a meltdown and they wonder what the specific cause of that meltdown was.

This is a good example from CNN 360 blog:
Then something happened. Whatever was boiling inside Cho exploded with lethal fury. In the ultimate act of hatred, he destroyed even himself, leaving others to decipher the ultimate question: Why?-- By Jill Dougherty, U.S. Affairs Editor for CNN International

This would indicate that the deaths on the campus of Virginia Tech were 2nd degree murders; however, this is untrue.

You simply have to look at the information. There was a receipt in Cho's backpack for the gun he used. It was dated in March. One would assume he purchased a generous amount of ammunition at that time as well.

As indicated in this article , Cho waited 5 weeks before using the gun to kill his fellow students and teachers at Virginia Tech. According to his teachers, Cho was intelligent if off-balance. The purchase of the gun and the ammunition indicates premeditation. There was no 'moment' where some action like flying doves in Mars attacks set him off to kill a bunch of people. Like Mars Attacks, Cho and the aliens always planned to kill a bunch of people.

He isn't a marksman. He really didn't have a legitimate reason for purchasing a handgun. His life wasn't threatened, theft while prevalent in schools usually isn't enough to want to own a gun for prevention and bringing a fun on campus is most likely illegal and certainly against the school's rules.

So, why would you buy a large number of rounds for a gun (even if we grant the point that he had a reasonable reason to buy the gun)? If you need to protect yourself, you might buy enough rounds to fill a clip. That's all you need. By the time you've gone through a clip of ammunition you are either dead, killed the intruder or put a bunch of holes in the wall. It is pretty unlikely that he refilled a single clip every time he needed to reload, either. He probably purchased multiple clips, so that he could reload as quickly as possible.

So, what does all this mean? Gun purchase, huge number of rounds, probable multiple clips....? It means it was premeditated. He was planning on doing it sometime. It was only a matter how how badly he felt that day that he decided that he was going to punish all these people for being who they are...

After all, he came from Korea. There is little doubt in my mind that life was considerably harder for him then in his formative years. To see the massive amount of waste in American culture, the resources frittered away that could easily help his people and then on top of that... How they reject him and how intent he was on doing things. That women would reject his advances and increase the feelings that he doesn't belong here, that there is no woman for him in the future.

I can see his side all too well; unfortunately, no one ever told him that the way things are - is not the way things will always be. His parents never drilled in to him that the most important thing in life was the future of humanity and not the future of self. Really, the self is so small in the enormous tide of billions of human beings. I know we like to think that we are individuals, that we are special and no doubt I suffer from that delusion as well. But when it comes down to it, this idea of self-importance probably tore in to Cho when faced with the outward evidence that he didn't matter, that all the suffering he saw didn't matter in Korea and that the point of all the money in the world appeared to be...a bunch of rich kids spending their money and wasting their time fooling around.

But the point of this entry is simple. Cho planned this horrible event. It was not a crime of passion or a lack of control. I'm sure we'll see more people speaking in the future of a Cho shooting people with an emotionless look on his face (much like the look on his face in any number of pictures on the web now. He probably felt hopeless, like he wasn't important struggle with the mental attitude that he must be important and probably felt the tide of College kids doing unimportant things and didn't want to be swept in to that tide. How could he possible stop being assimilated in to this culture?

The sad point is that many of the people he killed had infinite horizons ahead of them. Academic achievers that could have done an unknown amount of good for human society - the human future. A future like a Chinese proverb of many ants working together to achieve greatness. We may not always cooperate well together, but certainly we are better off in many ways in the present than humanity has ever been in the past.

Cho himself had a future. Perhaps if he controlled his anger and continued to write he could have been the next horror author that send chills down readers spines. But now, there is nothing.

Virginia Tech incident and Gun Control

2007-04-18T00:38:00.000-04:00

I've been writing some long posts today, but I think this one will be short and simple.

I'm not particularly a gun-control advocate. I think everything to a point needs to be controlled, the more hazard involved the more control might be advised.

So, Cho goes and purchases a gun and a large amount of ammunition from a gun store at age 23. This is perfectly legal under present laws. Some politicians are taking the time right now to put their foot down and say that better gun control laws will not provide any more benefit.

I think; however, that they are wrong. Specifically on two points that wouldn't be particularly restrictive.

1) I have a friend who is 24, he cannot rent a car. Cho, would not be allowed to rent a car unless he put down $500 payment (in addition to normal rental charges) that he would not get back. My friend had need of a rental car because he traveled to Florida for flight school. No car was available to him. So, let's be straight about this, if it is a business and it MAY cost them money it justifies greater control than a person who wants to purchase a gun which is designed to kill. This doesn't make sense to me. One of these items needs to give, either the age for renting a car or the age for purchasing a gun. Both have high requirements for responsibility. Both can kill. Only one will cost a business a lot of money if it gets wrecked or used improperly. Only one has a higher age requirement for use.

2) It is all well and good that people want to be able to walk in to a store and purchase a gun and walk out that day. However, it sounds like Cho didn't have a single friend and that is most likely part of the profile for him performing the actions that he did. Is it such a burden that if you go to purchase a gun that at least one other person be with you and legally sign that you have known the person for at least 3 years and that you know of no reason that the person purchasing the gun would use it on a person except in self-defense conditions? (for handguns, for hunting rifles, the requirements would be written slightly different)

I don't think the above are drastic changes to what happens when someone wants to buy a gun.

Oh, and one more thing. The victims the doctors saw that were alive all had multiple gun shot wounds. Don't you think that means that the dead victims had multiple gun shot wounds? The doctors indicated that there were at least 3 wounds per person in the hospital.

So, let's do a little math. Cho bought (at least) 17 [injured] * 3 (51) + 32 [dead] * 3 (96) = (147) rounds of ammunition. Now, don't get me wrong, but he bought the gun in March, so he didn't spread the purchase of the ammo across a lot of time - don't you think it should have raised an eyebrow that he bought almost 150 rounds of ammunition? Wouldn't someone think to ask what purpose do they need to have that much ammunition? It doesn't mean that buying that much ammunition needs to be illegal; however, if you can't answer that question with a "I'm going to a target range with a couple buddies and we are practicing our shooting abilities." or something similar I think the shop keep should be thinking about something more than just how much money he is going to make off the sale.

Even some relatively mild controls would have prevented this situation from happening - or at least happening the way it did.

Cho Seung-Hui and Indicators of Psychotic Anger

2007-04-18T00:19:00.000-04:00

A lot of information is coming out about Cho Seung-Hui. My earlier complaint about the faculty member of Virginia Tech not releasing his writing that was disturbing has been rectified, but not by her.

A picture is forming of a loner, who was very angry, and wrote in class about topics that showed his anger. It is mentioned by a former school-mate of his that Cho was a stereotype of the psychotic killer (or similar words).

But this picture can be very misleading. I have known some very f***ed up people - especially when I was younger, but none really turned out all that bad. Perhaps, I have led a sheltered life, but I don't think so.

The reality of the matter is that when I was younger I might have fit Cho's description, except that when people approached me and wanted to talk to me I broke out of my shell fairly easily. Of course, I can't say I was really angry about anything except that I didn't have a girlfriend and at that point in my life I often felt like I wasn't ever going to have a girlfriend. It happens when you graduate high school 5' 9.5" tall and 135 pounds. I was skinny as a rail and easily pushed around by just about everyone.

Fortunately, I never followed Cho's path, I was probably just needy. However, I suspect Cho is like many people out there or rather many people out there are like Cho. Only 1 in a very large number of people follow Cho's path to violence. This is why we don't have many shootings in colleges, but we probably do have many people that feel like Cho at certain points in their lives.

So, before people run around like crazy and reporting people they know that those people are just like Cho and going to pop their cork and kill a bunch of people take five minutes and cool it.

It should be realized that like medical conditions and other psychological conditions, many people have the symptoms that may appear like psychosis or a medical condition. That is because a lot of these conditions are inside of us, but to vastly lower degrees.

So, I'm afraid what Cho has done (not on purpose, most likely) is made it much more difficult for the creative student to write horror or horrific items. In Cho's case he apparently acted in a manner consistent with a person who was angry to the point of not being able to control it. That is an important point to keep in mind.

Each piece of writing has to be considered in its context. The context of the writing is the times we live in and the person writing the story. Writing about madness, death or any other subjects that people don't like to talk about is perfectly normal and stretches our minds. His schoolmate indicated that he wrote about things being used as weapons that he never imagined. Well, that's good in most writers cases, its bad when you think the writer might actually go and perform those actions.

This is similar to the Columbine shooting. Details of the lives of the shooters came out, the games they played on their game console, things they read and music they listened to. Well, so what? Many people fit that profile, few people (regardless of what they play on the gaming console, read or music they listen to) actually go around thinking it is a great idea to go and kill a bunch of people.

Life is very complex especially for humans. Humans are complex creatures by themselves and unpredictable when you take in to account humans interacting with humans. The same indicators in one person that means they are about to go crazy and kill a bunch of people might be the warm-up for another person for a good long game of Doom or a creative binge of writing.

So, if you are Angry that's good, it shows you are alive. Learn to control it and channel that energy in to something creative.

If you feel like you are closing in on madness, find people (professional or otherwise) that can talk to you and that care for you mutually. Hey, it might even be some people in a bar with no other commonality than they need to be able to talk to people before they descend into madness.

If you think you are psychotic, there is one last vital hope - that you care enough about humanity in general to seek help instead of deeping your psychosis.

Christians Can Sometimes be Funny

2007-04-17T16:24:00.000-04:00

This article, "The Best of Racists" is actually pretty funny in an ironic way.

I'll start with a paraphrase version of the article. Some remarks in parenthesis.

01) Don Imus said some racist things and got fired.

02) We all know that some forms of communication help people and some communicate hurt people. It appears that we support hurtful communication and suppress hurtful communication.

03) People who are religious have kids that do well in school. Oh, wait, let's quote the actual study where it says that people who belong to religion AND have an intact and stable family do well in school.

04) Highly religious minorities can outperform white students.

05) Therefore atheism is racist. (somehow #4 indicates #5)

06) Atheists are eugenicists because one atheist author, Margaret Sanger supported eugenics. Eugenics is racism.

07) Slavery was started by Christians

08) Slavery was ended by Christians

09) Atheists are cold people who write off large segments of humanity as having insufficiently endowed genetics

10) For a logically consistent atheist, altruism enables mediocrity.

11) Christians love everybody. God loved us in to existence. The widow's mite is worth more than the whole treasury of the Temple. The best that is worst in use produce more than the intellectual elite can manufacture. (Please note, he is attaching intellectual elite to atheism here)

12) The intellectual elite knows this, but is stubborn and won't realize their own weakness.

13) People who cannot see beyond the skin (atheists are who we are talking about) represent a danger to those who believe and can see beyond the skin.

14) Atheists are going to destroy the world.

So, let's take it point by point.

01) Don Imus said something that was racist and got fired for it. Well, according to a writer on CNN.com, what Imus said wasn't so much racist as sexist. What Imus said wasn't illegal. It was; however, something that corporate entities tied to his show don't want to be associated with and that is why he got fired. What the author is attempting to do in this piece is attack free speech. The very free speech that allows him to write the referenced article.

The article Steve Kellmeyer wrote; however, isn't free speech. It is hate speech. What he wrote as much as he derides Imus, is far worse. I will prove that it is hate speech and that his article is a little bit confused.

02) He suggests that we all 'know' what is right and wrong in terms of speech. But this simply isn't true. We are all very different people that share certain commonalities. What would be terribly insulting to one person is humorous and a learning episode to another person who enjoys frank discussion. This idea is simply the idea that there is a universal right and wrong and that people flaunt it actively. Haven't we all had that incident where we have said something to another person that we thought would be funny and they got insulted? Now, I'm not considering what Imus said to be in this category, I'm just challenging this idea that Steve Kellmeyer is presenting as a premise and saying that he is wrong.

03) People who are religious have kids that do well in school. The first way Mr. Kellmeyer presents this is to appear that religion is the only component in this equation. Later quotes in his article and statements he himself make water this down. A stable and intact family play a huge role in this matter. Anyone who has a friend or has endured parents getting divorced I am sure can attest to the fact that divorce has an effect as well as single parent families.

04) Highly religious minorities can outperform white students. Now this is a paraphrase, but you have to understand that inherent in this statement is a bit of racial superiority. Maybe we should re-state this a bit and say that highly religious white students can do as well as Asian students. It is an implicit statement of superiority.

05) Therefore atheism is racist. Somehow - our author seems to think that #4 indicates that atheists are racist. If we look at #4 it basically states: The greater the religion in a person the better they will do in school. The appropriate corollary to this is not that atheists are racists. It should be that atheists don't do well in school or in fact that atheists do the worst in school.

06) Atheists are eugenicists because one atheist author, Margaret Sanger supported eugenics. Eugenics is racism. I'm not exactly sure where Mr. Kellmeyer is getting his information. I think this is his attempt to tie atheism to Hitler. Who knows? I am an atheist as are many people that I know online and in the real world. None are eugenicists. I know one online that is incredibly racist. Here is the problem with Mr. Kellmeyer's assertion: You can't classify an entire group of people on the basis of a single individual Perhaps if he would like to associate atheism with eugenics and racism he'd like anyone with historical knowledge to trot out the hundreds of notable Christians that were in favor of slavery, racism and characterize all Christians as just like those individuals. Perhaps we should think that all Christians will take a person and tie them to the back of a pick-up truck and drive around since Chrisitians did that relatively recently to someone that they didn't like. We can go on further about this. When you get statistics about churches what do you find? That churches are racist. You have your black churches, your white churches and your Korean churches, but guess what, finding a church that is multi-racial is very hard to find. I don't know what Christians do to maintain this - sit and watch in the churches parking lot before deciding to go in and look at the race of the people going in the church? Oh, dog, its a black church, honey drive to the next church!!!

07) Slavery was started by Christians. This is true.

08) Slavery was ended by Christians. This is only partially true. Certainly Christian motivations for getting rid of slavery weren't based in the bible which appears to approve of slavery and make recommendations on how it should be performed and how people who are slaves should behave. There is a really good book by Susan Jacoby: Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. It goes over in detail the abolition movement and women's suffrage. The origin of these ideas comes from the enlightenment, not the bible or Christianity. Later, these ideas would take hold in Christians that it is wrong to enslave people and wrong to not allow them to vote because of their sex and wrong to treat people differently on the basis of race.

09) Atheists are cold people who write off large segments of humanity as having insufficiently endowed genetics - this is really the author trying to set up moral superiority over atheists. He continues to use the racism card with regard to atheism, but where is he really going with calling atheists racists. We'll see...

10) For a logically consistent atheist, altruism enables mediocrity. Well, he's staying on the atheists must be racists kick here. He probably thinks that all atheists that aren't racists aren't really atheists. Most atheists can be called secular humanists in terms of morality. Secular Humanism is best described as the philosophy of utilitarianism. This philosophy resides in the idea of doing what is best for humanity. Is it best for humanity to pursue an elitist eugenic movement creating a race of super humans? Not really. Such a path would really only produce more strife within humanity. Now to improve humanity in general? Yes, that is a good thing. Genetically? Maybe, but certainly not now when our knowledge of genetics is in its infancy. In utilitarianism, the mediocre plays a vital role in creating a stable society. In that way, we should all hope to be mediocre. Those who have more talents, should use those talents toward improving the world after reaching a certain point in personal stability.

11) Christians love everybody. God loved us in to existence. The widow's mite is worth more than the whole treasury of the Temple. The best that is worst in use produce more than the intellectual elite can manufacture. (Please note, he is attaching intellectual elite to atheism here)

It should be noted that our writer isn't very consistent. He goes from attacking atheists (invalidly and illogically) to attacking the intellectual elite. His implication is that the 'intellectual elite' are atheists. Perhaps this intellectual elite is running the country right now? Oh, wait, you can't possibly be elected to office if you are an open atheist. So, who is running the country (which is apparently headed for destruction)? Well, its Christians. Just like George W Bush. So, somehow with none of the power atheists and the so-called intellectual elite receive the blame for the purported downward spiral of our country. Another problem with his statement is that it is all too clearly a lie. If it wasn't a lie then there wouldn't be any homeless people on the streets because the 85% Christian country would raid all the church coffers in a second to ensure that everyone had shelter and food. This isn't the case. The case is that the vast majority of churches are social clubs with a nice non-profit tax umbrella.

12) The intellectual elite knows this (that it is inadequate and doesn't care for the average person), but is stubborn and won't realize their own weakness. This is just plain an insulting passage designed to bully people to his side of the argument, because after all who wants to be a bad person and these intellectual elitists are the worst there are... This is a simple nudge at dehumanizing the opponent.

13) People who cannot see beyond the skin (atheists are who we are talking about) represent a danger to those who believe and can see beyond the skin.

This is funny, please see my remarks above about the racial components of churches. Go ahead, watch television and these churches on TV, black preacher, black people in the audience, white preacher, white people in the audience and a couple of token black people. I'm not exactly sure when this happened, but it seems like it is ok for a few clean-cut black people to be in a white church, but not for white people to be in a white church.

14) Atheists are going to destroy the world. This isn't exactly what he says in the last paragraph. But the article is all about laying a case against atheists and the 'intellectual elite' whoever they may be. Here he makes a claim that 'society as we know it will be destroyed'. Now if you are a tried and true follower, what exactly do you do if you believe something is going to destroy society? You destroy it first. What is it? Atheists and the intellectual elite. He even spells it out 'these people are the greatest danger.'

So, this article is a hate article. Hate the atheists because they are racists and they are going to destroy the world.

What do you expect someone who reads this article and is a believer of everything this guy has to say and meets an atheist? You know, if the person is a go-getter, a person that does things about the wrongs in society, I know what they would do. Let's hope 'they' don't meet me.

Personally, I've got two kids, wife, two dogs, three cats and a snake that need me to be their sole provider. I don't want to be killed because some jackass that reads this article and is a tried and true believer thinks he's saving the world from the evil atheists.

What's more, Steve Kellmeyer's article is hate speech, and hate speech is not protected speech, it is illegal. Perhaps he'd like to post known atheist names on his website and cross them out when people kill them.

Popular Science - Nuclear Power

2007-04-17T15:00:00.000-04:00

There is an article in the current Popular Science magazine - May 2007, that indicates that a "new toxic-waste recycling process." will be tested in the United States of America.

Imagine my surprise when I continue to read the article and it is simply something the French have been doing for decades. This is basically using the nuclear waste produced in using nuclear power as a power source over and over again until at such point the fuel is completely spent and can be used no more.

During the process the amount of toxic radiation laden material is reduced and this reduces nuclear waste.

But this isn't a new process at least not on Earth. It might be new to the United States of America, but you know that is hardly surprising. We've been falling back on technology for the past 20 years or so, about the amount of time the French have been using this "new" process.

Popular Science - The Future of the Car

2007-04-17T14:30:00.000-04:00

Popular Science magazine in their current issue May 2007, is concentrated on the future of the car. This is only a logical topic as there was a Science Channel/Discovery Channel series recently about the future of the car "FutureCar".

Both the series and Popular Science go in to all the high technology that will go in to cars and Dr. Michio Kaku participates whom I have a deep respect. I've read his book Visions a few years back and enjoyed it thoroughly.

However, the problem with the Popular Science article, the FutureCar TV series and Dr. Michio Kaku's contributions to the FutureCar series is that they ignore simple physics. The point being that by not using a mechanical device to move a person you will always consume more energy for the weight of the mechanical device. This energy, unlike the energy that humans runs on is not always reusable or replaceable.

A large change may be required of society if it intends to keep the majority of its capabilities. We can either concentrate on keeping cars on the road and consuming less (but never zero) energy or we can concentrate on changing our infrastructure and our environment so that human power is what is necessary for most movements.

The way to accomplish this is by making vast cities called an arcology. An arcology is like a city, but most likely it would not have streets, businesses would be located close to residences and work wouldn't be far from home. This can be accomplished with buildings of many different formats, connected together by different types of rail and tubes where people can walk, run or cycle protected from the elements.

It would be a path to a healthier United States population as well, as those of us that can walk to work, will walk to work. It would remove a massive cause of pollution, the automobile from use (at least within the confines of an arcology.

Arcologies are also high on the use of alternative energies, as they can use whatever power source is available. It could start out using coal or whatever, but an alternative power source could be use and replace the current coal burning power plant.

The demise of the car would increase disposable income of the average person, as they would not have to pay for car insurance, car payments, car maintenance and they would gain the time that is typically lost by driving in a car every day.

The demise of the car would also be a huge safety win for humans. They would not die in car accidents, no one would be hit by cars walking across the street and the pollution created by cars would disappear. As a parent in northern NJ, I am always concerned about my child being hit by a car. It is so densely populated up here with so many cars that it is a grave concern to me. No one should ever have to live through losing their child through being hit by a car. An arcology is the path to the removal of this being possible.

Of course, there are technical and social barriers that we would have to overcome in order to create arcologies. Most of us don't want to live in apartments because you can hear all the people around you. However, I suspect that this can easily be solved by using appropriate materials to block the sounds of other people.

Everyone in the world doesn't have to live in an arcology. However, the greater a percentage that do live in arcologies would greatly alleviate many problems that confront humanity now and in the near future.

I suspect all this talk about future cars and all these great technologies is simply delaying the executioner of the car.

Mac Mini Problem

2007-04-17T14:25:00.000-04:00

Well, as I previously mentioned in this blog, we purchased a Mac Mini for my father-in-law. It works great as a computer except for one major problem. The 17" LCD display I decided he should use over his old 15" CRT, doesn't work with it. After the initial Mac startup gray screen the monitor goes to "No Signal".

So, rather fortunately, we had his 15" monitor available and we connected it to that monitor and it works perfectly. There are a number of blogs and articles out there on this subject, which seems to indicate that there is no solution. A German Company in some articles is referenced as indicating that the signal strength output from the Mac Mini is out of specification and too low to be interpreted by some monitor. Expensive monitors can apparently adjust to the lower signal output.

But, if I was interested in expensive, I'd have bought either the iMac or a more expensive PC and not the Mac Mini.

So, we have been recommended to take both monitor and Mac Mini to an Apple store to have it checked out. I'll keep everyone posted when we actually accomplish this pain in the butt. I suspect though, that there simply isn't a fix for this problem.

Viginia Tech Shooting

2007-04-17T14:12:00.000-04:00

I feel sorrow as a parent for all those killed at Virginia Tech. Each and every one of them took years to be made in to college students, people with futures and people that in this country we need to live long fruitful lives. All those hopes are embedded in these students by their parents and the hopes for better futures.

Today, for 32 people most who were college students there will be no future. The absence of a future is a void the exact opposite of having a better future.

The head of the English department at Virginia Tech has revealed that some of Cho Seung-Hui's writings were sufficiently disturbing that they sent him out for counseling. Then in the same paragraph in this article she indicates that she won't tell anyone his grades or reveal the paper that referred him to counseling out of respect for privacy laws.

I have the highest respect for privacy laws, but she already broke those privacy laws by revealing anything about his education that was not already public knowledge. At this point in time to be consistent she needs to reveal this paper that she has now made everyone slavering over knowing the contents public.

I think, that in certain cases privacy laws need to be amended. It should be written that if a person commits a crime that all privacy concerns are no longer in scope. If you run around and kill a bunch of people you lose your right to privacy. Also, in this case it is uncertain whose privacy she is protecting as the individual in question is quite dead. If you are dead, you don't own anything, you can't do anything, you can't feel embarrassed about anything and guess what you don't have a right to privacy anymore since there isn't a 'you' anymore.

Credit Card Woes II

2007-04-09T18:18:00.000-04:00

You know, sometimes I wonder about credit card companies and how they can survive. They practice such unethical business processes that it is a wonder they aren't sued out of existence.

For example, my wife and I had a Chase MasterCard through Amazon. It wasn't originally Chase, as we've had issue with Chase before, but Amazon changed who they were working with so now it is a Chase MasterCard.

We made a transfer from Chase to another credit card with a better rate for 5K. Three months later, Chase tells us that the payment never posted. In the meantime, unfortunately, we had to use the card so when they replaced the 3K on to the card, we went over the credit limit. The funny thing about it is that neither the issuing bank (my wife's credit union) nor Chase notified us that anything was wrong until things were fundamentally screwed up.

So, retroactively, they put us overlimit for 3 months, charged us a bunch of penalties and temporarily closed our account. They indicated if we made the account whole again they would open the account up again.

So, instead of paying the card to make it whole, we paid them a few thousand, and then moved the rest of the balance to other cards and called and said you know what, we don't want to deal with you.

You know why we'll never go back to Chase? Because the bitch on the phone started talking down to me when I was trying to straighten things out. "Didn't you notice 5K of your debt disappeared?" WTF lady, am I supposed to keep after credit card companies to make sure they do their business with money straight? Exactly which one of us is in the business of money? I know what I'm in the business of right now, taking care of 1 then 3 year old and one 4 month old. If you can't catch a problem with a payment for 3 months, I fail to see how I should be penalized at all. If I bounce a regular check, guess what, I know about it instantly. Exactly, why couldn't that happen with a balance transfer check.

End result is that they put 30 to 60 days late on my credit report and I paid their account off and I won't be using Chase ever again.

And you know, its funny, I really like Amazon as a company and I was more than happy to move over to an Amazon Mastercard for purchases with them. Whatever side business they did for having their name on the card, gone. I'll still use Amazon for a lot of purchases, but screw trying to do business with any of their financial products.

Credit Card Woes

2007-04-09T17:55:00.000-04:00

You know, over time you get used to how credit cards work and what happens when you drop the ball or when someone drops the ball for you.

Well, Exxon/Mobile changed who their credit card company is or something and they changed how things behave. Over the years I have been late with the occasional payment. Or missed it completely. Then I'd get the next bill, say 'oh, crap, I missed a payment. ' Send the payment with enough for both payments and all would be well.

But it seems the standards have changed. We get registered mail at my house and we get one every year. Well, out of the 5 years we have been at this house we have never had it delivered by our mail man. In fact, sometimes we'd get 3rd notice with our mail, and never have gotten 1st or second notice or anything with a threat to send the registered mail back.

This year, we got registered mail, from an old employer of mine that stopped paying us just before they passed from existence. It was a check and it was sent mid-December. We got final notice almost mid-January and had to complain for the post office to hold it so we could pick it up.

Then our annual registered mail came in or rather didn't and we complained.

That month, our Exxon bill didn't come and we missed a payment. I suspect it was a gentle hint from our mail man not to fuck with him. (sorry about the expletive, but sometimes it is necessary.)

So, we missed a payment. We get a bill with a past due from Exxon. We pay it. A few days later we get a notice that we're late and that they will be withdrawing our credit. What?

So, I pay that (not realizing my wife already paid it a few days earlier). Then some time passes and we get another notice that we are late. WTF?

You know, something fishy is going on here. What happened to the courtesy of waiting until the end of the payment of the next month to kill me with stuff like this? Is there no room for error?

So, now you should understand, I've been a Exxon Card owner and purchasing only Exxon gas for the past 10 years or more. Can you imagine the thousands of dollars I have spent with them? Picture a minimum of $200 a month and you'll get a glimmer of an idea.

And now they treat me like trash. What next, are they going to send me to collections?

So, I call them immediately after I get this second letter and they tell me, oh yeah, you are flush, you've got $140 credit on the card (both payments hit, but this amount of credit should be low, maybe purchases have already been applied against it).

Top all of this off with the fact that my sister-in-law is having problems with the credit portion of Exxon as well. And Exxon is in jeopardy of losing not $200 a month, but $400 to $600 a month. Maybe it isn't much in the big picture, but I wonder how many people who use Exxon Credit are also having issues with these folks.

Way to chase the customers off that are beating your door down. Hey, there are still other gas stations, and while my wife's grandfather and great-grandfather worked at Exxon, I don't feel any particular loyalty to them. Not when they treat me like dirt.

A New Mac for the Extended Family

2007-04-09T17:30:00.000-04:00

My nuclear family has 1 Mac - a Macbook 13". My wife enjoys everything about it - except that there is limited MMORPG support on the platform.

So, my father-in-laws is suffering from chronic slow computer disease. We ordered a Mac for him, considering that he doesn't have MMORPG needs at all and he needs his computer for e-mail, internet, spreadsheet and ancestry/family tree/ genome project needs and that is it - it is a logical choice for him.

We ordered a Mac Mini, as that certainly far outstrips his needs - at 1.66 Ghz and Intel Core Duo it is a reasonably nice machine, even if it is a bit slower than the Mac book we purchased for my wife while she was pregnant.

It bothers me, though. What bothers me, you ask?

Well, there is an Apple store in Menlo Park Mall here in NJ. We went there in the hopes of purchasing the machine and taking it home and transferring my father-in-laws files. His old e-machines computer was working at that time.

But, I would never purchase any machine at this time with only 512MB or RAM. And that is exactly what the Mac Mini comes with (even if you go up and buy the faster machine!).

And there is the hitch in my plot. If you buy 1GB of memory online they charge like $79. If you want the 1 GB in the store, they are going to charge you $150.

No, friggin way.

The excuse they gave at the store was that RAM costs more for them and that they actually do something something something and you end up with an extra chip.

Well, the extra chip is a waste and RAM costs aside, you should be able to offer in a standardized store the same thing you offer on a standardized web page. It isn't like CompUSA and they have a million things and charge on a FIFO basis for inventory.

In the Mac store they could charge it back to the web site and send the unused memory back to Apple. Or something similar that involved not charging the customer more for the option of necessary memory and pushing the customer to purchase through the web site for anything other than the default configuration.

So, we had to wait for the computer and just as luck would have it my father-in-laws e-machine died (horribly) and now things will be much harder to transfer.

It isn't like I don't have a drive enclosure for his old hard drive. It just makes things more difficult.

General Speaks and Claims 'Personal Views'

2007-03-13T16:55:00.000-04:00

I was a member of the military for 10 years including 2 years inactive duty.

CNN Article

I know exactly what it means to make a public statement in uniform. This is something that is taught when you start out in the military in Basic military training.

1) When you are in uniform you are not to make any public statements unless specifically authorized to do so.

2) Any public statemens made while in uniform are to be official communications of the military.

3) You do not have freedom of speech while you are performing your military duty in a public forum.

So General Pace as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would certainly have authorization to make public statements at any time even as high up as he is in the military he is still restricted by the second two 'rules'.

He should have the self-control to not make public statements while in uniform or performing his duty that might be considered military policy when in fact they are not.

He cannot claim that any statements made while serving and making statements publically are his personal views or by implication protecting his 'first amendment' rights to free speech, when in fact free speech does not exist for a military person serving and making public statements.

I'm sure he can appreciate that he wouldn't want his soldiers under him to discover free speech and first amendment protections any time they have a personal opinion about his orders. Nor can he make first amendment statements while in uniform serving his duty and making public statements.

Calls for him to apologize are foolish. You should never apologize for a statement that is a true representation for who you are and he shouldn't apologize for his statement. General Pace; however, should apologize to the military and himself for losing his battle of self-control and making personal statements as a public representative of the military. He knows he did something wrong (even if it isn't what people think he did wrong) and should make amends.

He has revealed his true beliefs that a fairly large percentage of his comrades in arms are people that he dispises and feels are immoral.

If, as one of the major leaders of the military, he believes as he does that gay activities are immoral and criminal then he should be true to himself. He should pursue gay activities just as much as he would pursue any other known criminals in the military. After all, what kind of moral integrity does he have if he'll allow the known immoral and criminal to fight for his country? He has revealed himself as a bigot and hypocrite.

A bigot - One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ - so much so that he believes these people who perform sexual practices that are unlike his own are criminal.

He is a hypocrite - a person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actually possess, esp. a person whose actions belie stated beliefs - in that he calls the actions of gay people crimes but does nothing to pursue them.

Those that are strong in to military virtues, regardless of their moral beliefs, should no longer want to be lead by a General who lack so much self-control.

Google News Searches

2007-03-06T16:08:00.000-05:00

If you like to read then here are my four favorite searches on google news:

1) Anti-Science
2) Science
3) Technology
4) Atheism

Almost always there is something interesting that pops up in these searches. In the future I'll be running these searchs and writing some about the more interesting articles out there.

Death Segment 2

2007-03-06T14:05:00.000-05:00

This is just going to be a brief post. I know often people will remark that a specific dead person that was close to them helped them through this or that or guided them through something.

I know one thing for sure dead people don't do anything at all. My mother-in-law used to watch my first son anytime we needed her. No spirit can do that if spirits exist.

If spirits cannot be responsible for something simple like watching my 3 year old, how can they be responsible for anything else?

And so... days before my mother-in-laws death my wife became pregnant. My mother-in-law will never know her second grandchild. And who knows, perhaps there will be a third in the future? I can't say. Right now it seems hard enough to deal with two kids and it seems unlikely that any of her siblings will have any children.

I know there are a lot of people that claim that dead people do things. But you don't see dead people doing anything important. You don't see these people that believe in dead people going around doing things depending on these spirits or whatever to go to work for them today because they are sick?

You can believe in spirits or whatever all you want. In the end, what you do is on a daily basis is no different than what a person does that doesn't believe in spirits. The belief in spirits does only one thing for you - gives you a nice fuzzy feeling that the ones you loved in life that have died are somewhere around doing useful things.

Ann Coulter Calls John Edwards a Faggot

2007-03-06T13:22:00.000-05:00

Ann Coulter is a very intelligent woman. I think that point needs to be brought out immediately.

So, when she was accused of using the term faggot (which she did) and she claims it was just a school yard insult and not derogatory of John Edwards sexual orientation and to gays in the United States of America, we know she is lying. An intelligent person in front of a conservative convention that is a paid speaker knows exactly what she is saying.

I don't have a problem with her calling John Edwards a faggot in a personal setting. I don't even care if she says it in a public setting, either. She is a publicity hound and will say or do anything that keeps the coin of her speeches valuable.

No, that isn't the problem.

If you watch the clip you'll hear something very important happen and it has nothing to do with Ann Coulter. Listen to the audience of this major political action committee. A PAC that represents around 50% of the nation.

There is an ooooooing sound from the audience. It is like a fight starting up in the cafeteria in elementary school! And then there is a brief Ah!!! As if to say, I can't believe she said that and its exactly what I'd say if I was up there, followed by loud applause.

Then she closes her speech only seconds later - to thunderous applause.

There was a conservative blog out there that was pissed off at Ann Coulter for associating bigotry and anti-gay sentiment with the conservative movement. I don't know who this person is, but they have a sadly misunderstood idea of their own conservative movement. Listen to the audience. That was not the sound of an audience upset by the speaker saying something they did not want to hear. This was an audience that agreed wholeheartedly with what she said, if not exactly how she said it.

Watch the video again and this time concentrate on her facial movements. She isn't sure at first how well the remark was taken, then the audience takes off with it. She smiles, tilts her head coyly and understands that she has hit her mark. The audience was cheering, there were sure to be press discussion about her which would driving up the value of her speaking engagements (and the demand for those engagements).

She is very proud of what she has done and in her remarks later she is not recalcitrant about saying it - instead she lies and states it is just a school-age insult.

She says that you have to go in to rehab if you use the term 'faggot'. Why would you have to go to an rehab for saying something that is just a school-age insult? No, you might need to go to rehab (at least rehab from the public) if you said the word Nigger. If she was taunting at Political Correctness, it seems that her comment itself is proof that it isn't true - that PC would send you to rehab for saying the word 'faggot'. In her own speech just before she says faggot she determines its meaning. It is clear. She means it as a double-insult - one against John Edwards (who among Democratic presidential hopefuls is the most forgettable) and one against the gay community.

So, Ann Coulter makes a statement, some people get upset, some people are very happy. It should be clear that Ann Coulter has done our society a great service. She has shown that one of the largest PACs and motivators behind republicans and conservatives - are hateful and bigoted. That making such statements does not bring global denouncement by the 'good' people in attendence is a treatise to the fact that they are not the good people they want people to think they are.

The Conspiracy to dismantle NASA

2007-03-02T00:50:00.000-05:00

It seems like years ago that Bush made a statement that we should return to the moon and then go onward to Mars with manned missions.

He did this before the 2004 elections. I thought it was obvious that he wanted to get the votes of the science oriented. NASA is a constant thorn in the side of politicians.

I am a member of an amateur astronomy group - and I said it shortly after his statement - and I'll say it again - it was not only a ploy to get votes but it is a magnificent plan to destroy and dismantle NASA.

NASA then and NASA now does not appear to have the capability to go to the Moon and even less Mars. It was clear that the funds would never be made available for an surge of capabilities necessary to make it to the Moon and Mars again.

Recent articles have stated that there will be a delay in our return to space after the Space shuttle is retired - due to a flat budget for NASA from 2007 to 2008 - which actually amounts to a decrease in funds when you account for inflation.

NASA - will be absorbed by the military in the near future. All it will take now is the public acknowledging NASA as a failure - and it will fail to go to the Moon and Mars, almost certainly... And NASA's budget, capabilities and manpower will all be military.

NASA has already reduced the science it will do in order to make it to the Moon and Mars, soon, it will not be able to do either (and it will be obvious long before the dates come that they planned to get to the Moon and Mars) and NASA will implode like a Black Hole - never to be seen again.

Dvorak's opinion on CES

2007-03-02T00:42:00.000-05:00

In John C. Dvorak's recent articel "Dear CES: Kick Out the PCs" he appeals that the computer technology should be removed from the CES show - to make a new Computer/technology oriented show and have more room for the Consume electronics that are supposed to be featured at CES.

Well, respectfully, I disagree with my favorite computer topic writer.

I think that he is on the right track though. I think that in a monstrous sized convention as the CES, you need clear segmentation of the different businesses. Even to the point that companies such as Sony should have separate stands in different areas - for TV, Computer, etc segments.

Then, you still have the SAP, IBM, Oracle stands that are there - and not for the typical Electronics Consumer - and you still attract the sheer number of people that CES is known.

Hell, I'd even be up for combining Tech Ed for Microsoft and Tech Ed for SAP in to CES... Then it would be great to bring the family.

Guacamole

2007-03-02T00:39:00.000-05:00

I love guacamole. But it is just painful to buy avocados and wait until they are ripe and make it. But I don't have to deal with that anymore.

Sam's club sells frozen avocados with premixed guacamole mix that you thaw, mix up and eat whenever you want it.

Ahhhh, this is happiness. Too bad everything I really like at Sam's club eventually disappears. So, I went and bought some more.

FutureCar series on Discovery Channel

2007-03-02T00:26:00.000-05:00

I like this series a lot, but it seems to me that they lack the negative side of the technologies they talk about.

I don't know how major it is, but I remember reading about the Tweel some time ago.
Noise Problems
As indicated in the above Wikipedia article need to be solved to a better than current tires noise level - before these tires could be adopted by regular people. At first these tires are going to be more expensive than regular tires and if they are more expensive people won't buy them unless they outperform their current tires in almost every way.

But I still love the show. I can't wait for the future to arrive. Personally, though, I hope for arcologies without roads (and no cars) more than I hope for really cool cars. Like any American, though, I love cars.

A Great Discussion Web Site for Religious topics

2007-02-26T18:10:00.000-05:00

If you are a person that is interested in discussions with people of varying levels of belief and non-belief the best site in the world to hold discussions is iidb.org -> The Internet Infidels Discussion Board.

I'm on this site frequently as Old Ygg. Sometimes I'll pose rediculous questions, sometimes I'll ask serious questions and on this site where there are so many questions it is often hard to tell the difference.

Most of the people there are curteous, but not all. Expect that you should be able to back up any statements you make on this discussion board.

There is also another good reason for people to go to this site - if they are atheists, agnostics, secular humanists or any other variety of philosophical thinker - it is a place where you can speak your mind and be the free thinker you are - and be in the company of friends.

Monthly Gas Bill

2007-02-26T17:26:00.000-05:00

So, this month my gas bill was $235 . This is incredible to me - the only thing I use gas for is heating the house and heating household water.

Just last night I was watching Dirty Jobs - where a new senior citizens home was being built - with a large number geothermal wells.

These wells were all 90 or so feet in the ground and helped to alleviate the power consumption of the final structure.

60 million barrels of oil a year could be saved if all the schools in the USA employed similar technology.

Now, this isn't that much when you consider that some numbers indicate we consume 19 million barrels a day, but saving 60 million barrels of oil is still significant - it purchases us three days more oil on the year than if we continue with our current usage profile.

So, when I move in to my next house, I'd certainly love to put in such a system. A combination of a wind turbine, geothermal heat source and some solar panels might reduce my oil profile significantly.

But the value isn't there just for a single household to do it. The value is to convert large numbers of homes to it, so that maybe we set up all the schools with geothermal power, then a significant percentage of homes and save another 60 million barrels of oil and we end up with 6 days less of oil consumption next year than this year.

All this construction certianly comes with a cost - and uses oil to be implemented. So, maybe the first year this is a wash. Then in the following years we could start saving more barrels of oil.

Of course, our population (and the world's population) continue to increase and demand will still increase even with implementing these kinds of measures. Without implementing these kinds of measures; however, we will have less energy for everyone (and higher prices).

So, there is little choice. We need to work to start saving energy resources. My gas bill this month is $235 - what will it be next year?

Second Introduction

2007-02-26T17:16:00.000-05:00

So, it has been a very long time since I have posted on this blog and a great many thing have happened since my last posting.

My wife and I had two miscarriages during the time I was blogging. Then my mother-in-law died - and unknown to everyone my wife was pregnant a few days before her death.

You can imagine that the hope engendered by being pregnant was tempered both by the past spontaneous abortions and by my mother-in-laws death.

Fortunately, the third pregnancy went full term and our second child (out of 4 pregnancies) was born. His name is Corwin and our first child is Random, both boys. It would be nice to have a third child, but the emotional wringer of the spontaneous abortions as well as age and higher risk of disease and economics all factor in the decision. Corwin is only 5 months old now and certainly we wouldn't want to have the next one too soon - as that also increases the chances of a spontaneous abortion.

Well, I certainly have hopes for the future. I hope my boys will have better lives than I've had, even if what I've had so far isn't so bad. It is in the core of my mind that the future should be better than the past.

So, now, this blog is for both of my boys. Hopefully, in reading these blogs when they get older they will get some idea of who I am as well as ideas about the world around them.

New Species Threaten the Earth

2007-02-26T16:49:00.000-05:00

This CNN article should be cause for alarm for everyone.
Antarctic ice melt reveals exotic creatures

Quote From CNN article: "Looking down 2,800 feet into the icy water -- a comparatively shallow depth -- they found fauna usually associated with seabeds about three times that deep, in places where the creatures must adapt to scarcity to survive.

There were blue ice fish, with dorsal fins like ribbed fans and blood that lacks red cells, an adaptation that makes the blood more fluid and easier to pump through the animal's body, conserving energy at low temperatures....

Among the hundreds of specimens collected, the scientists identified 15 possible new species of shrimp-like amphipods, and four possible new species of cnidarians, organisms related to coral, jellyfish and sea anemones, the scientists said in a statement."

Does the above quote scare you? Perhaps not. Perhaps you have put together what I have from that article.

Damage is done to environments by foreign species introduction. With the melting of these ice shelves we have a massive introduction of foreign species - species from another time. Most of these species have probably died off due to circumstances of their times. That does not mean that those circumstances continue to exist in the present. Perhaps the starfish in this article may survive better than existing starfish and cause damage to the environment at the same time.

We have a massive task ahead of us and no one is even discussing it. These foreign species from another time need to be isolated from our current environment. They could be carrying diseases that current species have no protection from.

Since it is apparent that no one is being pro-active in this aspect we may run in to new species replacing old ones in a reverse form of evolution, we may find new diseases in existing species some of which definitely do not need the help over the edge and we may luck out and the biodiversity being delivered in to our ecosystem will replace species that are being lost presently due to our direct actions.

Hey, anyone want to comment? Am I insane or some misled prophet of doom? Of course, one should realize that I do not mean that horrible things will happen. What I mean is that horrible things could happen and that we increase those chances by not dealing with the invasion of past species in to our current ecosystem.

Then again, maybe the new starfish will be edible by humans and replace the dwindling species of sea life.

Kiln or Furnace

2006-09-18T01:47:00.000-04:00

Well, who knows if anyone still reads this blog, it has been a long time since I posted anything here. My mother-in-laws death and my wife's pregnancy which happened as near simultaneously as these things can has vastly reduced time available for the expansion of thought.

Anyway, I was reading an article in a magazine - nature or something like that where they discussed finding a huge impact crater in Africa, by high-altitude imaging and locating pieces of quartz.

In that article it discussed that at 1600 degrees silicon turns in to quartz (not the point of the article, I know - the point of the article was that it was the largest impact crater ever found, once it was realized what it was).

So, now I am curious - if anyone can answer the question - how can I make something to produce 1600 degrees and melt silicon in to quartz?

The other question I have is interesting. If the quartz created in Africa was from a vast impact, why is there (or was there) so much quartz in cape may (sometimes known as cape may diamond)?

Death

2006-01-16T12:25:00.000-05:00

I'm going to be writing an article on Death - but I never seem to be able to finish it.

My mother-in-law died on Christmas day - very suddenly - and this leads my thoughts to travel to thoughts about death.

So, I haven't written much on my blog or on the Useless-knowledge website. In fact, I've written nothing.

Hopefully, I'll be able to come up with some content sometime. The reality is that either in work, after work hobbies or other activities - I've been having trouble concentrating and completing my tasks. I have lots of things to write articles about - but I keep returning to my article on death, which I can't seem to finish.

In the beginning, this blog was written so my son would have resources about me - other than the spoken word by others, about who I am and things like that.

Well, I can say somethings to tell him about himself of the past when he reads this in the future.

Of the grandparents, your Grandmother on your mother's side was the one you were closest to - and she played with you and seemed ready to watch you at a moments notice whenever we needed her help. Seemingly swollowed up in to a black hole at our house and foregoing making dinner for your grandfather and other things to watch you or sometimes just to help us with you.

More about this I suspect will show up in my article - which - who knows - perhaps no one will read. It seemed though that she was happiest when she spent time with you, my son.

Alex

UK - Article Loading to Database

2005-12-12T13:59:00.000-05:00

Well, I've improved my performance greatly in loading the article into my database in the hopes that I'll be able to use this data to help them update their interface.

So, up from the last number of articles I have loaded in to my database, I now have 7770 articles of over 10,000 articles uploaded.

That's pretty good. Less than 3,000 to go and then I'll need to be able to grab the most recent articles as well.

There are lots of options with the Useless-Knowledge website update. one hopes for the least work for the most increased abilities, looks and performance, but it seems to me that it is likely that they'll need something completely custom.

I just don't know. And considering the efforts necessary for completely custom - it is difficult to discern if it is worth it. Perhaps they should look at the update in phases. Start with looks and an improved posting logic. Then later add article counters and comments sections to the articles.

It might be better, who knows.

Alex

New Greyhound

2005-12-12T12:10:00.000-05:00

This is mostly a personal entry. It has been the better part of two years since one of our two greyhounds had to be put to sleep.

I should say that there is a moral obligation when humans take on pets - that you must be able to say to yourself about the animal at least 'I am going to kill you' - when you take on a pet.

Because it is unfair for an animal to live its existence primarily for your pleasure and companionship to suffer a horrible painful prolonged death because you don't have the guts to know when the time is - to put that animal to sleep. To kill it. Or you don't have the courage to do what needs to be done.

And in most cases - unless you are near the end of your own life you will outlive your family pet(s). One of the dogs we almost adopted - the owners - a couple - the husband died. The dog was mostly the husbands dog and the wife I suspect may no longer have been up to handling a dog - at least for a time. Fortunately, the dog is healthy and can be re-adopted to another family. Boy it was a really friendly dog. I have cats in the house, though - and this particular greyhound failed the cat test and wanted to eat the test cat. Since I don't want to have another dog at the expense of losing all my cats - he was out of the running.

It is a stark reality that any pet owner should acknowledge when you begin your custodianship of an animal. It is responsiblity for life and death.

Determination of when that time is - to put down a pet - is much harder. But if you don't recognize the fact that this will probably come to pass on inception of taking care of an animal - it is much harder.

No matter what it is hard to put an animal down - when the balance has shifted significantly on the issue of quantity or quality of life. It is largely a judgement call - but good veterninarians won't let you put an otherwise healthy animal down - if in their judgement you are overreacting.

Ok, so we've been looking for a new dog. It is always a journey to find a good fit. Fortunately, I think we found one in a timid greyhound who is just off the track called Willy.

Unfortunately, our current greyhound is called Philly, and Willy doesn't know his name. So you call one and you get both. So we are going to change Willy's name. Usually we keep the name, with Jet and Philly - we kept their original names. They both also seemed to know their original names - so that makes it a whole lot harder to justify changing the dogs name.

I've been watching a lot of anime lately - and am a fan of the sounds that Japanese language makes. So, my wife and I came up with a first and last name for our new Greyhound formerly known as Willy.

Oku Gengetsu. Oku - meaning Timid. Gengetsu - meaning crescent moon.

Greyhounds in general are somewhere between labrador retrievers and well, I can't come up with a completely sedate breed of dog. Anyway, Greyhounds are usually fairly well-rounded in being jumpy happy dogs and lying on the couch or floor sleeping.

Oku, though - and probably because he doesn't know anything about anything - is very very timid. So, Oku means timid in Japanese - and timid he is.

Crescent moon - is because he has a large two or three inch tall crescent moon scar on his side. We actually didn't notice it when we picked him up (him being very timid and another dog that we couldn't have because of his cat-eating obsession being very pushy and wanting to be with me). It wouldn't have mattered, of course. Philly was abused before she came to us and had many scars, but nothing nearly as large as this.

Timid Crescent Moon. Doesn't sound nice or anything in English. It is transformed - even in simple words - in Japanese to Oku Gengetsu.

So, hopefully, some day - a very long time from now - will come the time of decisions for Oku. And one hopes it will be a long time for Philly as well. But Philly is getting older and a large amount of the reason we got Oku - was because she was getting lonely and stopping eating.

She is of course ecstatic to have a companion again.

Now, if only we could get Random to be disciplined enough not to scare Oku so Oku can get acclamated to our house. :)

He's doing well, though - with all so many new things around him. And he isn't allowed to come up on the couch yet.... Which has got to bug him because Philly is allowed to... But them's the rules passed down from the adoption/rescue people and that's that.

Alex

Useless-Knowledge

2005-12-08T13:54:00.000-05:00

I am currently involved in a project to update the useless-knowledge website. Who knows what will really happen to the site, but one thing is crystal clear - in a major update many people might say leave the old articles behind.

This is very disturbing to me - these articles represent a lot of work on the part of a lot of people. Over 10,000 articles and who knows how many people.

So, I have begun first by getting a list of all the articles in to my database - and now the slow process of grabbing that content and putting it in a database. This way, if and when a conversion happens, the data will be in a database and can be applied to the newer format.

I am currently on the 143rd article - going in to my database. This is going to take some time, because I have ascertained no completely automated way to place the articles in the database. I could grab the entire page, but this isn't particularly useful.

I am just grabbing the article content and whatever HTML is associated with the article.

We'll see how long I stick with this and how much time is involved.

Alex

Colored Bubbles

2005-12-08T13:49:00.000-05:00

In a previous posting I showed a link to a Popular Science of Popular Mechanics article - which talked about the difficulties of creating bubbles that have color instead of clear bubbles.

Well, one of the uses this process could be applied to is medical coloring. Since the color disappears - when one applies an ointment to your face (for example) it could be colored temporarily - showing the user exactly what parts of the face have been covered.

I suffer from acne - even at age 34 - or however old I am now.

I use a couple of topical medications as well as a medical soap - but nothing works 100% or even 95%.

I do wonder if such medical coloring - could help - and show what parts of the face I miss with medicine (if that is what is the current problem).

The applications of this material are immense - even without considering the cosmetic fun that could be had if the coloration lasted hours instead of seconds.

Alex

Writing Music

2005-12-06T09:52:00.000-05:00

I was involved with music ages ago. Or at least it seems like ages ago. Right now I have some music instruments around and I play them sometimes for my son so that hopefully he will have some interest in music.

So, it has always been of interest to me to write music - but writing music on paper and performing it with a trumpet was never really my interest. I always wanted to do it in some automated manner.

There is software out there - mentioned by Him Louderback - that allows you to write music (using music notes and Midi synthesizer sounds) on the computer and have the computer perform the music.

Two pieces of software he mentions specifically - Cakewalk Sonar 5 and Notion. He had some complaints about Notion, but he also had some good points with it in that it had excellent sounds to go with the music notes. Rather unfortunately, the software is relatively expensive and at the moment I am pursuing other non-work goals.

Can't do everything at once. Right now I am concentrating on writing my Manga Style comic book - starting with an outline of the story and a cell by cell description of what needs to be drawn.

And at the same time, I am gradually getting the opportunity to learn how to draw in the Manga style.

I suspect that this will be a long-term project, but I definitely feel that the medium of Manga comic book will be an excellent form for the stories I have to tell.

Alex

The Bright Colors of Future

2005-12-05T14:57:00.000-05:00

In a post I made some time ago - I indicated that one of the things I would want would be to change the color of my skin, eyes and hair at any time and be able to change them again - as often as I would want to.

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/0a03b5108e097010vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

There is now technology that might make some of that possible. I can almost see me with blue hair and green skin with bright red eyes. A few hours later - I'd be back to my natural color.

Who knows if these guys will be able to realize it?

I can see it now, if my son has children and I'm old he'll be yelling at them about using natural colors instead of flourescent yellow for hair color...

Alex

Vacation

2005-12-04T02:28:00.000-05:00

Well, I have returned from vacation - lots of things that I want to write reviews of from the course of my vacation. Our Plan with Tan vacation plan, the rental car (Lincoln Town Car), Parks that we went to and overall how things turned out. Some of these will be articles and I suspect that some of them are more blog entries for here and of more personal interest.

Oh, if you go with your child to play with sting rays at Sea World, please don't scream out when it sucks on your fingers when you feed it while your toddler is next to you. My wife scared the crap out of my son doing that.

Anyway, it turned out ok. :) Hopefully my son won't be deathly afraid of sting rays for life.

But if he's going to be afraid of something - deathly afraid of something - sting rays are a pretty good object.

And I didn't feed the sting rays after that :)

Alex

Notes on current News #1

2005-11-22T13:54:00.000-05:00

Science continues its decline in the Western world.

Consider that once - science was core to the Muslim world. Today and for a couple of centuries this has not been the case.

It should be noted that an increase in religosity is what killed of science and philosophical thought in Muslim society.

This is what is happening here in the Western World.

There aren't enough physics teachers in the UK.
Entropy in UK

Top biologists abandon the best colleges in the United States because they are not free here to do the research necessary.
Stem Cell Scientists

Genetically modified food is feared in Europe and in the United States it is prevalent but society in general is blithely unaware that it is happening. It is uncontrolled. Either policy is dangerous.

And now we have problems getting corporate America to supply funding for a Darwin exhibition at a major museum.

We are turning our backs on science - science which is literally the hand the feeds us, earns our great incomes and makes our countries flourish.

Seems there is no way to stop history from repeating itself. I suspect though - that this time through the cycle there will not be so much time in the Interregnum, and the state of science will overall be higher throughout this Interregnum.

Alex

Today Monday 20051121 in the News

2005-11-21T13:19:00.000-05:00

GM reports that they will be cutting 30,000 jobs over the next 3 years. This will result in a 1,000,000 car drop in production capacity.

Does it matter that GM is going to lose 1,000,000 car capacity? Not really. They fell in love with the American ideal of bigger is better and made lots of profit. Now they laughably have commercials about the great mileage they get in their cars. Talking about the remade Cavalier/Cobalt getting 34 mpg.

I have two very important points on this...No, three

1) When my wife owned a Chevy Corsice (1989) hatchback - she loved the power in the car. It had a nice six cylinder engine. But the brakes were constantly not quite right, I changed the battery in the car - and we had to take it to the dealer so they could reset the computer (apparently you can't do something as simple as change the battery yourself) and the electrical system was beginning to act - well weird.

2) Every American car has left me stranded on the road and helpless. It is not a good feeling - and living in New Jersey not every area is a place where you can walk to a house and ask for help.

3) My Honda Civic - 1992 - which I have since donated had 222,222 miles over 9 years. Its sticker (stick shift/manual trans) had 36/40 MPG. Sometimes you get better and sometimes you get worse mileage than the sticker. That car for the life of the car when I owned it - got 40MPG. The car broke down once - because the distributer finally crapped out at 160,000 miles. And Chevy wants to laud the Cobalt (similar car) getting 34 MPG! What a bunch of idiots - is the kindest way I can put it. And you know what - my parents had a 1986 Cavalier - and it was a piece of crap. In fact, it was the car that turned my family from American Manufacturers to - well Honda.

I could really go on a lot about this stuff. Really this is a case of macroeconomics and microeconomics.

On the Microeconomic side you have comfort, reliability and fuel-efficiency. This are all factors in favor of Honda vs GM.

On the Macroeconomics side you have jobs, GNP and global perception of Americans. These are things that if you lose the Microeconomics side - guess what you lose the Macroeconomic side.

Guess what, people in general are what you might call selfish. We don't want to be victims of being left on the side of the road. We don't want to be victimized by garages that charge lots of money to do repairs or dealers that charge even more to do repairs. We like it even if there is just a perception that by the things we do on a daily basis we are saving money.

So, people buy what is best for them - meaning foreign cars in general and my family - Honda in specific. My wife's Honda CR-V has 202,000 miles on it. Never broke down. Although once it wouldn't start because the 6-year old battery finally died. My newer Honda Accord Coupe that I replaced my Honda Civic with has 37,000 miles on it (my driving habits have changed a lot) and it needed the transmission replaced. It was on warranty and the new warranty on the new transmission is 10 years. So, I am relatively unconcerned about that.

So, nearly 500,000 miles in cars my wife have owned and one break-down. And I'm not even including the hundreds of thousands of miles my parents have put on their three Hondas that they have owned over time. A Honda Wagovan (great car, but butt ugly), their newer Honda CR-V and their 1996 Honda Accord which has 137,000 miles on it.

Sp, anyway, read this article for more information - including a little note from an analyst saying 'Clearly, they eventually need to make better products that are more competitive with their foreign competitors, but that's a long-term proposition'. The main problem is that GM does not have a long term proposition anymore. They need to make better cars, more fuel efficient cars - now, not next year and certainly not three years from now.

http://www.thestreet.com/_googlen/markets/natworden/10253826.html?cm_ven=GOOGLEN&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA

Sorry folks. I went on a rand there. Nothing upsets me more than blatant stupidity. Yeah yeah - buy American and get stranded on the road. You know what - I'm in to limiting my risks. When you break down you could get in to a car accident, you could have a bad element come and rob or worse you and your car, and you could be trying to fix it on the side of the road and get hit by a drunk driver.

No thanks. I prefer to not break down in the first place.

RIAA Backs Rootkits
People are auctioning your privacy all the time. Apparently this guy thinks that anything on your computer is something that he has the right to take a look and see if everything is working just the way he wants it.
Everyone needs to send letters to these people and tell them they are allowed to make fair profit - but charging $15 an Audio CD, when everyone knows they can go to a store and buy CDs for less than 30 cents a pop, 50 cents a pop if you want a case just isn't going to float.

We just don't care enough about their profit margin. They should replace all these record stores with little machines that let you preview music and say 'burn it' and burns a quality CD. There would be no over supply or under supply of disks. People could conceivably know every track that they are purchasing and the entire disk should cost no more than $2.

Apparently stupidity is not exclusively an American trait:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/11/21/australia.tourist.ap/index.html

From the 'I want to torture people and my government won't let me. Waaaa' group:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/11/21/cia.prisoners.ap/index.html

Something nice to see - but maybe not so nice to smell.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/11/21/stinky.plant.ap/index.html

I have to say - if there was one that was 11 feet tall (or so) it would be neat to see in person. Hard to imagine a 11 foot tall dandelion...

So, if you have been up on the headlines lately - you may understand that there is a Darwin exhibit in a New York area museum. Due to the recent ID/Evolution debate - it attacted - $0 in businesses to fund the exhibit. Incredible. Stupidity spreads from individuals to large identities. It will be remarkable indeed if the United States will be able to keep up with other countries in science when we are apparently averse to what the science actually means and impacts life.

You know... Mazda went for a few years without the RX7 - its hot car. They noticed something - their sales slumped. Part of the reason they brought the car back as the RX8 - is that they needed something to attract people to the showroom.

Well, the United States of America's business is much like a car manufacturer. We have in the past had a lot to offer other countries. Our technical abilities attract people to do business here.

But, in this rapidly changing world - the United States of America in general is rejecting science. And our rate of scientific progress is slowing while places like South Korea are outstripping us in biology - once one of our main points of scientific progress. Science is no longer respected in the United States and we will not be attracting employers. Large companies like Intel are actually shipping high-technology jobs out of the country. Will India be the next powerhouse economy, South Korea or maybe perhaps China? It could well be.

Anyway, more than enough typing for now.

Alex

Torture

2005-11-18T11:10:00.000-05:00

Torture - is not allowable under any circumstance. It is a violation of the rights of man.

It is not a violation of anything in the bible or Christian religious documentation.

This is expressed by the actions of our currently very Christian government.

Ex-CIA chief: Cheney 'VP for torture'

Even the appearance of impropriety is damaging to the person who claims to be the good guy. I would advocate total video observation of any prisoners recorded to hard drives and not alterable except by Congress and the Supreme Court. It should not be viewed except for the time periods any prisoner or person brings up that improprietary conduct happened.

Who watches the watcher?

All I can really say is that I cannot believe much of anything a person says once they say they are in favor of torture - except that person is capable of anything.

Alex

Today in the News So Far

2005-11-18T09:29:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm going to start writing a little free form about the news I see on a daily basis. I might mine this later for article topics for the things that really cause me concern.

CNN:
Suicide bombers kill dozens in 2 Iraqi cities
People appear to die every day in Iraq. The decision is made at some point that killing will acheive your goals or if your goals can be acheived through peaceful initiative. There is little excitement in solving issues through politics... The HERO wants the war - so they can be proclaimed a HERO by all and remembered. In the end, all wars end with politicians and agreements - the Hero's actions a turn in to just a political necessity.
This CNN article is ok - until there is a non sequitur in the middle of the article when they start talking about a democratic Hawk that is now requesting our withdrawal from Iraq. The placement of this paragraph makes the implication that somehow this democrats actions resulted in the attacks and deaths in Iraq.
The next paragraph repeats a White House official calling the democrat - a coward.
A former Vietname Vet - being called a coward - by people that never served.

It is not cowardice to want to back out of an unjust war. Cheney was noted in an article yesterday: Cheney: War critics are opportunists He says senators of both parties saw Hussein as a threat that he considered Democrats opportunists and that they were attempting to revise history.

This is patently untrue. Let's break it down shall we.

Truth - Everyone backed the war at the time we started it. At least in terms of congress and in terms of having enough votes to say - let's go kill some people for the just cause.

Implication that is False - that Democrats are changing their mind on the basis of no new information.

Listen folks, I don't know how to say this any clearer. If we entered the war under false pretenses, we need to apologize to the Iraqi people, today and not 150 years after the fact like we did to the native americans.

No, leaving Iraq immediately is not probably on the list of the top 10 best things to do. Neither, apparently was starting the war in the first place. Suddenly, people are soooo concerned about the USA doing the absolute best possible action when they weren't all that concerned when they started the war in the first place.

Personally, I don't think we should pull out. But, I don't think we should stay there either.

We should pull out because we look a lot like a invader at present.

We should not pull out because Iraq may well fall in to total civil war if we just leave.

There is a solution to this problem, I think. But we need to find a neutral party that is trusted by everyone willing to send their troops in to replace ours.

Problem is, the only neutral parties I can think of don't really maintain much of a military and at this point in time must view sending troops to Iraq like we should have when we started sending troops to Vietnam after the French were getting the snot kicked out of them there. Basically 'no way are we sending our folks there to die'.

Anyway, enough about the war. Just consider that we have a whole appeals process before we can execute a person, but to start a war we just need a bunch of a$$hole politicians who may or may not have military experience to say 'hey that sounds like a great idea'.

Technology saves the day - again - no supernatural beings necessary:
Sons save mom overseas with webcam.

Cheap laptops for everyone?
Windup laptops aim to bridge digital divide
Well, I suppose it isn't quite for everyone. Personally, they should charge $150 per laptop in the United States and make it a big seller this year. Take the extra $50 (assuming these folks are smart enough to be flush with money from $100) and give out free laptops instead of $100 laptops.
The wind-up laptop looks pretty neat to me - and if it is basically an internet only type of machine with basic functionality - I think it would be great as a second or third machine. It would also be a great advertising opportunity for Linux - the operating system I think will be on these laptops.

But you know, they'll probably only make them available in 3rd world countries and ignore the possibilities. Hell people in the US pay four times as much for a cell phone sometimes, people.

News in General
Sony's DRM woes expand to include copyright infringement
Now, Sony is a big company and they have a really big screw-up on their hands with their RootKit using DRM software.
I'm a programmer, and I've got to believe that Sony can at least afford to pay top-notch programmers. But apparently, they have a buch of coders that steal open-source code for commercial purposes! I mean, these guys didn't even bother to write their own software for playing MP3s.
This is nuts. I'm tempted to never by Sony stuff again after noting the things they are willing to try to protect themselves and the well poor quality in their ethics practices in using GPU license code and hiring people that can't code for crap when obviously they have money for coding.
Well, maybe after all the lawsuits settle they won't have so much money and they'll have to hire good people for more money instead of morons for $1.50 an hour.

Standard war for next DVD discs.
Blu-Ray snubs HP
Well, I hate to say this, but this whole argument about the next DVD standard is really moot. Yeah yeah yeah - higher quality DVD content for HDTV. You know - that's just not that important to me. New DRM built-in to the disks - either by Blu-Ray or HD-DVD - well, folks its hard for me to get exciting about something that is a benefit to the producers of content and not to me.
Its like getting excited about PMI on my house. Ooooh exciting I'm paying insurance so that when I go under financially the banks will have my mortgage fully paid off - but does this help me in any way - no - mortgage gets paid off and I'm still out of a house and probably a job.

Real nice. I can't wait for the cracks to come out for the new DRM these guys dream up. I think people copy DVD's now just because they can and because they are thumbing their nose at the 'man' than for any other reason. Commercial pirates - you know those folks should fry. But if I want to make a laugh/funny group of cuts from movies - how come its friggin impossible? If I want to do anything just for fun using these folks content - I'd have to spend thousands of dollars - probably more.

If I was selling that stuff, it'd be different, but you know these people are morons. They have no marketing sense. If I did make a funny movie composed of the actual funny bits of so-called funny movies and people saw it and laughed - that would generate interest and possible sales of those movies.

Review: New 'Potter' tries to do too much
I'll be going to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire today. I'll report what I can about the movie. I'm a big fan of the series, but the last movie was a bit too short given the actual content of the book. I do wish people had the attention spans they used to have during President Lincoln's time. They would go to a debate that lasted 8 hours long. Now its a struggle to get people to sit down for 2.5 hours to watch a movie. Hell, I'd love to see Sci-Fi channel pull off their magic and do a paragraph by paragraph Harry Potter... Oh, it'd be ages long (not the first movie so much, they didn't cut as much from that as the others), but it would be very enjoyable.

Probably have to wait 20 years for them to do something like that - because the people who have the current license for Harry Potter wouldn't let anyone else edge in for that long.

And to point - its probably a few years before the series wraps up in the movies.

By then, who knows - home movie makers may have enough technology to do it justice by themselves.

ok, well I guess that's enough headlines for today. Time to do some real work.

One more thing - anyone that has advice on how to draw anime/manga - feel free to drop me a comment or e-mail message. RhagamYgg@hotmail.com . I have a few story lines I want to write - and I was going to do them as books, but I suspect that the proper medium for them is Manga/Anime.

Alex

Google Adsense and this Blog

2005-11-17T22:48:00.000-05:00

Well, I decided to add Google's Adsense to this Blog. It was not all that hard to do, and it wasn't even something I really did intentionally.

I just logged in to the blog and saw the ad for adsense. Followed it down the path.

Supposedly, adsense searches the blog and only puts ads on it that are related to the content. If it does a good job, please visit the linked ads at the top of this blog.

It could mean money for me - but you know, I'm not going to get my hopes up.

Anyway, the click of the ad on a page does not trigger any monetary gain. It is what you do when you get to the destination web page. If you click a few links on the destination web page it generates some numbers which in turn will generate a few pennies on my side.

So, if the links at the top of the screen look like they are something worth it for you, please by all means click on through and look around on those web sites.

The links there presently are of interest to the programmer in me - the IT business and things like that.

But as I have said in many articles - you need to be as aware as you can of how computers work so that you will not be a victim in a computer run society, but someone that understands what is going on around them.

Alex

Recent Articles

2005-11-17T18:40:00.001-05:00

Well, two of my most recent articles have been posted on Useless-Knowledge.

Here they are:

This article is about how the idea of Conception being the beginning of life and the rights associated with life would have severe consequences to a great many people.
Considering Life to Begin at Conception

This article was written at the request of another writer - it details the various things people need to do to protect their computer (and themselves) on the web - and the things that can threaten you on the web.
Things You Should Understand About Your Computer and People

Alex

Urusei Yatsura - Those Obnoxious Aliens

2005-11-16T17:27:00.000-05:00

I have a new favorite show - and it is Urusei Yatsura.

I first discovered it on OnDemand on HBO - the movie "Beautiful Dreamer".

Excellent movie in the Urusei Yatsura universe - but the wrong place to start watching the show - as it appears to be after the TV series.

So, now I am renting through NetFlix - the TV Show DVDs.

Urusei Yatsura is written/drawn by the same person that wrote Inuyasha - another of my favorite shows. Rumiko Takahashi .

Inuyasha a dark and has its own flavor - one so completely different that Urusei Yatsura that it is astonishing that kind of breadth is contained in a single person.

Urusei Yatsura - of all things is a comedy. I suppose it would be considered an 'R' rated comedy by the sad state of United States of America standards. I believe it was originally designed for Japanese Teens and pre-teens.

It is excellent in the incredible amount of humor in the show - and the humor works so well it works even though I've got to read the subtitles.

So, if you are afraid of a little nudity - or teenagers behaving well like teenagers - specifically boys, but a little bit of the girls as well... I'd stay away from this one.

If you have a tolerance for nudity and don't believe it will burn your eyes out and that seeing what people really are like when they are teenages isn't going to degrade your moral values or the future moral values of your current teenager - I highly recommend this series.

And for everyone that is against this sort of thing because it degrades women etc (with the nudity) I remind you very strongly - this story is written by a woman.

Alex

Recent Articles and Thoughts of More Topics to Write Aboue

2005-11-13T11:54:00.000-05:00

Hi Everyone,
It has been a little while since I have written. When life - or work anyway - become more active it is hard to keep up writing on the blog.

Anyway, I have written a few more articles on Useless-Knowledge.

I wrote an article about the need for everyone to have a basic understanding of computer programming.
http://www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/oct/article387.html

This is the first article that I have written showing people how to write a simple article:
http://www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/nov/article090.html

I wrote an article opposing the idea that these are the 'end-times'. I could probably write more on this topic.
http://www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/oct/article317.html

Here is an article about George Bush - regarding the idea that he is basically a paradox... How can he believe that all life began in the basic form that it is now - if he also believes that a bird flu can mutate in to a human variant and kill people? There is of course a lot more detail in the article.
http://www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/nov/article074.html

This is an article about the foolishness of authors and publishers in thinking that somehow Googles efforts to make all books searchable will harm them. It will by far make the money and increase the ability for people at home to start the research using books - legitimate resources - instead of just the web - where there are a lot of unverified resources out there behaving like factual resources.
http://www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/nov/article051.html

This is an article discussing the inability for there to be a common ground in terms of ideas in the discussion of Evolution and Intelligent Design. It is similar to comparing a drawing of a car on paper and a car that has been through the design process and completely built and is functioning.
http://www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/nov/article042.html

I want to write a series of articles on actions that would result in a better election process. Anyone that has thoughts on this - please make a response to this blog entry.

Also, I want to write about the legality of statements made by a certain Fundamentalist Christian Leader - threatening a Pennsylvanian town.

Abwägen

Talking to Meme

2005-09-20T14:12:00.000-04:00

Meme is the name that my wife and her siblings applied to their grandmother many years ago. That name continues on for her in her role as great-grandmother to my son.

It is good talking with her on the days that she watches my son. It helps me to kick out ideas and she certainly has a different perspective on technology - having lived through the times when technology was such a smaller part of our lives.

There are many things that we have done to our society that reflects back onto us that if we had thought about it - we would have designed things different. Some things as simple as the housing development - need to be re-thought and re-designed for safety, efficiency and reduction of waste.

I'll be writing an article in the future about my design for a community - that would be a better place to live. Something that could be instituted in the hurricane ravaged New Orleans area - if people stop and think instead of run and just rebuild what was once there. Rebuilding what was once there is simply planning for the next event that will destroy the area again.

Article: iPODs disposable culture

2005-09-20T14:10:00.000-04:00

Hi everyone I have written an article about iPODs and focused specifically on the non-user replaceable battery.

People send Apple accolades about design, but neglect the fact that the design could be better, and the focus of apple's design of the iPOD is style and not utilization.

http://www.useless-knowledge.com/1234/sept/article304.html