Ranting to /dev/null

A moment of justice

Saddam Hussein, the 'Butcher of Baghdad' has been hung from the neck until dead.

Rejoice.

Homecoming

I'll be headed into Chattanooga tomorrow. Should arrive by 8:00 PM or so. I'm bringing my friend Rob with me, and we're probably crashing at Todd's place, and partying with him on Sunday.

Let's do this.

Things that are not cool

There are certain things which your body just instinctively knows are not a good idea. Things which you want to shy away from without even having to think about it. Like someone sticking a four inch metal suction spike up your nose and pulling things out with it.

Fortunately, when someone tried to do that to me this morning, it turns out I was paying him to do that, because he was my surgeon. Even more fortunately, he had shot my head full of topical anesthetic, so while it did feel distinctly and remarkably bizarre, it didn't actually hurt much.

Still, the whole time, my body was screaming "Have you completely lost your mind?! Get that thing out of there!" But it all worked out. I can breathe even better than before. I had never really appreciated just how pleasant taking a deep breath can be. Before this week, it always involved building pressure in my head, so I didn't do it much. Now it's, well, a breath of fresh air, as it were.

Misc.

A few randoms before bed. I get the packing pulled out of my face in the morning. Doesn't that sound fun. I'm thinking I'll be hitting the narcos they gave me again. Cause... damn.

Also: Listen to Hem. I was made aware of them a few years ago, but never actually listened to their music until this morning. Why not until now? Because I wasn't paying attention. Why now? Umm. Because it was on my hard drive.

What follows is just as random but of much less general interest. You have been warned.

Finally: Those of you with a tendency to geek out from time to time should read this. It's a long and detailed analysis of the new content "protection" regime imposed under the forthcoming Windows Vista. Boingboing picked this up on Saturday, and Slashdot is running a story today, but they don't seem to provide a link to the actual document. It's a really fascinating read. In essence, Microsoft is attempting to exert total and final control over every single aspect of your computer. If things don't check out, things get shut down. And from the way it's being described, this sounds like exactly the kind of thing that your average user will not tolerate. Has Microsoft finally written the OS that no one wants?

It seems a foregone conclusion that it has just lost the entire medical imaging community as clients, because it forces the system to downscale image quality, something prohibited in medical practice for obvious reasons. And power-users (read as gamers), who almost entirely dominate the high-end hardware market, do so for precisely the same reasons: attempting to eek the last iota of performance out of their hardware. What do you think will happen when it turns out that their spanking new $800 video card is actually spending a lot of time just making nice with Windows? I mean, Microsoft seems to be introducing a product that early adopters won't adopt because they're early adopters.

And users are probably not going to put up with being forced to upgrade their hardware because Windows has disabled it due to non-compliant drivers. I mean, it's one thing for the system to say "Hey, are you sure you want to install this, because we have no idea whether or not it actually works." It's another thing entirely to say "You may only use the hardware we approve." Apple never dreamed of so draconian a measure of control.

I agree with the author entirely: consumers will not accept this intrusion. The result will be either that the system is immediately compromised or it will simply not take.

Lethal fruitcake

Last Tuesday I had sinus surgery. Okay. As a result, I've been ordered to "take it easy," which includes not lifting anything heavy. "Heavier than a gallon of milk" was the phrase used by my surgeon. The reason for this is that exertion of any kind tends to raise your blood pressure to accommodate the force your muscles are exerting, and when the inside of your face has just been reamed out with a bone saw, any increase in blood pressure is liable to rupture what scabs are in place.

Fast forward to today. I'm feeling a lot better than I did last week, so when mom told me to unwrap a fruitcake brought by my aunt and put it on a plate, I didn't think anything of it.

Turns out the fruitcake was the heaviest thing I've lifted in a week. It also turns out that my surgeon wasn't kidding. I promptly started bleeding from my nose, and though I managed to avoid getting blood on anything, I was banned from the kitchen forthwith.

I don't even like fruitcake.

Sometimes it takes a communist

Though I have an increasing respect for China, I still don't really like their methods most of the time. I mean, they're nothing if not practical, but that practicality all too frequently manifests itself as downright ruthlessness.

That being said, it looks like it might take China to impose what should have probably happened years ago: standardized power and data cables for cell phones. There is no reason except deliberate consumer inconvenience to have proprietary handset connectors. They just want to be the only ones to sell it to you and make sure you have to buy a new one for each phone.

Right now it's pretty easy for a single person to have up to eight distinct power cords: one AC power and one car adapter for cell phone, laptop, mp3 player, and Blackberry. Imagine dropping down to two.

Blogging under the influence

In this particular case, it's oxycodone, prescribed for pain resulting from my surgery this morning, but I've been awake for more than two hours, and as I seem to be able to format HTML, I think I'm probably good to go.

The motivation for this particular post is this, brought to my attention by Justin, who doesn't seem to have updated in a while. It's regarding yesterday's vote by seven Virginia parishes of the ECUSA to break away from that failing denomination and join the province of Nigeria. The congregations were among those that deny the authority of the newly consecrated presiding bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori, who is pretty much crazy. As a matter of fact, the diocese of Fort Worth has directly petitioned the Archbishop of Canterbury for "alternative primatial oversight", which would be a first.

And now I'm going to go to sleep and try not to bleed all over everything. Blech.

Well that's over

I'm finished with finals. As it turns out, waiting for grades to come out is significantly more stressful for me than the actual process of studying for and taking exams.

Let me go on the record saying that I hate exams with word limits. For the two exams I took that had them, I spent about the first hour or so writing the answer, and then the next hour cutting stuff out so it'd be below the alloted limit. I was reduced to looking for adjectives I could cut out, and finding a prepositional phrase that wasn't strictly necessary was golden. This is not fun. I'd get to a certain point, check my word count, and be 400 words over, and not finished giving my answer, so it's like "Huh. I guess I'm done now." So yeah, I'm not particularly satisfied with either of those exams. Cue nailbiting while I wait for the profs to finish plowing through the 320,000 words they have to read so they can hand in the grades. That's about 1400 pages.

I'll be headed back to Pennsylvania in a few hours, once I get the place cleaned up and the fridge emptied out. If I make it in by midnight I'll be pleased.

Fun with torts

See, these things just beg for products liability lawsuits. Lawn darts? I quote: "Lawn darts were massive weighted spears. You threw them. They stuck where they landed. If they happened to land in your skull, well, then you should have moved... The best part... was that they eliminated all speculation from true outdoor fun. (Is this dangerous? Hell yes, now chuck it!)"

You have to wonder who thought this was a good idea.

Three down, one to go...

This has got to be one of the funniest things I've seen in weeks.

One more final. Torts. Which covers exactly this kind of thing. That's probably battery. Though I'd direct a jury to find for him in a heartbeat.

So. Finals.

Yeah, not really wanting to be awake right now. The smacktards in the apartment below me are apparently finished with their finals, because they've been carrying on in a drunken stupor for the last hour or so, which apparently needs to include multiple cars driving in and out with their stereos blaring.

Then I found this, which pretty much sums up my thoughts on criminal law, the final for which is in eight and a half hours:

Downright bizarre

Here we have an interesting case: a minor girl is both the perpetrator and victim of the crime with which she was charged, namely having sex with a minor under 14. The minor in question was her boyfriend. She's 13, he's 12.

I mean, say what you want about the advisability of "starting early" as it were, it does not seem that this is the kind of thing the law is supposed to produce. As one justice noted, the only thing that approaches this kind of double-treatment is dueling. It's going to be rather difficult to assert that there's a common thread there.

Law is a constantly evolving beast. Yes, the legislature makes statutory law, but a law that is incapable of change is doomed. This has less to do with the fact that society and culture change - I don't think the law in this case should be amended to allow children to have sex - but because the people who make law are not only finite beings, but they're also subject to political pressures. This can produce laws which don't make sense, are badly drafted, or downright vague. And a law which produces results such that both individuals involved are mutual perpetrators and victims has got to be flawed.

For all you design geeks

Take a look at this (warning: flash).

Just because the design is good doesn't mean your client knows that.

Contracts final in T-minus 15 hours.

Got a problem you can't solve?

Simple! Just redefine your way out of it.

If only law worked that way...

Finals approach. Contracts is on Friday. Here we go.

Invalid assumptions

This post isn't a link to an article, but just a rant.

I think it's high time we dispensed with the fantasy that every download of copyrighted content represents a lost sale. Seriously now: though sales of traditional media have arguably fallen over the past few years, the volume of copyrighted materials downloaded over that time is probably closer to the total sales figures for record companies than to the decrease in their sales.

The largest record label conglomerate in the world, Universal Music Group, did five billion euros in sales last year (it's a wholly-owned subsidiary of the French company Vivendi, and thus states its earnings in euro), with a total profit of around half a billion euros. That's a lot of music. But there must be millions upon millions of songs and movies swapped over the internet every day. I would be very surprised if the legitimate music sales business were larger than the volume traded online.

As the music companies' revenue is more or less intact - yes it's gone down, but not that much - it's absurd to say that every download is a missed sale. Just because a song is downloaded doesn't mean the user had more money than he did before, and doesn't mean that he's choosing not to spend money he had earmarked for music purchases. The choice isn't between acquiring content by paying for it or by not paying for it, it's between acquiring content by not paying for it and not acquiring it at all. Record companies seem to only understand the former choice. Consumers deal with the latter one, because they're already spending as much as they can afford on music.

Yes, the advent of digital file sharing has dramatically affected and continues to affect the business of selling content. No questions there. But people will always spend money on things they're willing to spend money on. What we're seeing with downloading is largely people acquiring content they would have otherwise done without. Until the labels realize this, they'll come up with increasingly breathless and irrational solutions like this one.