December 2005 Archives
So, I have to admit that I'm a bit confused at Scott Adam's take on discussions about torture. He posted a question, would you sacrifice an entire city to avoid torturing one man, and then declared some sort of "knockout" victory when people didn't want to answer that question.
Why must that question be answered "honestly" before any other discussions can occur, other than it's his blog and he can play that way if he wishes? It does nothing to establish anything about torture other than perhaps the person answering is willing, or is not, to go exactly that far. It's a useless metric in my mind and the fact that he declares victory when you don't answer makes no sense to me. The question is loaded like a semi-automatic shotgun with the magazine restrictor removed since it implies that torture "works." In Scott's case it would "save" a city.
Why don't we ask if torture works before we ask people how far they will go with it? If it doesn't, the question almost answers itself, no? If it does, which by all accounts it doesn't (even the crooks in Reservoir Dogs know what you get from a torture subject), should we first ask why we don't already do it? I mean if we want to have real, honest debates about a topic why start out with all these assumptions? Cart? Horse? Any order will do these days?
If Scott is doing what I think he's doing, this is all just another of his "thought experiments," as I doubt that he isn any more capable of killing a man with a power drill than I am. Maybe Scott should just ask people if torture is an acceptable form of vengeance, since that seems to be the only thing that it has proven itself effective at. I think that would get a lot more honest answers and provoke a "debate" as heated as his one about it magically working to save entire cities.
Better still, Scott can start a "modest proposal" category on his blog. I suggest the first post be about eating babies. D'oh! Scott just scored a knockout on me...
bapper: Isn't that what that one movie is about?
pberry: yeah
pberry: gay cowboys
pberry: as if there were any other kind!
bapper: flaming straight cowboys. :)
And for some reason, I can't get the damn heart symbol to display on the my mac version of Firefox...even in Unicode. Oh well.
Let me say this as clearly as I possibly can.
THE NSA WEB SERVER PUTTING PUTTING COOKIES ON YOUR PC IS NOT "SPYING"!
Seriously people...there are real things to worry about and I assure you this is not one of them. If they really wanted to spy on your web habbits they would just get the data from Google, DoubleClick, and Abacus.
That is all.
How hopeless is John McCain? Completely. Yes, "let the students decide" what they get taught in science classes. What a load.
Lots of stuff happened this year. Let me run down some of the more inane things that I wrote about.
- January
- Bill Gates is a pretty smart guy. So when he says stupid shit, I suspect that he knows it and is lying through his teeth.
- February
- I hate you. I loathe you . I despise you. I abhor you. I detest you. You are an abomination. You are repugnant.
- March
- You know that when you have dreams about CAS, uPortal, and LDAP that you didn't drink enough wine because the dogs are still barking in your head.
- April
- It's really hard to explain this without sounding like a jaded, cynical bastard.
- May
- I ordered a mac mini, with Bluetooth and a SuperDrive.
- June
- God is a pauper...Hell, I make more money than God!
- July
- I knew I shouldn't have sent him that redstate.org link...
- August
- Over iChat Greg asked me to explain podcasting to him.
- September
- Once again I post about why I'm not posting...
- October
- Boy...sucks to be him.
- November
- Eventually, I hope, Democrats will pull their heads out of their political ass and get serious about running campaigns.
- December
- There is no TLD for .ey, which really stinks. I was hoping to get do.nk.ey.
Now...wasn't that fun?
Can we all just agree that Powell is a hack and move on?
Powell said that when he was in the Cabinet, he was not told that President Bush authorized a warrantless National Security Agency surveillance operation after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Appearing on ABC's "This Week" Powell said he sees "absolutely nothing wrong with the president authorizing these kinds of actions" to protect the nation.
One question, how was Powell supposed to be a moderating influence inside the Bush administration when he seems to have rarely been told about anything they did?
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so that's where we left it
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more unintended consequences in iraq
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oak-trib wants to send copies of 1984 to Congress
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The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
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GOP offends Christians
Dale dropped by and brought his 50mm f/1.4 lens by for me to drool on play with. It's very, very nice.
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a very nifty MT tool
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consider supporting the commons
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more loev for russ
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breaking the law is not a partisan issue
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What is Asterisk? Good question.
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"Damn you Hannukah!" says Giblets.
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pirates toys!
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christmas is f'ing metal
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bruce runs down the bush/nsa scandal in great detail
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make a minifesto
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speech bubbles!
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Potemkin court
It should be noted that Senator Feingold has been kicking some ass as of late.
"None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a former judge and close ally of the president who sits on the Judiciary Committee.
Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), who has led a bipartisan filibuster against a reauthorization of the Patriot Act, quoted Patrick Henry, an icon of the American Revolution, in response: "Give me liberty or give me death."
He called Cornyn’s comments "a retreat from who we are and who we should be."
Keep on keepin' on Senator.
So Bloglines had some scheduled downtime today to move data centers and their downtime plumber guy got all piratey!
It made it almost worth it.
So I've used iTunes for a long time. Here is what iTunes is telling me these days:
- I have 22,709 files in my library (a few Pixar videos, a few Rocketboom vidcasts, and the rest are audio files)
- 21,617 have no "Rating" (but I'm working on that)
- 18,871 have an average bit rate higher than 128kbps (much of my encoding is VBR)
- 12,740 have never been played through iTunes or an iPod (at least an iPod that updates your iTunes library on play count and rating metadata)
- 1,857 have no "Genre" metadata
- 446 are "Protected"
- Of those, 39 are free downloads of the 9-11 Commission. Which means that I've bought roughly 407 DRM-laden music files from Apple, not counting to occasional free weekly download.
- 2,363 different albums
- 121 tracks have no "Album" affiliation
- 779 different artists
- All of my tracks at least have "Artist" information
- I have too much music to actually listen to even a fair percentage of it
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the rude pundit cd
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want to feel old? read this.
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Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses using Flash
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Safe Bedside Table
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The Torture Fairy
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kick-ass shipping process
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I for one will welcome our new linux powered robot overlords
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washington will shoot who it wants, when it wants
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froomkin responds
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National Wildlife Federation photo content winners
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graffiti seems classier in latin
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dear japanese people
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snowtown on flickr
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beej's awesome network programming guide
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I digg beej
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who in their right mind would blog about oracle apps?
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nice guide on setting up EAC to use the Lame encoder
In today's consumer society, this time (of the year) is unfortunately subjected to a sort of commercial 'pollution' that is in danger of altering its true spirit, which is characterized by meditation, sobriety and by a joy that is not exterior but intimate
Every company in America should be on its knees thanking Jesus for being born. Without Christmas, most American businesses would be far less profitable; more than enough reason for businesses to be screaming Merry Christmas.
Almost 3 years ago Mark Pilgrim invited people to pony the hell up and get a Free Software Foundation membership. He was member #140. I'm #175. He said, "Someday that will be worth a lot of geek cred."
Maybe not so much?
There is no TLD for .ey, which really stinks. I was hoping to get do.nk.ey.
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fun way to learn about james k. polk
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Nature's Harmonious Money Cycle
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nobody saw this coming
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the smart money's always on the cow
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kos' book is up for pre-order
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McCain can straight talk right to Hell
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don't fight, you might loose
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who says lawyers have no sense of humor?
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wanted: dog comedians
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jakob hates ajax. how predictable.
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if it's secret, who told bill o'reilly?
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great interview with an anonymous higher-ed blogger
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management techniques as baseball analogies
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quick starting-point css templates
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incredibly horrible news for flash developers
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workflow code for ruby
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new ipod earbugs (yes, bugs)
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Approved by the FBI
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ann coulter wants to beat me up with a baseball bat
