Are we at war with Canada now?

Presidents have a history of leaving messes for following presidents to clean up if they're not of the same political party, but this takes the cake:

In his final days in power, President George W. Bush asserted U.S. military "sea power" over the oil-rich Arctic Monday, in another forceful rebuttal of Canada's claims of sovereignty over the Northwest Passage. . . . The Bush directive reiterates that the Northwest Passage is an international waterway -- a rebuttal of Canada's claim of sovereignty over what is emerging as a major global shipping route because of the shrinking polar ice cap -- and it highlights the boundary dispute in the resource-rich Beaufort Sea.

So in his last two weeks before leaving office, Bush claims Canada's territory as its own.

For the love of god, is he going to leave us at war?

Did Microsoft buy out Google?

Or vice versa, perhaps?

If you look at the image to the right, you'll see the new Google favicon. If you're thinking it looks mightily familiar, you're right: look at your Start button. It's the four colors of the Windows logo, rotated 90 degrees and with the Google lowercase 'g' superimposed thereupon.

Scientology: "We had no role in Travolta's death"

Amazingly enough, before I even heard the news about Jett Travolta dying, I heard about the denial from the Church of Scientology describing how they did not cause his death.

But with their quick assertion of innocence, though... well, as in so many cases, XKCD says it best.

The Year of Science

We've got some amazing anniversaries this year -- the 400-year anniversary of Galileo, and the 200-year anniversary of Charles Darwin. This has caused the International Astronomy Union to declare 2009 the Year of Astronomy, and the Coalition on Public Understanding of Science to declare 2009 the Year of Science.

I think that's a wonderful theme to carry through the year.

Java

Today I came across a dinosaur of the World Wide Web: a site that required Java to run. And not a personal site, either -- this company actually required people to pay money to use their service, a mistake you can be sure I will not be making.

Most people will remember Java fondly as bloatware, along with such horrors as RealPlayer and Quicktime. What it proposed was a true object-oriented language running in small 'applets' in your browser: like miniature programs! People imagined entire office suites.

Except... Java sucked. Java was slow to develop, and even slower to run, with the Java Virtual Machine growing to expand any available process time or memory that the users had. If you were using a Java applet, you would not be able to do anything else while that thing clunked away. And when you were done, the Java VM stayed in memory, keeping your computer choked.

Even more unfortunately for website coders, there was a better Java than Java, which already existed -- JavaScript. Javascript, the key to Web 2.0 buzzword 'AJAX', ran much faster and with much less trouble than waiting for the Java VM to load and run each time.

Java has been succeeded by Flash and Javascript for 99% of uses, with the remaining 1% has been replaced by the free Silverlight (for the 1% of users who can't afford Flash but have the ethics not to download it somewhere).

Nowadays, requiring Java to view a page is like requiring the <blink> tag, or VRML -- a sign of the web designers working there having learned nothing since the 90s.

Speaking of the 90s, writing this blog post has made me feel old. I think I'll go hunt for my VHS tapes of Eek! The Cat and Power Rangers and study my old Algebra 2 homework.

The Registry: It starts with suicide

This piece has hit the national news due to the tragedy of the suicide, but looking a little deeper reveals some harder issues.

First, let's look at what our system of education has done to the girl. The girl (who is unnamed due to the fact that she was 14 at the time) was found to have a 'sex diary', describing her various conquests. In a later interview, she declared:

Yes, I'm a victim. I was a victim who was deceived by my own emotions and ignorance, of misplaced confidence, a victim of my own fantasies . . . Yes, predator for I chase people who themselves were victims of misplaced confidence."

So, she's a victim because she consented to sex... but she's also a predator because she consented to sex? Typical of our our American legal system treats sex... consent is not defined by someone's wishes, but by what the legal system declares. Not to mention what having our system declare her both predator and victom must have done to her.

The boy, who was eighteen, pled guilty to 'seduction,' a very old charge; this was an admission of guilt that did not require jail time or registration (likely due to a Romeo-and-Juliet law). Now, let's go forwards five years in time to 2007:

But changes last year require those who pleaded guilty to seduction to appear on the list, said the county's Chief Deputy Prosecutor Deborah Carley.

Under most civilized jurisdictions, that's double jeopardy. He's already paid for his crime (a very public outing and a long probation), but now the system was going back to give him a permanant black mark that would ruin his life.

The tragedy is not that the boy committed suicide; the tragedy is that our system drove him to it.

And so ends my backlog of blog entries. I apologize for being slow with them, but I had the misfortune of being given Fallout 3 for Christmas, thus destroying my free time.

Religion and evolution: co-dependent?

Two news stories by two different groups have come out that are surprisingly amusing in their synergy.

First, we have news that religion evolved:

Self-control is critical for success in life, and a new study by University of Miami professor of Psychology Michael McCullough finds that religious people have more self-control than do their less religious counterparts. These findings imply that religious people may be better at pursuing and achieving long-term goals that are important to them and their religious groups.

And to go with it, we have this opinion piece that an understanding of evolution strengthens faith:

In my opinion the Darwinian worldview is not just compatible with religious faith but deepens it and makes aspects of it more intelligible.

Religion and evolution: Two great tastes that, apparently, taste great together.

Sarah Palin: Boy, did we dodge a bullet there

In the no-news category, we have news from a Christian site that Sarah Palin was even scarier than we thought:

"I believe in warfare. We were given an assignment in Alaska... we had the very liberal candidates running for governor, and we began to pray for God to give us a Christian ", declared Mary Glazier. At a three day religious conference held in Everett, Washington last summer, on June 13, 2008, Glazier described how, nearly two decades ago, her movement helped propel Alaska Independence Party candidate Walter J. Hickel, in an upset write-in campaign, into the Alaska governor's office: Glazier's new prayer group member, a 24 year old woman named Sarah Palin, would later follow.

Good thing she can't sanctify the US against us durn libruls.

Good wins for now, but we need to be careful of any other instances in which religions conspire against citizens to buy votes and subvert elections.

Free Internet for the masses?

Look out. It seems that the FCC's "free but censored internet" may be losing the "but censored" part:

Even though Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Kevin Martin is leaving in a matter of weeks, he still hopes to push through a major policy decision he’s been backing for months: One that would create a nationwide free wireless broadband network for use by all.

Until now, this ambitious proposal has met with resistance from everyone from incumbent wireless service providers such as T-Mobile USA, worried the new network would cause interference to its users to consumer advocacy groups, which have particularly objected to Martin’s idea of filtering adult content available on this public network. Well, in an interview published by Ars Technica on Dec. 29, Martin said that he has dropped his porn filtering idea in hopes of garnering more support for the open network proposal.

Unfortunately, the decision was not made because it's the right thing to do -- it was made because it would make it more popular and easier to support.

The end result, however, is the same -- making unrestricted and unfiltered access to the Internet, vital in this day and age to compete and to be able to communicate our ideas with the same ability as everyone else, just another public good.

The idea of being given access to all the Internet save the parts disapproved of by our government was hailed in some circles. Instead, if this measure passes, it'll be a strong blow to the same groups who promote a conservative Christian nanny-state.

Some suggestions for the Paranoid Linux

Alright... I'm hardly a UNIX guru, or even a UNIX initiate. Copyleft immediately strikes me as a danger sign in any software project: either they assumed the goodwill of the FSF without reading the GPL, or they read the GPL, understood it, and maliciously accepted it. But no matter what these guys did, you have to admit that their work is exciting and essential to the future: Paranoid Linux.

For the unfamiliar, Paranoid Linux is a once-fictional Linux distribution that is being made real. Designed for Chinese and Syrian dissidents, it's now being made real not to protect against second- and third-world dictators, but first-world conservative nanny states that want to ensure you're always following the Good way.

These are my humble suggestions to the project.

Damn Small Linux: Right now, the project is basing itself on one of the larger distros, Incognito Linux, which in turn is based off of Gentoo Linux, one of the largest, most bloated, all-the-toppings-deep-dish-with-extra-cheese distros out there. This will result in having to take a very large system and whittle it down.

In Little Brother, the book that inspired Paranoid Linux, our protagonist mentions "you can run ParanoidLinux on just about anything." And when you want to get a machine running in as little memory as possible, you don't want to start from the top -- start from the bottom. The PL Wiki defines "a P1 MMX 200, with 128MB memory, a 7.5G hard drive, and an ATI Xpert98 video card" as being 'just about anything.' DSL, on the other hand, does this better -- a 486DX, 16 MB of ram (with 128MB, it can load the entire OS in memory, handy for zeroing out your entire session later), and run off a 64MB flash drive. It's the Windows 95 of the Linux world, except that it's actually still supported and still useful.

Running off a tiny flash drive should be a priority. Reporters that won't be able to bring computers, cameras, or even notebooks into a country won't be prevented from having their watch, multitool, eraser, batteries, pens, or the like. The entire 'loading once into ram on install' thing would be handy, too, as it'd extend the life of your flash drive or even let you remove the drive after boot, leaving no physical evidence visible that the machine was booted any way but normally.

Of course, I'm biased because DSL includes Fluxbox by default, one of the few Linux WMs I actually like.

XPde: I'm aware that this is the red-headed stepchild of the Linux desktop environment world, but hear me out. Part of the goal of PL is stealth, being unnoticable in a world increasingly bent on noticing very hard what you're doing.

No matter what you do, eventually you're going to have someone looking over your shoulder. In the third world (where open-source software has very little penetration because there is no company to 'play ball' with the tin-pot dictators), XP and the like are basically the only options you have.

When the Morality Police comes by and sees your typical GNOME or Fluxbox desktop, they will be confused. A confused cop with absolute power will result in another dissident or reporter being jailed and disappearing. Instead, give them nothing to worry about -- use XPde and custom themes to make it appear like a standard XP install (yes, even with the eye-destroying Chiclet colors). This has the additional ability of being able to be dropped into most internet cafés on a single USB key.

(There are other distros . XPde is just one of the more mature projects that have been around for a while.)

This brings me to another point. Whenever possible, Paranoid Linux in action should not look like anything other than a standard Wintel box. In fact, I'd highly suggest that the words "Paranoid Linux" appear nowhere in the distro, in text or image form, or even in the iso's filename. Nothing about the program should tip off the untrained eye (or even the modestly trained but disinterested eye) that Paranoid Linux is designed to circumvent dictatorships.

Wireless 'burst' networking: I know it exists, I just don't know where... Create a network where your system isn't broadcasting for 90% of the time (99.9% of the time would be better); use encrypted 'burst' transmissions from wireless-enabled device to wireless-enabled device, passing the data along until it hits someone with a satellite uplink modem (or someone across the border with less restrictive laws). If you're not broadcasting, they can't find you.

Obviously this would be no good for regular internet browsing, much less anything more than a megabyte or so at a time, but as long as you're content with POP3 e-mail and Usenet -- the old-school keystones of social networking -- you'd have a basically invincible network for you and all your subversive buds to enjoy.

Kibitz: Not a program that exists that I know of, Kibitz is using the power of Turing-test-passing chatbots for a force of good. Basically, it's a chaff-dispenser. While you're doing things you don't want to be seen, Kibitz is quietly sitting in the background holding chats on big IRC networks. It'll talk about cars, relationships, cooking, the weather, reminiscing about school and bygone days... everything BUT the big three of religion, politics, and economy. Several 'personality' files (which can be randomized to make yours unique) ensure that each user running Kibitz has a different signature from other Kibitz users, so it can't be easily filtered.

While it normally runs minimized in the taskbar, you can full-screen it, both to amuse yourself with your bot's chattiness and to provide a cover for your real activities. And to keep users absolutely safe, messages that could be possibly disapproved of by the Morality Police (by human users wanting to be jerks) just won't be shown in full screen mode or kept in memory, so you can AFK with confidence.

And if you're really being evil, you could have a variant of Kibitz play World of Warcraft. Nothing says "burned-out lifeless internet otaku, move along" like seeing thousands of packets going to and from Blizzard servers.

Subversive files: This would really fall more into the lines of a seperate project, but while we're at it, we could help the revolution(s) along by giving them some reading material. Given a 16-GB flash drive (the most we can expect with today's technology), we can fit in full copies of Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikihow, and selections of Project Gutenberg, with all the software needed to read (and in the case of wikis, edit) them offline. Make sure to include some plain "fun" things to do, to promote the love of reading in people trapped in nations that restrict literature to religious purposes. Hmm... Twain, Paine, and Verne for the masses, anyone?

Welcome to the Daily Yiff

Welcome to the Daily Yiff. Let me clear two misconceptions:

1) It's not going to be daily. It's going to be catch-as-catch-can, as life permits.

2) It's not going to be about yiffing. The name was purely chosen because nothing else on the Internet had taken it yet.

3) It's going to be extremely liberal. I'm so far off the left wing (compared to US mainline liberal views) I need a parachute to compete in politics.

So welcome. Hopefully, you'll have fun and learn something.