Category: music

A photomosaic made up of the military personnel who have made the supreme sacrifice in Iraq.

[click for larger image]

Found at michaelmoore.com

I wish these winged monkeys were like the ones in Baum’s book: they can only be used three times by any one person. Sadly, this variety has no such limits.

Give us your opinion. Cast your vote.

I have been hearing about little else but this issue these past few days, with it coming to a head today when the president endorsed his plan to enshrine discrimination as the law of the land.

Hyperbole aside, is this the most important issue he or his staff can come up with? How ’bout . . .

* The stagnant economy

* Iraq and it’s future: when do the troops come home?

* Afghanistan: are we sure democracy has taken root there?

As for a defense of marriage, I’d feel a lot better if the folks doing the defending had a better track record themselves. My guess is a lot of them are probably more experienced at marriage than I am, with more than one to draw from. (An interesting statistic would be how many elected representatives have successfully defended their own marriages.)

What about the millions of “traditional” marriages that are dissolved each year? How do we feel about that? Are we to believe that committed same-sex couples are going to do a lousier job of staying together and working through their problems that those who have the support of our societal mores? Or could the case be made that if they have stayed together without benefit of clergy and state protections, they may actually do a better job? If unmarried couples break up, there are no statistics, no legalities, and no stigma. Yet look at the folk who have been taking the plunge in San Francisco: they don’t look like they’re doing this on a whim.

According to national vital statistics data for 2000-2002, and a very few minutes work in Excel, we find that the rate of divorces to marriages is around 40% for those periods. Does anyone care about those numbers? Does anyone think that permitting same-sex couples to enjoy the same legal rights as everyone else is going to make things worse?

All they’re looking for is the same legal protections and rights the rest of us enjoy. The proposed amendment won’t prevent anyone from having a relationship: it will prevent them being able to make decisions as next of kin, to share in property after the death of a partner, to share benefits conferred as part of employment by a partner, little things like that. Have the people who think this issue is worthy of tampering with the Constitution considered the ramifications of this? Or is punishing people who are different all this is about?

The rhetoric seems to miss how deprecated marriage has become in recent years: some states have gone so far as to insist that aspiring celebrants complete some basic instruction in order to be licensed. In the face of that kind of disregard/apathy, how is expanding the definition of marriage going to weaken the institution? It sounds to me like we should welcome any attempt to take it seriously, no matter who makes the offer.

I guess the best thing about this is it should ensure the incumbent is a one term president, but I wish there was a less hurtful way to go about it.

now playing: Shane, She Wrote This from the album Television by Television
Continue reading “defense of marriage? from what?”

Ed Felten discusses the monoculture meme:

Freedom to Tinker: Monoculture: Third, it may be possible to have the advantages of compatibility, without the risks of monoculture, thereby allowing users to work together while suffering a lower monoculture penalty. Precisely how to do this is a matter of ongoing research.

I read that as a call for open standards. In the course of making the various protocols work everywhere, with development taking place in the open, security risks would be minimized and interoperability would be maximized.

We missed an opportunity to make this happen when Netscape failed to make Windows nothing more than “a collection of slightly buggy device drivers[1]”. Perhaps “web services” will get us there this time.

fn1. This article also notes the decline of the Windows-Intel desktop . . . . oops.

Wired News: Webmonkey, RIP: 1996 — 2004

The demise of Webmonkey and the belated praise for its success makes me wonder: what would be the downside to Terra Lycos just letting it all go with their blessing?

Obviously, as a labor of love for its creators and a clear traffic draw, it was an unqualified success in its day. Why not let it go its own way?

(Of course, I have wished the same thing for the Newton OS and HyperCard . . . )

CNN.com – Expert: Microsoft dominance poses security threat – Feb. 16, 2004:

Geer and others believe Microsoft’s software is so dangerously pervasive that a virus capable of exploiting even a single flaw in its operating systems could wreak havoc.

[ . . . ]

“Once you start down the road with that analogy, you get stuck in it,” said Scott Charney, chief security strategist for Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft.

Charney says monoculture theory doesn’t suggest any reasonable solutions; more use of the Linux open-source operating system, a rival to Microsoft Windows, might create a “duoculture,” but that would hardly deter sophisticated hackers.

If you factor in evolution and the various ways organisms come up with to defend themselves, there’s more to this analogy. Those that can adapt to changing conditions might survive: no guarantees for those that are not able — or unwilling — to adapt.

Pursuing this line of thought in bio-medical terms leads one to ideas like quarantines for known disease carriers, inoculations, and euthanization if a great die-off doesn’t come first.

Old commentary on this.

<update: Feb 19, 2004> Of course, I completely missed the reference to “sophisticated hackers.” When did that become the problem? What we’ve seen so far with the vast majority of these Windows exploits are crimes of opportunity, or schoolboy pranks writ large.

We’re not seeing home computers being used to clean out bank accounts or anything like that: all we’re seeing is immature vandals wreaking their small-minded version of havoc on the commons, soaking up network bandwidth, overloading mail servers and inboxes. A preventable annoyance . . .