Intelligence, logic, statistics, and one's own petard (2012/05/16)
A while back, Eric Raymond blogged what he called an intelligence test. It’s based on the much-commented on “the talk: non-black edition” piece that was making the rounds a while back. Raymond continues with some questions, then says:
[read more...]Thanks to the Internet, societal change is faster. (2012/05/09)
Back in 2011, Rick Perry was whining about how there is “something wrong in this country when gays can openly serve in the military”. Ten years ago, that might have been a selling point, politically. But then, ten years ago, you didn’t find out, in real time, how people felt about things.
[read more...]Sometimes you just gotta eat the losses (2012/04/25)
A lot of our problems come from people being obsessively focused, somewhat irrationally, on trying to absolutely eliminate things that they regard as losses. From the DMCA’s “anti-circumvention” rules to the attempts at making SOPA/PIPA (and new attempts to make the same laws again), there is a huge amount of damage being done or attempted in the hopes of completely eradicating copyright infringement.
[read more...]The tone argument argument: A straw man in motion (2012/04/11)
Someone linked me to a discussion of the tone argument. Here’s the key point:
[read more...]Dear Mr. Santorum: You are out of order (2012/04/10)
Someone made a quip that Rick Santorum ought to have to carry his dead campaign to term, but this is of course ridiculous.
[read more...]Followup on homelessness and the like (2012/04/09)
Million-dollar Murray is a more detailed look at some of the issues to do with homelessness and social services.
[read more...]Hatred is still scary (2012/04/08)
So, our friend Rah did something pretty awesome. She made cheap, portable, housing. The summary of the thesis is particularly endearing.
[read more...]I am heartless and insensitive, part 5 (2012/03/30)
I play video games. I play, in fact, roleplaying computer games. When I play MMOs, I tend to play them in-character. But sometimes… the character is, perhaps, not totally serious. So I used to have a character in WoW named Merisioux. And when I stopped playing WoW because of their horrific record of giving no fucks about trans people and queers, I continued playing characters named that in other MMOs.
[read more...]Mmm, starbucks. (2012/03/25)
Okay, simple fact: I like frappucino, but it’s overpriced.
[read more...]Copyright and piracy (2012/03/22)
I recently happened to read an old David Pogue column in Scientific American, where he pointed out that modern copy protection schemes are punishingly hard on legitimate users, but have no effect on pirates.
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