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Still thinking - 24 February 2007
Feb. 25th, 2007 01:17 amPut in more things - think I might have a handle on how they work, so I could very well finish one of the two models tomorrow and get started on what is hopefully the easier model. And then forget homework and do something nice, like spend dawn to dusk leveling. That’d be nice, definitely. And then we’ll see what happens - maybe I can get some new areas opened up. My stress levels are going down, I’m fairly certain, but they’ll really go down when all the work’s done.
Onward to linky stuff.
Another reason why you should change your router password off the default - It could be hacked by a malicious script so that the DNS of the router is obtained from the cracker's servers. Meaning that your Internet connection (and all the data that passes through it) could be taken and used for other criminal purposes. And the user is not necessarily any wiser, since the Internet connection would still work. So far, this is a proof-of-concept attack, not an in-the-wild attack. In any case, though, change the password whenever it will reset to the default.
The conflict in Iraq has been going on long enough that we’ve gone past the tragedy part and into the statistics part. As a consequence, the average American underestimates the death count of Iraqi civilians in this conflict. They’re reasonably aware of the count of United States deaths, because they appear on the media. But rarely are the civilian casualties news, much less mentioned at all.
In Indonesia, an experiment to plug an erupting mud volcano with giant concrete balls is going forward. Thus any scrotum jokes that you may have been saving, or feel that you missed out on for the other incident, feel free to let them all hang out. Speaking of terminology being used, if you’re unsure on what terms you’re supposed to use to be politically correct, Joel Bleifuss from In These Times has a handy guide on Political Correctness that may be of assistance. The Unapologetic Mexican turns the issue on its head and pokes fun at it with the Definition of Terms for bloggers.
For what purpose such a device would be used, I have no idea, but here's step-by-step instructions to build a device that will allow your eyes to look at each other. Mirrors and mirrors and... what is this for, again?
Second Life is becoming quite the interesting experiment. Perhaps much like the Internet, people are using it to display all sorts of ideas, thoughts, and obsessions. Which, yes, does mean that there are fetishes displayed. Warren Ellis, a regular in Second Life, is well aware of this, and documents an incident where he was witness to a dom/sub interaction - on property that he had bought and done a little building on. Sex is a rather large part of our biology, and I suppose the ability to replicate it in Second Life, possibly without the blurries (I don’t know, not having stepped into Second Life) is going to have an explosion of people doing so. Perhaps the next joke will be that Second Life is for porn. I’m inclined to believe that things will settle down once the novelty of having virtual sex is over. Not to say it will disappear, or that people won’t still have those fetishes, but I don’t think it’ll be all over the place. I could be wrong.
In First Life, Malaysia’s government has suggested that prostitutes be whipped as punishment, The reasoning quoted in the article says that if drug addicts can be whipped, why not prostitutes? (Prostitution is illegal in the country, so this would be a punishment for breaking the law.) This appears to be a reaction to Malaysia being a bit of a hub for prostitution. Whipping someone who is soliciting sex for money seems to be a bit extreme to me, but then again, I’m sitting somewhere where “Cruel and unusual” punishment is generally considered taboo. Somewhere else in the world, or in another time, this might seem to be a perfectly reasonable response to trying to “scourge out immoral people like prostitutes”, as the reasoning might go.
Elementary school teachers in Brooksville were hoping that the children would do well on the standardized tests. So they held an after-hours prayer session. That wouldn’t normally have been a problem, except they anointed the children's desks with prayer oil, and the oil was still there when the kids came in on Monday. So the only real reason that anything was known about it was because the evidence was still there. There were concerns expressed about the Christian overtones of the prayer sequence, and possible constitutional matters because the evidence was still visible come Monday. So, let this be a lesson to you - if you want to pray, do it in your house, with the door closed, and in secret. That way, the deity who sees things in secret will reward you.
Other religious things - The ACLU of Oklahoma is arguing that a pastor critical of gay marriage is being tried for lewdness over something that is legal - asking for a private encounter between him and an undercover policeman. Using the Lawrence v. Texas decision, no less. This is probably a good example of how the rain falls on the just and the unjust - the law cuts both ways. At the same time, the leader of an anti-gay Catholic group was bound for trial in an incident where a pro-gay protester was tackled to the ground and told she needed to leave by him.
A domestic political comment - Exploding Aardvark linked it with the title of “Everything you ever needed to know about Hillary Clinton”. The source title at UFO Breakfast Recipients is Pitching Woo to the Security State Freaks, and says that the Senator’s statements about persisting in a mistake and then deliberately distorting things to make it impossible for her opponents to engage her on rational grounds and prove her wrong. The scary bit is the parallel it draws over management tactics designed to make the worker always look bad and the manager faultless. That sounds a lot like politics of the last several elections, regardless of who won. If we really are engaging in this sort of distortion in our politics, then we’re really in trouble in terms of electing a sane President.
At the intersection of politics and religion, we find that nearly half of Americans believe that the civil liberties of Muslims should be restricted. This is mostly advanced from those who consider themselves highly religious, which gives me a strong suspicion that these people would probably support restricting the civil liberties of anyone they didn’t approve of. Outside that core, the television-news watching crowd is afraid of terrorists, who have been systematically linked to Islam in the fear, uncertainty, and doubt campaign being waged. That probably makes up the majority of the percentage that favors such a crackdown on Muslim freedom. According to the Christian Science Monitor, though, the large majority of Muslims reject terrorism as a viable tactic, and appear to “support” bin Laden’s ideas as a means of protesting American foreign policy decisions. It’s the media perception that gets people to think that Muslims are terrorists or support terror unanimously. Some other statistics from the study are that 27 percent of Americans support forcing Muslims to register with the government, 22 percent favor profiling of Muslims to find threats, and 29 percent would support undercover agents infiltrating Muslim organizations to keep tabs on them. Something about these stats and questions sounds really, really familiar... maybe because we were in favor of keeping tabs on the Japanese, supposed Communists, and other groups throughout our history? And that there were agents in college anti-war groups in earlier decades, and agents profiling pacifist groups just recently looking for terror sympathies... and the one thing that seems to be tying them all together is that every one of those actions was useless in the historical perspective. All they really did was perpetuate fear, uncertainty, and doubt and turn Americans into informants on their neighbors. When there’s baseless suspicion going around, lynch mobs, dirty looks, and hate crimes tend to be the result. The human species can do better than that, and Americans, if they want to keep laying claim to being “the best” at everything, need to start backing up their claims with evidence.
Planning on traveling outside the country? Well, thanks to the data mining techniques and sharing that’s supposed to facilitate finding terrorists trying to cross borders means that old convictions of yours, even for DUI or smoking pot, can be found. And as some travelers are finding out, even a small criminal record more than thirty years past can stop you from immigrating into another country. Wow. Can’t say that I particularly like that much tightness of border control. Luckily, there is a way to have that record cleared, at least in Canada, by getting the appropriate ministry to approve that you’ve been rehabilitated. Likely so in the other countries, too. Still, this seems like an undue burden being put on travelers to check and make sure that everything from their past is cleared. With the new ID card and passport requirements, getting out and seeing the world is becoming an increasingly expensive and hassling position. Should I be worried about isolationism being reborn because people can’t get out of the country to get perspective?
The last bits for tonight are some things that may just be weird without extra significance - Things people write on money. Is this technically a crime in the sense of defacing the currency of the country? And from there, Neatorama shows off 37 fads that swept the nation. Each of which I either recognize in the original, or the descendants thereof. That’s how fad-powerful they were... or are. Depends on whether there’s a comeback in the works. And there are a lot of things that do the old-as-new transition, often with a little “updating” to make them hipper for the new crowd.
That’s it from Silver Adept Link Services for tonight. Maybe tomorrow everything will become clear again, and I’ll finish and organize and get everything in the order I want to for the assignments.
Onward to linky stuff.
Another reason why you should change your router password off the default - It could be hacked by a malicious script so that the DNS of the router is obtained from the cracker's servers. Meaning that your Internet connection (and all the data that passes through it) could be taken and used for other criminal purposes. And the user is not necessarily any wiser, since the Internet connection would still work. So far, this is a proof-of-concept attack, not an in-the-wild attack. In any case, though, change the password whenever it will reset to the default.
The conflict in Iraq has been going on long enough that we’ve gone past the tragedy part and into the statistics part. As a consequence, the average American underestimates the death count of Iraqi civilians in this conflict. They’re reasonably aware of the count of United States deaths, because they appear on the media. But rarely are the civilian casualties news, much less mentioned at all.
In Indonesia, an experiment to plug an erupting mud volcano with giant concrete balls is going forward. Thus any scrotum jokes that you may have been saving, or feel that you missed out on for the other incident, feel free to let them all hang out. Speaking of terminology being used, if you’re unsure on what terms you’re supposed to use to be politically correct, Joel Bleifuss from In These Times has a handy guide on Political Correctness that may be of assistance. The Unapologetic Mexican turns the issue on its head and pokes fun at it with the Definition of Terms for bloggers.
For what purpose such a device would be used, I have no idea, but here's step-by-step instructions to build a device that will allow your eyes to look at each other. Mirrors and mirrors and... what is this for, again?
Second Life is becoming quite the interesting experiment. Perhaps much like the Internet, people are using it to display all sorts of ideas, thoughts, and obsessions. Which, yes, does mean that there are fetishes displayed. Warren Ellis, a regular in Second Life, is well aware of this, and documents an incident where he was witness to a dom/sub interaction - on property that he had bought and done a little building on. Sex is a rather large part of our biology, and I suppose the ability to replicate it in Second Life, possibly without the blurries (I don’t know, not having stepped into Second Life) is going to have an explosion of people doing so. Perhaps the next joke will be that Second Life is for porn. I’m inclined to believe that things will settle down once the novelty of having virtual sex is over. Not to say it will disappear, or that people won’t still have those fetishes, but I don’t think it’ll be all over the place. I could be wrong.
In First Life, Malaysia’s government has suggested that prostitutes be whipped as punishment, The reasoning quoted in the article says that if drug addicts can be whipped, why not prostitutes? (Prostitution is illegal in the country, so this would be a punishment for breaking the law.) This appears to be a reaction to Malaysia being a bit of a hub for prostitution. Whipping someone who is soliciting sex for money seems to be a bit extreme to me, but then again, I’m sitting somewhere where “Cruel and unusual” punishment is generally considered taboo. Somewhere else in the world, or in another time, this might seem to be a perfectly reasonable response to trying to “scourge out immoral people like prostitutes”, as the reasoning might go.
Elementary school teachers in Brooksville were hoping that the children would do well on the standardized tests. So they held an after-hours prayer session. That wouldn’t normally have been a problem, except they anointed the children's desks with prayer oil, and the oil was still there when the kids came in on Monday. So the only real reason that anything was known about it was because the evidence was still there. There were concerns expressed about the Christian overtones of the prayer sequence, and possible constitutional matters because the evidence was still visible come Monday. So, let this be a lesson to you - if you want to pray, do it in your house, with the door closed, and in secret. That way, the deity who sees things in secret will reward you.
Other religious things - The ACLU of Oklahoma is arguing that a pastor critical of gay marriage is being tried for lewdness over something that is legal - asking for a private encounter between him and an undercover policeman. Using the Lawrence v. Texas decision, no less. This is probably a good example of how the rain falls on the just and the unjust - the law cuts both ways. At the same time, the leader of an anti-gay Catholic group was bound for trial in an incident where a pro-gay protester was tackled to the ground and told she needed to leave by him.
A domestic political comment - Exploding Aardvark linked it with the title of “Everything you ever needed to know about Hillary Clinton”. The source title at UFO Breakfast Recipients is Pitching Woo to the Security State Freaks, and says that the Senator’s statements about persisting in a mistake and then deliberately distorting things to make it impossible for her opponents to engage her on rational grounds and prove her wrong. The scary bit is the parallel it draws over management tactics designed to make the worker always look bad and the manager faultless. That sounds a lot like politics of the last several elections, regardless of who won. If we really are engaging in this sort of distortion in our politics, then we’re really in trouble in terms of electing a sane President.
At the intersection of politics and religion, we find that nearly half of Americans believe that the civil liberties of Muslims should be restricted. This is mostly advanced from those who consider themselves highly religious, which gives me a strong suspicion that these people would probably support restricting the civil liberties of anyone they didn’t approve of. Outside that core, the television-news watching crowd is afraid of terrorists, who have been systematically linked to Islam in the fear, uncertainty, and doubt campaign being waged. That probably makes up the majority of the percentage that favors such a crackdown on Muslim freedom. According to the Christian Science Monitor, though, the large majority of Muslims reject terrorism as a viable tactic, and appear to “support” bin Laden’s ideas as a means of protesting American foreign policy decisions. It’s the media perception that gets people to think that Muslims are terrorists or support terror unanimously. Some other statistics from the study are that 27 percent of Americans support forcing Muslims to register with the government, 22 percent favor profiling of Muslims to find threats, and 29 percent would support undercover agents infiltrating Muslim organizations to keep tabs on them. Something about these stats and questions sounds really, really familiar... maybe because we were in favor of keeping tabs on the Japanese, supposed Communists, and other groups throughout our history? And that there were agents in college anti-war groups in earlier decades, and agents profiling pacifist groups just recently looking for terror sympathies... and the one thing that seems to be tying them all together is that every one of those actions was useless in the historical perspective. All they really did was perpetuate fear, uncertainty, and doubt and turn Americans into informants on their neighbors. When there’s baseless suspicion going around, lynch mobs, dirty looks, and hate crimes tend to be the result. The human species can do better than that, and Americans, if they want to keep laying claim to being “the best” at everything, need to start backing up their claims with evidence.
Planning on traveling outside the country? Well, thanks to the data mining techniques and sharing that’s supposed to facilitate finding terrorists trying to cross borders means that old convictions of yours, even for DUI or smoking pot, can be found. And as some travelers are finding out, even a small criminal record more than thirty years past can stop you from immigrating into another country. Wow. Can’t say that I particularly like that much tightness of border control. Luckily, there is a way to have that record cleared, at least in Canada, by getting the appropriate ministry to approve that you’ve been rehabilitated. Likely so in the other countries, too. Still, this seems like an undue burden being put on travelers to check and make sure that everything from their past is cleared. With the new ID card and passport requirements, getting out and seeing the world is becoming an increasingly expensive and hassling position. Should I be worried about isolationism being reborn because people can’t get out of the country to get perspective?
The last bits for tonight are some things that may just be weird without extra significance - Things people write on money. Is this technically a crime in the sense of defacing the currency of the country? And from there, Neatorama shows off 37 fads that swept the nation. Each of which I either recognize in the original, or the descendants thereof. That’s how fad-powerful they were... or are. Depends on whether there’s a comeback in the works. And there are a lot of things that do the old-as-new transition, often with a little “updating” to make them hipper for the new crowd.
That’s it from Silver Adept Link Services for tonight. Maybe tomorrow everything will become clear again, and I’ll finish and organize and get everything in the order I want to for the assignments.
