A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.
I finally managed to get the dotOpml updates to work. Loaded 17 new parts last night, and I’m running on version 0.67. Now if only my screen would work, it’d be useful.
Want to know about vagueness? The Register are reporting on how the University of Bath and a whole bunch of Big Name Techs are spending £1.6m on the “Cityware Project” which sounds like a mixture of an academic paperfest and an avoidance of the real issues. They want “pervasive computing zones”, yet they’re not doing anything about free wifi rollout. WiFi gives you “pervasive” Internet access, especially when combined with those funny power socket things that make laptops go. Similarly, if Vodafone want to help bring about pervasive net access, they could do so by making GPRS and 3G cheaper and more available. We don’t need this research. We need decent free wifi, or at least wifi as commodity (which is to say: wifi as an affordable commodity - bits are already a commodity but the market is being inflated by the fact that they are targeting only one market - that of sales executive droids with expense accounts).
The US Government really need to get their head around the whole pornography online thing: it’s not very difficult. Porn exists online. By the bucketload. If you don’t want children accessing it, tell them not to and supervise them when online. Of course, how is asking for search records in a massive block going to help the government come up with solutions to preventing those underage from getting porn? Ridiculous. There’s no way for someone with full access to Google’s SQL servers to tell whether the person searching for “hot sweaty Britney pix” is a twelve-year-old or a fifty-year-old. Google doesn’t track age.
Many teachers not properly qualified. Gee, what a surprise.
Those dang creationists are at it here. They say they want to be doctors and dentists. Fine. But if I find out that my doctor is a creationist, I’m finding a different doctor. If he can be so wrong about something for which there is so much evidence, why should I trust him with my health?
Creationism is based on fundamentally flawed philosophical presuppositions including the two-model paradigm which holds that either evolution is correct or creationism is. If evolution were to be shown wrong, this doesn’t prove creationists correct. The story of Noah, for instance, is one where eight people built in six days a vessel roughly the size of a cruise ship and then amassed a zoological collection to fill said boat the next week. If this doesn’t strike you as more than slightly improbable, you should be stripped of any academic qualifications.
Creationism is also based on the presupposition of revelatory and divine-action theism (Intelligent Design loosens this and makes it unnecessary though preferred). This is philosophically unjustifiable, since timebound gods cannot be omniscient and create truly free creatures, and timeless gods cannot act since that would bind them to time.
To accept creationism, you must accept that finite and physical historicity can prove an infinite and non-physical agency. To accept creationism, you must throw out any evidence that suggests the earth might be four billion years old in favour of the presupposition that God put the fossils there to fool us.
You cannot have it both ways: if you throw your chips on the natural world pointing to God, as Christianity did near unanimously back in the centuries before Darwin, then retract your claim and say “Actually, it’s all metaphor! Anyone who disagrees is a fundie!”. You took your bet, and you lost. The world does not reveal a designer. It reveals cold, merciless indifference and amoral nihilism.
Quick, business opportunity here: register “ismydoctoranidiotcreationist.com” and produce a survey to work out whether your GP is a scientific and intellectual pleb who believes in Noah, the 800-year-old cruise ship owner, and God, who doesn’t make anything that evolution can explain (humans, plants, eyes, moral behaviour) but does produce the stuff that evolution apparently can’t (bacterial flagella, DNA, mitochondria and the such like). I’d pay a fiver to ensure my doctor isn’t better suited for Ken Ham’s museum than the practice of medicine.
We need a spinster and single people takeover. Think about it. Unshaven students and grumpy twenty-five-year-old unemployed people descend on central London to battle with their statistical enemies: pensioners and “family folk”. Just imagine that for a second. We’ve got the trannies and queers on our side, so we’re bound to win. “;->”
Zoe Williams on the baby gap malarkey. I’m out of this whole thing, since I’ve decided that I don’t want children because I detest the little brats. If that means that I don’t have someone to care for me later on in life (about the only good reason I can see to reproduce beyond the base Darwinian “spread my genetic empire” ones), so be it. I’ll be the one who, at age fifty, will still have my hair and still have my sanity.
Both P. Z. Myers and Brian Leiter have given us good entries on Leon Wieseltier’s review of Dan Dennett’s new book. Yes, the ignorance displayed within is rather stunning.
Distinctly non-smart thinking follows smart thinking. This case being, of course, Ricky Gervais’ podcast. I listen to that show, and I’m not paying $1.95 via Audible for a number of reasons. One, I’m in the UK (as, I would predict, most of Gervais’ listeners are) and I haven’t got an Audible account nor do I want to set one up (it’s got DRM and it’s US-based). Two, there are many other podcasts which are as funny if not funnier, for free (notably the qPodders: Ragan Fox, Eat This Hot Show, Madge and the PNS Explosion, as well as Red Bar Radio). As much as I like Karl’s bizarre mumblings, it’s not worth paying for.
“We’re dying! We’re dying!” sayeth your brain cells when they work in dull environments.
It’s shipped!
My MacBook Pro is on it’s way, apparently. w00t w00t w00t w00t w00t! Should be here within a week.
There is a difference between a URL and a URI.
Don’t let London Transport find out about this. There is something interesting about this: when someone renames a product, they are trying to unwire people’s brains. If you’re doing that because you have to (eg. Phoenix to Firebird to Firefox) that’s not a problem, but when you’re doing it for commercial purposes, that sucks and we’re going to hate it (let us say that London Transport renamed Liverpool Street to Tiscaliverpool Street station, nobody would call it that. We’d still call it Liverpool Street because the new name would be a shit one for a dumb purpose. Will that stop advertising droids? Does anything but a restraining order?
People are suggesting that Microsoft’s inclusion of parental controls in Vista could lead to a big take-up of Linux. It’s a nice idea, but this presumes that people will buy Vista in the first place. Of course, parental controls never harmed anyone’s reputation (except, of course, those irredemable bastards at Belkin), least of all Apple’s. Of course, what we need to do is make a bootable disc which simply exorcises a machine of all it’s “parental control” bullshit. Good old Peacefire.
This is fucked up! They’re actors, you security-obsessed pindicks! How about catching some of the fuckers setting light to embassies, rather than harrassing actors in airports?
iPod video privacy tool. It’s from Japan - what did you expect?
Techdirt: “we’re getting used to media ignorance when it comes to technology, but actively ignoring the truth is taking things a step too far”.
Read the story. It’s interesting.
I find it amazing that for every single technological innovation, there’s this group of “moral luddites” waiting around the corner, trying to lure it out of young people’s hands with the temptation of stories about paedophiles, pornographers, drug dealers and other assorted reprobates.
I mean, did you know that recently a police raided a sex offenders house and found, of all things, a knife. Apparently, this sicko paedophile kiddy fiddler uses this “knife” in order to chop up his steak and put ketchup on it! They also found a floppy disk, which can be used to transfer files on a computer. It only contained his CV and some amateur poetry, but it could be used to transmit child pornography!
Every technological accomplishment for the last few thousand years with a number of exceptions can be used by every type of sex offender, paedophile, abusive spouse, murderer, rapist, benefits fraud, anti-social lout, drug dealer and PTA member to do nefarious stuff. A steak knife could be used to sever someone’s head, or it could be used to cut steak. A computer could be used to download child pornography, or it could be used to check one’s investments and send electronic postcards on mothers day.
If any of this came as some kind of shock, you might want to take something for it. For everybody with a brain, it’s pretty self-evident.
Conducting business by text message? I pity them.
If you work somewhere noisy, read this. I currently blog from a moving office. The difference is that I can work in absolute silence and not disturb anyone else. Few others can. Mobile phones, Blackberries, horrible announcements, and precocious, middle age self-importance is the oxygen of suburban railway travelling. I could do with a few of these, though.
