Even asshats can get it right (By uriel Last mod: Feb 22 22:22 )
Cory Doctorow is one of the most obnoxiously abhorrent 'personality' of the 'blogsphere', but even he can see something is very wrong with the so called 'intellectual property'. He has written a short article for The Gurdiang(sic) titled: "Intellectual property" is a silly euphemism.
Of course he still thinks government should regulate information and knowledge (for our own good, as usual), to save ourselves from our own wicked thoughts Oh, no wait, I bet my hat it is to save us from the abuse of those evil corporations! because we all know special interests could never manipulate government regulation to further their... well, special interests. Again the lack of understanding of the most basic economic principles (regulatory capture in particular) shows.
Still, it is a positive development when more people come to realize the 'property' paradigm becomes a pathetic caricature of itself when applied to information and knowledge.
The Unfairness of Fair Trade (By uriel Last mod: Oct 3 2007 )
I wrote a rant about all the silly hype around so called fair trade.
Bizarre Swedish politics (By uriel Last mod: Aug 31 2007 )
When all mainstream parties are in favor of doing away with ancient and archaic system of conscription which results in around forty people being thrown into jail every year for their principled opposition to military service, who speaks in favor of continuing stealing a part of the precious life of young men? The Left!
Sweden, where left wing politics and militarism unite:
The wonders of biofuels (By uriel Last mod: Aug 20 2007 )
Because if something sounds like a good idea, it must be a good idea, so why not have government push it down our throats, I'm sure it wont have any unintended consequences. From the Guardian:
Spirituality (By uriel Last mod: Aug 11 2007 )
Charles Brooker's screen burn at the Guardian is the best rant I have read in a long time:
'Welcome to a dangerous new era - the Unlightenment - in which centuries of rational thought are overturned by idiots. Superstitious idiots. They're everywhere - reading horoscopes, buying homeopathic remedies, consulting psychics, babbling about "chakras" and "healing energies", praying to imaginary gods, and rejecting science in favour of soft-headed bunkum. But instead of slapping these people round the face till they behave like adults, we encourage them. We've got to respect their beliefs, apparently.'
'Well I don't. "Spirituality" is what cretins have in place of imagination. If you've ever described yourself as "quite spiritual", do civilisation a favour and punch yourself in the throat until you're incapable of speaking aloud ever again. Why should your outmoded codswallop be treated with anything other than the contemptuous mockery it deserves?'
The Project Zero meta FAQ (By uriel Last mod: Jul 6 2007 )
Think Corporate Gibberish Generator meets Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator..
What does dynamic linking and communism have in common (By uriel Last mod: Jul 2 2007 )
Roman Shaposhnik has written a wonderful article about the evils of one of the most insidious ideas in the software world: What does dynamic linking and communism have got in common?.
And I have to share his feeling that the more pro-dynamic-linking propaganda I read, the more angry I get, which is one of the reasons I have not not got around writing about it here yet.
Static linking works just fine, and dynamic linking didn't make sense even back when computers had less than one Mb of ram, say 'No' to the insane complexity of dynamic linking.
Edit: Another wonderful post in Roman's blog: Why do I love multiple versioned symbols with the same name. If you can't smell the sarcasm in that title from a mile away you need to have your brain checked.
Clerics and copyright (By uriel Last mod: Jun 29 2007 )
A couple of interesting links about two of my favorite subjects, the harmful effects of religion delusions and intellectual property.
- How Things Would Work in a Copyright Free Universe.
- What if Muslim clerics were held to the same standards as Pfizer?
In a more positive note, evil capitalism is destroying the wonderful traditional Indian social system:
Patents IP and wine (By uriel Last mod: Jun 26 2007 )
I found a beautiful essay by John Perry Barlow titled 'Selling Wine Without Bottles, The Economy of Mind on the Global Net' written in in the beginning of the 90's, and its premonitory power is only comparable to that of Neuromancer ten years earlier.
And as an extra I rescued a collection of quotes about patents that includes gems like this:
"Of course, nothing is easier than to excite people on the argument that everything should be made in this country and not imported: though what would happen if anybody really tried to carry that out is the same as would happen if everybody expelled his breath from his body and never drew any breath in." -- Viscount Simon, Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords, 1949.
Which reminds me, I should should create a page about tariffs and other trade barriers to complement the subsidies page.
The sick wacko (By uriel Last mod: Jun 21 2007 )
Cato@Liberty asks: Is Michael Moore Sicko or Wacko?
- Moore frequently refers to the 47 million Americans without health insurance, but fails to point out that most of those are uninsured for only brief periods, or that millions are already eligible for government programs like Medicaid but fail to apply. Moreover, he implies that people without health insurance don’t receive health care. In reality, as Michael Cannon and I have pointed out, most do. Hospitals are legally obligated to provide care regardless of ability to pay, and while physicians do not face the same legal requirements, few are willing to deny treatment because a patient lacks insurance. Treatment for the uninsured may well mean financial hardship, but by and large they do receive care.
- Moore talks a lot about life expectancy, suggesting that people in Canada, Britain, France, and even Cuba live longer than Americans because of their health care systems. But most experts agree that life expectancies are a poor measure of health care, because they are affected by too many exogenous factors like violent crime, poverty, obesity, tobacco and drug use, and other issues unrelated to a country’s health system. Americans in Utah live longer than Americans in New York City, despite having essentially the same health care.
- Moore downplays waiting lists in Canada, suggesting they are no more than inconveniences. He interviews apparently healthy Canadians who claim they have no problem getting care. Yet nearly 800,000 Canadians are not so lucky. No less than the Canadian Supreme Court has said that many Canadians waiting for treatment suffer chronic pain and that “patients die while on the waiting list.”
- Moore shows happy Britons who don’t have to pay for their prescription drugs. But he didn’t talk to any of the 850,000 Britons waiting for admission to National Health Service hospitals. Every year, shortages force the NHS to cancel as many as 50,000 operations. In a Cato Policy Analysis, John Goodman noted that roughly 40 percent of cancer patients never get to see an oncology specialist. Delays in receiving treatment are often so long that nearly 20 percent of colon cancer cases considered treatable when first diagnosed are incurable by the time treatment is finally offered.
- Moore calls the French system “free,” convieniently ignoring the 13.55 percent payroll tax, a 5.25 percent income tax, and additional taxes on tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceutical company revenues that fund the system. (Despite the high taxes, the system is running an €11.6 billion annual deficit.) The French system is not even free in terms of what patients pay. Its patients pay high copayments and other out-of-pocket expenses, and physicians are able to bill patients for charges over and above what the government reimburses. As a result, 92 percent of French citizens have private health insurance to complement the government system. Yet there remain shortages of modern health care technology and a lack of access to the most advanced care.
But those are facts, facts, facts... don't bother me with facts! Socialist-healthcare makes me feel good, so it must be good.
Nevermind that it is the government who totally fucked up the healthcare system in the first place and now people expect that by having government completely take healthcare over it will make things any better... yea, because you want to put your healthcare in the hands of the same people that run FEMA, the iraq war, the war on drugs, the education system, and the US post, wonderful idea.
And just wait for the next religious wacko to get to the white house and after they keep pushing abstinence only sex education (as someone put it 'just hold it potty training') they will push faith healing and prayer to cure cancer, I'm sure that will work great, because government always makes the right choices for you.
t (By uriel Last mod: Jun 24 2007 )
Infinite stupidity (By uriel Last mod: Jun 18 2007 )
When chemistry is outlawed, only outlaws will do chemistry.
I should write about the war on drugs some time, but it is so stupid that it makes my brains cringe.
George Carlin (By uriel Last mod: Jun 13 2007 )
George Carlin is one of my heros, I don't agree with him in many things, and his understanding of economics is a bit lacking, but he is an absolute genius, and I love how he trounces political correctness and other generally accepted nonsense.
Here are two great shows by him:
His rant on religion is as close to perfection as a rant can be.
And his essay about children is beautiful.
New documents archive and ifdef considered harmful (By uriel Last mod: Jun 12 2007 )
There is a new doc.cat-v.org site that intends to collect interesting papers and other documents, it is slowly being populated, but please feel free to send in any interesting things that are worth including.
One of the first things I posted there is the excellent, and sadly completely ignored, paper by Henry Spencer and Geoff Collyer: #ifdef Considered Harmful, well worth reading to learn about how to write portable software without abusing the wicked C preprocessor.
The the evolution of language (By uriel Last mod: Jun 12 2007 )
... from Descartes to the W3C.
Autohell (By uriel Last mod: Jun 11 2007 )
One of my favorite subjects, the total stupidity and idioticy of the gnu autotools. Thanks to sqweek for this gem he found in busybox:
/* Lie to autoconf when it starts asking stupid questions. */
if (argc == 2 && !strcmp(argv[1], "--version")) {
puts("This is not GNU sed version 4.0");
return 0;
}
Twenty years of software progress (By uriel Last mod: Jun 6 2007 )
Mac Plus(1986) vs. AMD DualCore/WinXP(2007). Confirmation of what we suspected all along: that in the last twenty years the software industry has made zero progress.
When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac
Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can
be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in
technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity.
And they don't even evaluate reliability which is probably the most important and has certainly been going steadily down over the years.
This reminds me of what is still the most powerful programming paradigm: Unix shell programming with pipes. The most basic Unix tools have become so Byzantine that they are slower than they were 25 years ago. But got to thank PoSix and GNU for all those really useful 'features' like locales and --worthless-insanely-long-options-nobody-can-remember.
Blogs suck so we got a blog (By uriel Last mod: Jun 5 2007 )
So we have a blog now! Even with an rss feed... yuck
And to celebrate I added a bunch of new entries:
- Andy Tanenbaum had not learned anything in 92' and I doubt he has learned anything since then.
- Agnostics are wimps.
- Gay marriage is silly and hypocritical, stop the discrimination against singles, polygamists and romantic relationships with non-human entities!
And probably a few other items that I forgot about. Enjoy!