Self Abuse

This time of year you might think this was an April Fool's gag. Sadly, it's not. An article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (thanks, Don) describes how a 15-year-old girl is being charged with (among other things) sexual abuse of children, for taking sexually explicit photographs... of herself.

The charges of possessing and distributing child pornography almost make sense. She did have explicit photos of a minor, she did send them to people, and if you assume that the existence of such images pose an inherent danger to society no matter what (an assumption I don't buy) then that's a problem. Except that she's a minor, so charging her with a crime over that (even for trial as a juvenile) seems iffy.

Where this falls down the hole into wonderland is charging her with abusing... herself. OK, what she was doing used to be popularly known as "self abuse". But playing with yourself - even in front of a camera - is hardly criminal. It's practically a textbook definition of a victimless crime. Can't we deal with the notion that maybe this kid enjoyed it? The whole rationale behind statutory rape laws is the idea that you have an older person taking advantage of their power/influence/experience over the younger person's. Unless this girl has multiple personalities, that's impossible. The folks in Latrobe who are prosecuting this kid have been drinking far too much Rolling Rock.

I know for a fact that taking pictures of oneself like that is not sexually abusive. I did it myself. When I was this girl's age, maybe even a year or two younger, I took some black-and-white Polaroid photos of myself, also "in various states of undress and performing a variety of sexual acts." I was just goofing around. The only trauma I experienced was the anxiety of wondering if my parents would find them, because that'd be embarrassing. As an exercise in adolescent sexual experimentation, it was harmless... and probably even beneficial, because it helped me get over some of my hang-ups about being nude. (e.g. In elementary school when we went to the high school to swim in the pool, I used to wrap a towel around my waist before taking off my underwear and putting on my swim suit, or vice versa.)

I'm not saying that what this girl did was smart. Sending naked pictures of yourself to strangers is pretty foolish, especially if you don't have a lot of life experience behind you to judge whether you're being safe about it or not. But that's all it is: unwise. Like so many other things teenagers do that you'd think they'd have the common sense not to do... but they do it anyways. There's a reason we have (or at least used to have) "juvenile" status for kids and teenagers: they have serious lapses in judgment. And that doesn't make them bad or evil or (for the most part) dangerous. In this girl's case, it simply means she's not ready to move out of her parents' house. Duh.

When I was young and foolish, I didn't have an internet available to tempt me into sending those photos of myself to strangers. I was painfully shy, so even the perceived anonymity of the internet wouldn't have persuaded me to share them. At least at the time. Now I really wouldn't care (personally) if nude photos of me as a teenager were available online. And why shouldn't I be allowed to make that choice? Am I not old enough to give consent for publication? But the authorities certainly would mind, and I know enough about how non-anonymous the internet really is to even consider publishing them... even if I still had them.

There is such a thing as sexual abuse of children. We need laws against it, and we ought to prosecute when it happens. But situations like this - when they accuse the "victim" of being her own "abuser" - show that the laws we have are way too broad.

Alternatives to Windows

Microsoft Windows isn't the only operating system for personal computers, or even the best... it's just the best-marketed. Its inconsistent behavior and the interface that changes with every version are the main reasons people find computers difficult to use. Microsoft adds new bells and whistles in each release, and claims that this time they've solved the countless problems in the previous versions... but the hype is never really fulfilled. The upgrade prices are blatant, documented gouging, which serve primarily to keep the cash flowing to Microsoft to subsidize their efforts to take over other markets. And a slew of intrusive new "features" in Windows XP benefit Microsoft at the expensive of both your privacy and your freedom. So rather than switching to WinXP, consider switching to something better. There's an exciting array of interesting operating systems out there, and the overall quality of them is stronger than ever.

If you can't say NO to Windows (which is understandable in many cases), you can still say NO MORE. The simplest alternative to Windows XP is a previously-installed version of Windows. Windows XP isn't a simple upgrade like 98 or ME was; it's actually a different operating system, which has compatibility problems with some pre-XP software, and won't work properly with a lot of older hardware, so installing the XP "upgrade" is a risk. And it'll be slower. Besides, most new software will still work on the earlier versions of Windows. Even if the software box brags "for Windows XP", that's because Microsoft tells developers not to list earlier versions. The bottom line: if you already own Windows 95/98/ME/2K and it works for you, you don't have to upgrade; you can continue using it without paying Microsoft another dime. I've used the latest versions in my job, but I still use ol' Win98 (occasionally) at home.

The Mac OS user interface inspired the creation of Windows, and is still the target Microsoft is trying to equal. As a popular consumer product, there's plenty of software available for it, and in certain professions (like graphic design and education), it's as ubiquitous as Windows is in big business. Now even Windows-focused publications are starting to pay more attention to it, for both home and mainstream business use. (After all, Apple Corp. runs on it.) The current version, OS X (ten), uses Unix technology, which makes it more stable and secure than Windows, and lets you run free Unix software. But the real star is OS X's visual interface, which shows the difference between Microsoft's guesswork in this area and Apple's innovative design work: it's both beautiful and easy to use. The main "negative" to Mac OS is that you need to buy an Apple computer to use it, but that's not much of a sacrifice: in addition to being stylish, they're top-notch in quality, and both faster and less expensive than you'd expect. Apple has a section of their site for people wondering if they can switch to Mac OS. (This site runs on an OS X system when the main server is offline for maintenance.)

Linux (LIH-nux) is a free Unix-like operating system, developed by programmers who who simply love the challenge of solving problems and producing quality software... even if that means giving the resulting product away. Not coincidentally, there's also a wealth of free software for it (which is also true of most other free operating systems). Unlike commercial operating systems, which are usually controlled in every detail by a single company, Linux has a standard consistent core (called the "kernel") around which many varieties (known as "distributions") have been produced by various companies and organisations. Some are aimed at geeks, some focus on the needs of business users, and some are designed with home users in mind. You can test-drive Linux with Knoppix, a version of Linux that runs from a CD. New Linux users should start with one of the mainstream distributions, such as Mandrake, Xandros, Lycoris, SUSE, or Lindows. Power users might prefer Debian, Slackware, or Gentoo. Linux is a first-rate choice for servers; the main server of this site is a Linux system.

BeOS was designed with multimedia in mind, including the kinds of features that Microsoft is just now tacking onto Windows. Although Microsoft successfully drove Be Corp. out of business through illegal interference with their business efforts, reports of BeOS's death are exaggerated: The source code for BeOS has been licensed to European software firm YellowTAB whose Zeta is effectively the much-longed-for BeOS R6. The free BeOS R5 Personal Edition is still available to download, and has been patched to support newer hardware as BeOS Max Edition. And OpenBeOS and a few other projects are creating open-source duplicates of BeOS R5, which will then be enhanced.

FreeBSD is commonly called "the free Unix". It's descended from the classic 1970's Berkeley Software Distribution of Unix (from before the OS became "UNIX"®), making it one of the most mature and stable operating systems around. It's "free" as in "free beer" (you can download it for nothing) and as in "free speech" (you can do pretty much whatever you like with it... like when Microsoft took code from it to add better networking to Windows NT). Unlike the plethora of Linuxes, there's only one current version of FreeBSD, with a consistent structure and an easy-to-use "ports" system for installing software. It can also run most Linux binaries. Much of the Internet infrastructure was built on FreeBSD, due to its combination of quality and cost. It's always been excellent for servers, but it's become comparable to mainstream Linux distros as a desktop OS as well. Its main platform is the Intel x86 architecture, with ports to a few others.

OpenBSD is "the other free Unix". It's similar to FreeBSD both in the Berkeley code it's based on, and the licensing terms. One key advantage it has over its BSD siblings (and nearly any other OS) is that it's incredibly secure from attack, as implied by its blowfish mascot, and made explicit by their boast of only one remotely-exploitable hole - ever - in their default installation. (Compare that to Windows' hundreds.) "Open" is a reference to their code auditing process, not a welcome-mat for crackers. It's not as speedy as FreeBSD, but it's safer. It's also available for some hardware plaforms FreeBSD doesn't support, including Mac 68K, PPC, Amiga, Sun, Vax, and others.

NetBSD is "the other other free Unix". It's the work of another group of volunteer developers using the net to collaborate (hence the name of their product). Their mission is to get the OS to run - and run well - on hardware platforms no other Unix supports. In addition to most of the usual suspects above, it's been ported to run on the NeXT box, MIPS machines, the good Atari computers, the BeBox, WinCE-compatible handhelds, ARM processors, and even game machines like the Playstation 2 or the orphaned Sega Dreamcast. So with NetBSD you can standardise your software even if you have a whole bunch of different, "incompatible" hardware, one of the strengths of the Unix-like system.

Darwin is a cousin of Free/Open/NetBSD, and the free foundation on which the commercial Mac OS X is built. Although its development was originally managed rather tightly by Apple (understandable, because their business depends on it) they've loosened the leash, making participation in the development fully open. So OpenDarwin is becoming an open-source OS in its own right. Any Darwin software will run on OS X, but software written specifically for OS X won't run on Darwin, because the Mac interface (and various other proprietary bits) are not part of Darwin itself. Instead, Darwin typically uses X11 with either TWM or KDE.

Amiga owners used to taunt PC and Mac users with their smoothly-multitasking graphical operating system, back when the Macs couldn't multitask, and PCs weren't even graphical. Even though the "classic" Amiga machines are no longer being produced, there's a lot of ongoing activity in Amigaspace: The OS is again being updated to support current technology (Amiga OS 4 is in development), an emulation layer called AmigaOSXL (aka AMIthlon) is available to run Amiga OS on modern PC hardware, Amiga Forever is an emulator for Windows and other operating systems, and a new hardware platform and OS called AmigaOne have been introduced to try to carry on the Amiga legacy.

MorphOS began as a project to port the Amiga OS to the then-new PowerPC architecture, but has since morphed into an OS in its own right. It runs on (and comes bundled with) the Pegasos platform, a PowerPC-based architecture (also supported by Linux and other OSes), and has better-than-standard-emulation support for Amiga OS 3.1 applications as well as native apps built for MorphOS.

RISC OS is the operating system of the former Acorn line of computers (best known in the UK), which has been revived and updated for faster performance and to meet current OS standards (e.g. long filenames, large hard drives). It doesn't run on standard PCs, but on systems specifically designed for it (such as the RiscPC and A7000), using the high-speed StrongARM processors. The OS itself is stored in electronic ROM rather than having to be loaded into RAM from a hard drive.

Syllable is based on AtheOS, building on the work done before AtheOS development stopped. It's a free alternative OS for standard PCs. It isn't specifically trying to copy Unix or BeOS or AmigaOS or anything else. But it uses some of the better ideas from these OSes, and because of the inherent portability of programs written in C++ for Unix, some of them can be easily ported to it (e.g. Apache, BIND, GCC, Emacs, vi, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby). It's not a full-featured OS yet, but it's functional enough to be useful.

GNU's Not Unix. In fact, that phrase is what G.N.U. is a (recursive) abbrevation for. It is a Unix-like operating system being developed as a long-term project by the Free Software Foundation to offer a fully-free alternative to the commercial and BSD versions of Unix. Although you'll find many key components of GNU used in Linux and BSD packages under the GNU General Public license (GPL), a fully GNU system will use the Hurd, GNU's own free-software kernel. The Hurd has some design advantages over the Linux kernel, but is still far from finished, and requires serious expertise with OS development to install.

Minix is a freeware Unix-like operating system developed for educational purposes. Because of its relative simplicity and ample documentation, its creator says that a few months studying the source code should teach you most of how such things work. (It inspired Linus Torvalds to create Linux.) It's not a very actively-maintained OS (since the hardware it runs on is all "old stuff", there's little point in keeping it "current"), but versions for both Intel-x86-compatible and Mac/Amiga/Atari hardware are available for download; by putting Minix on a discarded machine (e.g. a 286 or 68000 CPU), you can literally build a working computer system for free.

There are also a bunch of commercial UNIX® systems, which are typically customised to run on expensive, high-end, proprietary hardware sold by the same vendor. Most of them have names other than "Unix" due to old trademark issues. They're better as alternatives to the server versions of Windows NT/200X, not the desktop versions of Windows such as 98 and XP. They include Sun Solaris, HP-UX, IBM AIX, SGI IRIX. (Avoid SCO UnixWare; they're on a collision course with disaster.)

IBM's OS/2warp was once supposed to replace MS Windows, back when Emperor IBM and Darth Microsoft were planning to rule the galaxy together. Then Darth decided he didn't need the Emperor, struck confidential deals with other hardware vendors and software developers, and made Windows (just barely) powerful enough to fill OS/2's intended role. Windows didn't really beat OS/2 technically, but it won the Marketing Wars, which is what mattered. Unfortunately, IBM is giving up on OS/2's future, offering minor updates to support new technology, but no serious upgrades. A third-party package called eComStation is a licensed effort to update and maintain OS/2. It's still a stable, useful, Windows-like operating system with a rather loyal userbase.

Believe it or not, DOS (with or without Windows 3.1) is still a viable option for many uses. There was an incredible amount of software developed for it, and it still works. Plus, DOS runs like a champ, on old hardware that no one else wants. You can even fit it on a diskette, to boot it on nearly any PC anywhere. In addition to Microsoft's DOS (which you can probably get a computing old-timer to donate to you along with some of his "vintage" applications like WordPerfect 5.1, Lotus 1-2-3 r2.2, and dBASE III), there are modern, compatible DOSes in active use from other sources: the open-source clone FreeDOS (available instead of Windows on certain computers from Dell), IBM's PC-DOS, and DR DOS.

NOTE: If you want to use a different operating system, but still need to run Windows programs, you might be able to have it both ways. You can often set up your computer to run more than one OS: you just pick which one to use when you turn it on. For even more flexibility, there are "emulators" which will let you add another OS (or several) to your main OS, letting you click from one to another at will: VMware (lets you run Windows on Linux, or Linux on Windows), Win4Lin (Windows on Linux), Bochs (Windows or Linux on Mac, BeOS, Unix, Amiga, etc.), Amiga Forever (Amiga on Windows/Linux/Mac OS). Another option is WINE, a free package that adds enough Windows compatibility to Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris so that many Windows programs (including MS Office) can run on them as if they were Linux programs.

And a Pony

Good news, Americans! Our president says that everybody ought to have affordable broadband internet by 2007!

And a pony!

OK, he didn't actually mention the pony, but as long as you're just wishing for things, you might as well wish for it all.

I have nothing against affordable broadband internet to the home. I used to run a web site over a pair of 64Kbps ISDN channels and switched to 384Kbps-upstream SDSL as soon as it was available where I live. I'd upgrade to something faster, but higher speeds aren't available on my block. And perhaps more importantly, I had a dream-come-true not-quite-a-job-offer fail to materialise because the outfit that was going to hire me - a development studio specialising in bandwidth-intensive rich media projects - couldn't find enough work to pay my salary. Apparent there simply aren't enough people with broadband connections to make these kinds of projects worthwhile. It's not quite on par with, say, affordable healthcare or reliable retirement income, but ubiquitous broadband would be a very good thing for this country to have.

But hang on a sec. About healthcare and retirement income. Those really are more important. Those are needs, pretty far down near the base of Maslow's hierarchy. Shouldn't the president be spending more time working on those?

It's rather ironic that Bush should be trying to score points with voters by promoting internet access. Four years ago, he and his proxies were ridiculing Al Gore for claiming to have invented the Internet. Gore actually made no such claim; that was a lie promoted by the Bush campaign. What he'd said was that "I took the initiative in creating the Internet." And you know what? He did. Not as a geek inventor (a word he never used in this context). But as a Representative in the 1970's and as a Senator in the 1980's (before you'd even heard the word "internet"), he was instrumental in providing funding for the inter-networking projects which would become the publically available "information superhighway" we know today. He didn't just vote or it, or co-sponsor the bills; he wrote them. All Bush is doing here is jumping on a bandwagon that Al set in motion back when George was still dodging... military service.

The difference is that Gore made it happen. He provided the funds. Bush is just wishing. He has no plan for paying for it. He has no plan for making it happen. He just thinks it "ought" to happen. Hell, if that's what it takes to be elected president, I should have won four - or even eight - years ago. And he's going to worry about creating competition in this market only after there's an entrenched incumbent in every market.

But maybe now we can return the favor by propagating the lie that Bush is claiming to have invented broadband. And the pony.

The Theology of Martian Life

The latest Martian methane leaks - about a new piece of data that could point to life - have sent some atheists into a gleeful frenzy. They don't smell gas... they smell blood. And they're eager to shove this in the face of the theists, and watch their faith crumble to bits as they're finally confronted with proof that they've been wrong all along.

Ain't gonna happen.

First, there's the cynical rebuttal: Theists cling so tightly to their beliefs that they'll find some way to rationalize the discovery of extra-terrestrial life so that it fits in with their beliefs. They'll stick their heads in the sand and claim it's a hoax. Or they'll argue that it probably came from Earth somehow. Or that it's not really "life", it's just carbon-based molecules capable of reproducing themselves chemically.

There would probably be some of that happening. But it wouldn't be needed. Because there's nothing about bacteria on Mars that contradicts the holy scriptures of major modern religions. Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, and Shintos might be intrigued by the news, but it wouldn't threaten their beliefs in any way. Any polytheist or pantheist religion isn't going to be fazed by the existance of life elsewhere.

The only religions that might be threatened are the monotheist ones, specifically Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But as closed-minded as the priests of these faiths can be, at times rejecting or denouncing things like the equality of women, or the evil of slavery, or the notion of good clean recreational sex... this one wouldn't be a problem for them.

For one thing, it wouldn't have a direct impact on day to day life within the faith. Germs on another planet won't upset the status quo, so there's no sociopolitical motivation to freak out over it.

And theologically... it's a non-issue. There's nothing in the holy scriptures of these faiths that would be contradicted by it. Sure, there's nothing in the Torah, the Gospels, the Epistles, or the Quran that directly acknowledges the existence of life on other planets, but neither is there anything that denies it. It's not as if Genesis says, "and God said 'Let there be life, but only on this one world, for God wished it to be unique in all His Creation." For all we know from reading the Book, God spent the Eighth Day letting there be simple bacteria in underground fissures on Mars, where volcanic heat and saltwater would sustain them.

The Bible doesn't say anything about the existence of pineapples in Hawaii, but the discovery of them didn't shake anyone's faith. Likewise, the discovery of Martian bacteria would simply be another example of the wonders of God's Creation.

At worst, Orthodox rabbis would have to revisit (as they've had to do many times over the millennia... it's part of their lot in life) the interpretation of the Talmud to take the changing world around them into account. Are Martian lifeforms kosher or traif? (While they're at it, they might want to figure out how to deal with observance of the Sabbath on a planet with a 24.6-hour day.)

What would raise some theological eyebrows, and no doubt some crises of faith, would be the discovery of sentient life elsewhere in the universe. Not some lesser intelligence like the apes or cetaceans that we can brush off as "not quite there yet", or artificial intelligence that we can claim godhood over... but an alien culture that's obviously as advanced as (or more than) our own.

It wouldn't be a completely unique situation. Over the centuries, European Christians "discovered" a series of "new" civilisations that had never heard of Jesus (or even their ancestor Adam). There was sometimes debate about the theological implications of this. After all, these people had lived for generations without a chance at salvation through Jesus. But the Christians usually coped by converting, enslaving, and/or killing the people in question. Jesus did say "make disciples of all nations", after all. The Muslims followed a similar pattern in North African and Southwest Asia.

The Jews might not have a problem with ETs. Judaism really only has two fundamental precepts: G-d is the Creator of everything, and He has a special covenant with the children of Abraham. All others... Greek, Egyptian, Inuit, Chinese, Martian, Antarean... are just goyim, people not of the house of Abraham, with no theological significance.

There's a notion that already has a bit of traction in our society, that God might manifest Himself in different ways to different peoples. Jews, Christians, and Muslims (at least the non-xenophobic ones) allude to this as they accept that when a Muslim says "Allah" he's talking about "YHWH" or "Jehovah". The Jewish notion that G-d holds them to a different standard than to the gentiles fits with this. It would depend, I suppose on just how different ia!8&k/'4s is from the guy we call God.

Christianity (and Islam, I think) would be more troubled over the implications this would have on the doctrine of Original Sin. The idea there is that Creation was a perfect, peaceful place until Adam and Eve brought sin into it by disobeying a direct order from God. Since everyone on Earth is a descendent of Adam and Eve, it explains why sinfulness and suffering are part of the human condition. But what about the Antareans? Does their life suck because of what Adam and Eve did over here in the Sol system? Or did they have their own little spoilers? But what if theirs happened way before ours did? Does that mean Adam's sin wasn't all that original?

The thing is, this question is already before the jury. The whole question of Literal Creationism v. Darwinian Evolution puts Original Sin in the balance. After all, if there were T-Rexes fighting Triceratopses, and Brontos dying off while little mammals chomped on their eggs, epochs before the first man and woman came along, how can you blame all the death and dischord on their disobedience?

Anyway, most of this last bit is moot, as the odds of us discovering any definitively intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe - let alone learning anything about them - are rather slim. Maybe by then we'll be ready to cope with the theological implications of the encounter.

The Ladykillers

my rating: Nathan's rating:

The Ladykillers seems to have something for everyone in it. Just not enough for me to satisfy me. It's as if it can't decide what kind of film to be (dark comedy, screwball laff-fest, ironic satire, etc), and instead mixes a bunch of it all together.

There's lots of carefully cinematic photography, with the square and flat framing of the sheriff's office against a blank sky, or the recurring shot of the criminals dropping... assorted items onto a garbage barge from the bridge, which ties in unexpectedly but delightfully at the end. And like O Brother, Where Art Thou?, there's plenty of authentic American folk music (this time of the gospel variety). Very artistic.

But in between there are gags about one of the characters having diarrhea, another getting slapped upside the head over and over, and another nearly swallowing the old lady's dentures. The characters are odd and interesting... at first. But they each turn out to be shallow caricatures: a ringleader with peculiar intellectual affectations, a stupid and childlike piece of muscle, a mysterious asian soldier, a colorful oversized boyscout, a funky foul-mouthed gangsta, and (their nemesis) a dotty gospel-loving old negress. The criminals don't belong together and only a line of dialog is wasted justifying their partnership. And the wacky hijinx as they play all off each other is predictable. There were times I thought I was watching one of the comedies I used to go to as a kid, starring Burt Reynolds and/or Don Knotts.

Nathan got lots of out-loud laughs from it, though they tended to be the bits I sat through with my eyes rolling. I chuckled at some of the clever lines given to the professor because he was the "smart" one of the bunch, and I appreciated the irony of the naive black woman making donations to racist Bob Jones University, because she thought it was a good Christian school. Maybe the bits I liked were brief enough to avoid boring Nathan, but the parts he liked were enough to let my mind wander to Smokey and the Bandit. It wasn't bad, but it was... disappointing.

YRUGay

Who would've predicted it? The Village People, especially their homoerotic disco hit YMCA (or "YRUGay" as my not-especially-enlightened 13-year-old peers sang it), have become a piece of classic Americana. It's dancing fun for the whole family!

You're the cowboy. You're charming, old fashioned,
and down to earth. You're more comfortable
alone on the range than in social situations,
but that doesn't mean you don't want someone
around to rope and ride now and then.
What member of the Village People are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Newdow v. God

There's an article somewhere in your local newspaper about Michael Newdow's appearance before the Supreme Court, challenging Congress' attempt to promote the belief in a God and subservience to it, through the Pledge of Allegiance. Sounds like he argued rather persuasively, but the main question on most of the justices' minds was what grounds they could use to decide the case against him, not whether he might actually have a valid point and grounds for complaint.

With Scalia out of the picture and a few not-entirely-unsympathetic justices on the bench, it's conceivable that Newdow will win. But I doubt it. An irrational contempt for atheists is too deeply ingrained in our culture. People actually dismiss Newdow's objections because he "just an atheist". Theists treat us like second-class citizens, because that's what they're taught by their parents, their preachers, and - thanks to recitations of the Pledge - their teachers.

Well, I'm certainly no better than anyone else, so why not sink to their level:

To anyone who thinks this is no big deal, and Newdow and the rest of us should just stop complaining, I respectfully invite you to pull your heads out of your asses and start showing some of the concern for your fellow man that most of your religions preach. If the "under God" bit is really (as Justice Souter tried to argue) so tepid that it really doesn't mean anything, why do you insist on keeping it there?

And to anyone who firmly believes that "under God" really does belong in a state-declared pledge to our national banner... all I can do is tell you to go suck on the business end of a shotgun, you small-minded turd. And on the off chance that you're right about all this, I hope you end up in Hell. You deserve it for being such a spiteful winner.

The above is my own personal opinion. If it offends you... good. Now you know how I feel about the crap you keep giving to people like me.

Microsoft's European Slap on the Ass

Just in case there was any doubt that the U.S. Senate is for sale (or perhaps just for rent), we now have Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, asking the Commander in Chief to "engage" the European Union over their $600 million slap on the ass to Microsoft for violating EU law.

Sen. Murray really ought to choose her words more carefully; Mr. Bush might just take her up on the suggestion and invade Belgium.

The case was very much like the previous anti-trust cases against Microsoft in the U.S., such as the one over their bundling IE with Windows and interfering with other browsers. The issue in this case was Windows Media Player, which Microsoft (just like in the browser situation) insisted was an integral part of the OS which couldn't be removed, and which others (just like before) demonstrated to the court was not true at all. The difference is that Microsoft funds the elections of people like Sen. Murray, but they don't have that kind of influence on the EU government. So the EU actually threw the book at them, rather than just waving it over their heads and backing down.

What Microsoft seems to be complaining about is the notion that they have to know and abide by the local laws of whatever sovereign nations they do business in. Well, duh.

The Senator from Microsoft is claiming that this is going to cost American jobs and hurt our economy. Which is bullshit.

In the short term, it means Microsoft is going to have to spend some extra money on programming to make Windows XP and Windows Media Player comply with European law. Real and Apple (developers of RealPlayer and QuickTime media players, Microsoft's biggest challengers) will have a brief boom in programming activity as well (taking advantage of the newly-opened Windows media interfaces), followed by (one would expect) some renewed prosperity from this new opportunity. That's a net gain in jobs. That's what competition does in a free market: it increases economic activity. The MS monopoly - with a single company writing nearly all of our software - is one of the things killing it. Give Windows a really good cracking open, and you'll see such a blizzard of economic activity in the tech sector that it'll take years to settle down. (Hell, even if that post-monopoly economic revival helped Bush get elected this fall, I think it might almost be worth it.)

OK, this court ruling would take over half a billion dollars out of Microsoft's cash reserves and send it to Europe. That wouldn't be good for the American economy. Maybe if the US prosecutors and courts had the courage to impose fines of this size when they had the chance, Microsoft might have discontinued their anti-competitive bundling, and avoided this fine in the first place.

The bottom line is that Microsoft's been violating EU law, and the usual alternative to a fine is jail time. Would Sen. Murray prefer that Bill Gates spend some time in a Turkish prison instead?

Besides, this fine isn't exactly a crippling blow to a company with tens of billions in cash on hand. It's more than a slap on the wrist, for which the European court should be applauded. But it's really not much worse than a spanking, which might prevent Microsoft from sitting down in Europe for a while, but won't change their overall attitude.

No .Sex Please

Don't get me wrong: I like sex. Even online. But .sex is simply a Bad Idea.

A few years ago, ICANN, the organisation charged with overseeing the administration of Top Level Domains, approved the addition of .info, .biz, .name, and .pro, which joined the "classic" generic TLDs of .net, .com, and .org. (There are several other TLDs in use, but they belong to agencies which determine who can use them.)

One of the proposals they did not implement - but which refuses to die - is to create a new .sex TLD. At first glance it seems like a tidy solution to the conflict between those who want the internet to be suitable for children and those who want to continue using it for porn. Just put all the naughty stuff in .sex (or .xxx or .adult) and those who want it can still get at it, and parents can restrict their kids' computers from accessing anything in that TLD.

But it's not that simple. A new Request For Comments (the traditional mechanism for developing protocols and standards for the internet) discusses some of the technical and political problems with the idea, and also goes into some of the alternative solutions (segregation based on IP addresses, data tagging, etc.) that are also being floated about. The bottom line is that it wouldn't work.

Creating .sex would certainly create a landrush of people eager to register domains. What porn webmaster wouldn't want a catchy domain like http://teen.sex? But don't think for a minute that the owner of http://teensex.com is just going to turn off that name. You'd have to pass a law requiring him to. Which just made the whole idea impossible to make work. So nothing's been accomplished.

First there's the obvious problem of who passes that law. The .com domain is international, so the U.S. government can't dictate what the Argentino operator of http://sexoadolescente.com puts on his site. The U.N. couldn't do it because of national sovereignty. The only way it could be done would be through a global treaty like the Geneva convention or the Berne convention. Well, they managed to form a consensus about terms of warfare and copyright, but I don't think we could get the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia to agree on the definition of "porn". We can't even get Hollywood CA and Holland MI to agree on that.

Even if we had a law on the books, enforcement would be problematic at best. It'd be no different from the current mess of conflicts between free speech and protect-the-children regulations within the .com domain space. This site, for example, is not a porn site. But I do talk about sex, and there's a photo of a lifesize realistic doll sporting a woody in one of my entries. This is definitely not a site for 10-year-olds. But it sure as hell doesn't belong in a .sex domain, either.

Another suggestion (one which ICANN actually gave some consideration to earlier) has been to create a .kids TLD. This idea isn't as dead-on-arrival bad as .sex. It wouldn't require uprooting terabytes of porn from .com and giving the entire Web a screening for kid-inappropriate material. But if Mom and Dad sit the kid in front of a computer with its browser restricted to .kids, that cuts the kid off from a lot of legitimate sites. Suppose 12-year-old Jacob wants to check NBC.com to see if tonight's episode of Fear Factor is going to be a re-run. Or 15-year-old Courtney wants to use Google.com to find current information about Croatia for a school report. Even if there were a Google.kids for her to use, it'd be limited to sites in the .kids domain, and there probably aren't a lot of general-audience site operators that are going to take the trouble to set up another domain with "approved" material. The big commercial sites might, but not the small informational sites. We'd be setting children loose in a domain dominated by more advertising, and less data.

Speaking of setting children loose, that'd be another problem in itself. It'd give parents a false sense of security, figuring that it's OK to put a computer with a broadband connection in 7-year-old Trey's bedroom and let him surf for hours with the door closed. Even assuming he doesn't hack his browser to give him access to .com (using info he found posted by another user on http://hax4.kids, a site that contains no naughty words or dirty pictures so it passes all the rules for .kids sites), letting him hang out on message boards with 17-year-olds probably isn't that great an idea. Even if they're actually 17 years old.

If a sexual predator wants access to kids online, creating a new domain isn't going to stop him. All he has to do is set up an innocuous looking site called http://gamesjust4.kids or something, with no sexual content or otherwise offensive material, and wait for the girls to show up. Once again: nothing accomplished.

The creation of .sex, .kids, .xxx, and so on is probably going to happen eventually. The internet started down that path around the time that InterNIC stopped policing the rules that said that your TLD had to identify which kind of entity you were: a college (.edu), a government agency (.gov), a non-profit (.org), a network provider (.net), or a commercial corporation (.com). Now that .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, and .name are all pretty much open to anyone for any purpose, and certain countries are marketing their national two-letter TLDs as if they were generic (Tuvalu's .tv being the best example of that), TLDs are no longer about hierarchy but about branding. Personally I would've preferred to keep it hierarchical, but given that it's not going to be, I don't have a problem with the creation of additional TLDs (as long as it doesn't get out of hand and become a free-for-all). But trying to use .sex and .kids to protect kids from sex simply won't work, and it'd only create a mess that limits legitimate free speech in the process. So please don't try to force .sex on the internet.

MS-AOL

There's a link on Slashdot to articles on The NY Post and CNN/Money sites that say Time-Warner and Microsoft have discussed the possibility of selling AOL to the software megagiant. If this happens, and if the U.S. government allows it, that'll mean it's time to give up and move to Canada, Mexico, Europe, Pakistan, China, Afghanistan, or some other place where things make at least a little sense.

There's a certain irony in the phrasing of this potential deal, because it was actually AOL that bought Time-Warner back in the stock bubble days, but reality has reasserted itself and the company's execs now consider Time-Warner the "main" company, and AOL a mere division of it.

Nonetheless, AOL is still huge. They are by far the single largest internet access provider in the U.S. They are pretty much the Microsoft of the ISP industry, not quite to the extent that they can unilaterally dictate standards and platforms to other companies, but due to their sheer size and resources, they are a definite threat to every small-to-medium-sized ISP out there.

Next largest ISP after AOL is Microsoft. This is one major segment of the technology industry where MS is still stuck in second place. They have never been averse to buying market share, such as when they bought the leading internet-appliance (WebTV) and web-based e-mail (Hotmail) companies, or when they tried to buy Intuit (of QuickBooks fame). What's remarkable is that the U.S. Dept of Justices anti-trust division lets them.

AOL has never been a particularly ethical company, and they've gotten worse as they've gotten bigger. About the only reason I've been glad to see them around is that they were an obstacle to Microsoft's further domination of another segment of the industry. For example, MS had to pay some heed to internet standards for e-mail to remain compatible with AOL. With over 1/3 of home internet subscribers using MS-AOL software, they'd be able to set their own standards more easily, forcing everyone else to follow along. Competition in instant messaging would be squelched with the users of AIM and MSN Messenger rolled together into one group.

Incidentally, AOL would finally be able to complete kill the browser it undercut back in the late 1990's: Netscape. AOL bought out Netscape (a company crippled by its inability to recoup the development costs for its browser, because MS was giving theirs away for free), but their interest in the software itself has waned. They released the source code for Netscape to the public some years ago (where it now thrives as Mozilla) and reportedly the current version (Netscape 7.1) was already going to be the last. The purchase of AOL by Microsoft would ensure that.

I can only hope that the symbolism of MS engulfing Netscape will help show the courts how Microsoft has shat upon the consent decree that ended the suit over their illegal tactics to kill Netscape. If not, they're just fucking useless.

Century City - An Improbable Hybrid

Century City is a new mid-season replacement series that tries to combine two genres in hopes of creating something new and different. It's Yet Another Law Drama, but it's set in the year 2030, for a Sci-Fi spin. Unfortunately, it isn't a particularly remarkable example of either genre.

The Law Drama aspect features an assortment of partners in the law firm, including the idealistic young associate, the seasoned senior partner, the hottie and the nebbish who has the hots for her, etc. Nothing terribly new or interesting there.

The Sci-Fi angle tries to take advantage of the genre's ability to comment on current issues under the pretext of looking at issues of the future or another society. Unfortunately the issues don't derive from the setting. Instead they're contrivances that seem unlikely to come out of nowhere as precedent-setting cases 25 years from now.

It's a bit like when Star Trek has tried to do legal episodes, establishing for the first time questions that would have to be settled long before the episode in question. Like, they've got a sentient android enlisted in Star Fleet, but nobody's established yet whether he has the same rights as any other sentient being. Yeah, right. And in the year 2030 they're just starting to wrestle with the legal standing of a cloned embryo and whether it's a "son" or a "brother" of the donor? I don't think so. Or a boy band who were on the charts in the 1980's, and still look twenty-something and doing a reunion tour (except for the one member who didn't get the anti-aging treatments)... but the lawyers are taken completely by surprise by it? Um, sure. And the young lawyer who was the product of substantial genetic engineering... which, if you do the math, would have to be taking place right now? Er, no.

The series seems to have it's heart in the right place, trying to put quesions like cloning into some context, free of the current debates. But between the unrealism of its portrayal of the legal profession, and the Very Special Episode theme of every week's cases, it's not something I'll be making a big effort to watch.

Appointed President

Jerry Ford's greatest distinction among presidents of the U.S. is that he's the only one to be appointed to the office. (GWB's election was botched, but it was an election.) So far. It's only a matter of time before we get another. That's because we no longer elect vice presidents. They're all appointed.

Ford was appointed under the terms of the 25th Amendment, which was enacted after the assassination of Kennedy pointed out the urgency of always having a spare handy. What if LBJ had croaked before Humphrey was elected VP in 1964? At the time, the idea of simply appointing a replacement (rather than having an actual election) was considered a necessary evil in case of crisis. But today it's just standard operating procedure.

Originally the vice president was selected by as democratic a method as our electoral system could come up with: whoever came in second in the Electoral College vote got the job. The rapid collapse of American politics into a two-party system made that rather awkward, since the two would inevitably be rivals. So they came up with the odd system of a two-person "ticket" where we'd vote for them as a package.

But at least the make-up of that ticket was originally determined by a system with democratic roots: party conventions. Assuming you were a member of a party, you could elect a delegate to represent you at its convention, and that delegate would participate in the process of selecting the party's nominees. It may or may not be a foregone conclusion going into the convention who the presidential nominee would be (like Kerry has a lock on the Democratic nomination now), and that person might have an opinion on the question of who'll be on the ticket with him, but the delegates got to choose. If it was a close contest, the guy with the next-most number of supporters there would probably get the nod. Makes sense.

Today we barely even pretend to do it that way. I'm sure there will be a vote at the Dems' convention, but it'll just be going through the motions. Everybody - including the media, the candidates, political hacks - talk as if the only person who gets to decide who'll be on the ticket with John Kerry is... John Kerry. Which is insane. It's certainly not democratic.

I'm not just picking on Kerry here. I mean, who here (or anywhere) voted for Dick Cheney? Not counting when his name was under Bush's. He wasn't even a candidate for the presidency until GWB pulled him out of the Halliburton boardroom. Joe Lieberman's poor showing this year underscores that he wasn't someone the American public really considered a good choice for president. Dan Quayle obviously wasn't, but he became vice president anyway.

It's telling that the only vice presidents (or candidates) to go on to become presidents (or nearly so) are those who were serious presidential candidates to begin with. Al Gore was a contender in 1992, then (arguably) won in 2000. George H.W. Bush gave Reagan a tough race in 1980, then got elected in 1988. The ones who completely flunked their later presidential attempts or (or never even tried) were the from-off-the-radar-scope appointees: Lieberman, Quayle, Bentsen, Ferraro, Mondale, Agnew, Shriver, Muskie... (OK, Mondale actually got the nomination, but Reagan buried him in the general election.)

I think part of the cause of this phenomenon is the growing irrelevance of the conventions. The TV networks have been grousing that they don't get good ratings, and that's because there's little drama to them, because there's rarely any doubt about the outcome. During the primaries the media treat the contest like a horse race, and in doing so, pretty much assure that someone will "win the race" well before the convention. The voters are too eager to vote for whoever's "ahead".

The sudden replacement of Dean with Kerry as "front runner" demonstrates that. Dean was doing really well in polls all over the country, and a lot of people expressed their intention to vote for him. Mostly because the race announcers described him as being in the lead. When the results from Iowa and New Hampshire didn't ratify that, suddenly Dean's support evaporated and everyone loved Kerry, the surprise winner. It was like 1984 (the book, not the year) with Big Brother telling the public that Oceania was at war with Eurasia now and that we'd never actually been at war with Eastasia.

Combined with the insane cost of running a campaign (which means that most candidates who are "behind" have to withdraw from further primaries), this means that the conventions end up loaded with delegates committed to the inevitable nominee, and they give him a blank check to pick whomever he wants.

I think Nixon made a pretty good choice with Ford. The fact that Tricky Dick had the U.S. Senate to get his appointment past - rather than just a bunch of fawning convention delegates - forced him to pick someone who had the qualities the country needed in a president at that time (integrity and a lack of guile, mostly). Without that, our current process is going to keep on letting presidential nominees appoint our vice president... and in the event of a crisis, our president. The thought of President Cheney scares the willies out of me. And the thought that Kerry could pick someone more for his "running mate" qualities than his qualifications or his popular support for the job of president, doesn't make me feel much better.

Cerebus: The End

I didn't get to the comics shop on New Comics Day this past week, so I was a few days late in picking up the 300th - and final - issue of Cerebus. But heck, Dave was late sometimes, so I don't feel too bad about that.

Cerebus is - or was, I should say - an epic story about the life of an aardvark. It began in 1977 as a Conan parody, written, illustrated, and published by a guy named Dave Sim. It rather quickly grew into something with more depth and breadth than that, and Sim declared fairly early on his intention to continue producing the series for 300 issues, culminating with the protagonist's death, "unloved, unmourned, and alone". The final issue would come out in March of 2004, he projected. And here it is.

I haven't been buying Cerebus all along. As a matter of fact, I haven't read very much of it... yet. I've never been a big fan of buying serialised stories of the sort that most modern comics have become, requiring you to either wait a month (sometimes more) between chapters, or collect a bunch of little booklets before you can start reading them. So I decided some years ago that, for limited series I knew would later be reprinted in collected editions, I'd wait and buy them that way. Cerebus already had a backlist of several collections on the shelves, but I didn't want to have to sit and wait between those. So I decided that I'd wait until the last one was out before I'd start reading. I special-ordered #300 more for the sake of participating in a much-awaited event: the March 2004 release.

Sim has been variously described as a genius and a lunatic. He's probably both. The sheer hubris of setting out to write and illustrate a 6000-page graphic novel, and the obsessive tenacity to actually do it are evidence of both. By all accounts, reading the book provides even more... with probably more of the genius showing in the earlier half and more of the lunatic in the latter half. He's developed a fairly wacked-out and misogynist cosmology over the years (most evident in the essays and commentary pages at the back of the monthlies) and I'm curious to see how it shows through in the story.

Regardless of what I think of his philosophy, I have a great deal of admiration for Sim. Not just for the 300 issues, but how he did it. He refused to sell the series to a publisher (there was at least one serious offer from a major player). He maintained his independence, allowing him to call all the shots with his creation. If he wanted to include the Marx Brothers, Oscar Wilde, F.Scott Fitzgerald, and himself as characters, there was no one to tell him not to. He could do dopey superhero parodies at his discretion. Popular characters could be killed and stay dead. If he wanted to let prose and essays squeeze out the sequential-art storytelling for a time, he could. When his anti-feminist and anti-homosexualist ranting caused many readers to drop the series and sales figures frankly sucked, no one could cancel it on him. The only noteworthy concession he made to this do-it-yourself/own-it-yourself ethic was to partner with Gerhard, his background artist for all but the early issues. And true to Sim's creator-ownership manifesto, he made his collaborator a co-owner.

In some ways, I look to Sim as a role model. He certainly served as an example to many other writer/artists who've followed in his footsteps by publishing their own work (DC, Marvel, and their ilk be damned). But don't expect me to announce any grand quarter-century objectives like his.

Going to a doctor and getting the news that I have a "health risk factor" (however mild) on my charts has got me thinking a little about my mortality. The old "what if I only had ___ to live?" question has hung about me, and I was torn between two conflicting ideals: make a mark, or live it up. I came down on the side of the latter.

When I was younger I was definitely more in the "make a mark" camp. I wanted to change the world, to make a difference. I'd still like that, but if I only had a year or several left, it wouldn't be my highest priority any more. In some ways, I've already done that. I was publically involved in les/bi/gay/trans rights issues back when even mere visibility was a major problem. I volunteered helping gay youth, some of whom have specifically told me that I'd made a difference in their lives. This doesn't necessarily let me off the hook for doing anything more, but at least it gives me some comfort in terms of my mortality.

Ultimately it comes down to my own view of the universe (which diverges widely from Sim's, obviously). Spending my final years establishing my importance to the fate of the world might make me happier in the afterlife... but I don't believe in an afterlife. So instead it'd make more sense to focus on making myself happier in this life. Rather than worrying about some checklist of things to do before I die, I'd be happier just making sure that I'm doing something I enjoy... even if doesn't have any lasting consequences. So no "run for president" or "climb Mt. Everest" or "publish a 6000-page story"... unless I'd really be happy while doing that. And I don't think I necessarily would.

I am planning on doing something (superficially) similar to Sim's project. And I do very much want to finish it. But the bottom line for me is going to be having fun with it. If that leads to it getting published and read by tens of thousands and discussed by millions and changing the world... great. But the main point of it is to enjoy the ride, and the destination is wherever it gets me.

Business Cancer

My credit union has been talking lately about changing their charter. Again. It seems the board of directors is concerned about their ability to grow under their current setup.

Like many CUs, it began back around the time of the Depression, as a worker-owned organisation. In their case, it was teachers, pooling their savings to provide credit - on a not-for-profit basis - to each other. (A bit like the Baileys' Building & Loan in It's a Wonderful Life.) You had to be a teacher to join, and by providing services only to members, they weren't subject to the same rules as banks. Over time they expanded their membership base to include all employees of educational institutions and students, set up cooperative arrangements and joint operations with a local medical employee credit union, and so on. Last year they revised their charter, becoming a geography-based institution, open to anyone in the surrounding four counties. They're now one of the (if not the) biggest credit unions in the area. But that's not enough.

The information they've been sending to us members has gone on and on about growth. The regulations of the current charter, and the government regs placed on CUs (as opposed to banks) are inhibiting growth, they say. In order to keep growing, we need to change. It's necessary in order to compete... to survive.

Maybe. The "financial services industry" isn't my area of expertise, and they may be right about it. But if so, it seems symptomatic of a larger problem. As a society we're so obsessed with the idea of "growth" that we forget that the word isn't necessary as positive one. "Growth" can also refer to obesity. Or cancer.

Another anecdote: My first real job was working for a local retailer. They'd started a generation earlier with a single store, selling women's clothing. It was a classic immigrant success story. They did so well they opened another store. Then another. And several more. By the time I started working there the original owner had passed on, and his sons were running the business. They had a few dozen stores all over the state and in nearby states. Business was good. Really good. But that wasn't enough. They kept opening more. They went public, selling a bunch of stock to fund their expansion campaign. They had their sights set on becoming a national chain, coast to coast. But they over-extended, lost sight of what had made the stores successful in the first place (mostly loyal local customers to whom the name meant something), started losing money, had to close stores, laid off huge numbers of employees, and eventually collapsed. Not even the hometown stores are left.

In other words, the business turned into a cancer, grew too much, and killed itself.

It's the American way. Hell, it's bigger than that: it's the modern international way.

Growth doesn't have to be a bad thing. If there's nobody selling flapjacks on the other side of town, leaving people to make their own and/or drive across town and crowd your Jack's Flapjacks restaurant, and you open another location over there, that's probably a good thing for everyone. If there was another flapjack shack with lousy cakes and you put them out of business, that's just competition doing its thing and most people in town will come out of it better off. But if you're expanding to the other side of town just to take over business from another good flapjack joint, no one really benefits except maybe you. Likewise if you buy out the other guy so you can "grow your business". And it's even less beneficial if you sell your business to the growing national Flapjack Shack chain.

The problem is that we seem to see a lot more of the latter kinds of "growth", but both are praised and rewarded as if it were all the same thing. So we get market-dominators like Clear Channel buying up local radio stations, or Microsoft taking over one software category after another (and moving now into hardware and services). We get former competitors buying each other out and merging, like the huge "Baby Bells". Which is not to mention ridiculously large conglomerates like AOL/Time/Warner/Turner (which barely begins to list the range of their ownings) or GE (whose holdings range from TV networks to financial services to military contracts to home appliances to communication satellites to healthcare equipment). Comcast wants to buy Disney which already owns ABC which owns production studios and local broadcasters....

It's true that these surviving companies are very efficient. But efficiency is overrated; it shouldn't be an end in itself. In fact, too much efficiency is bad for things such as... people. It may be more efficient to make all of the world's hamburger patties in a single plant and ship them out. But that puts all the patty-makers in the rest of the world out of work. A single ISP might be more efficient, saving the redundant effort of stringing multiple cables to every home, but it makes us all dependent on them. A single operating system might offer the efficiency of letting software developers write for a single platform, but it gives the developer of that OS too much influence and leaves us all vulnerable to whatever security problems it has.

The analysts who cover the business scene (who are themselves employed by large media companies, but let's not go into that particular conflict of interest right now) excuse this as wholesome market competition in action. But it's more like the end result of competition. This is what we get when competition has run its course, when all that's left are the strongest, most resilient tumors.

This "end result" may be inevitable in the long run. But so is death. That doesn't mean we should just embrace it. We fight cancer. A wise person quits smoking, eats plenty of fiber, and avoids known carcinogenic chemicals. And if a person does develop cancer, we treat it with whatever tools are effective, including surgery, chemotherapy, and targeted radiation. We ought to do the same with business cancer: discourage the behaviors that increase the risk of it, encourage activities that keep it at bay, and outright ban the things we know will cause it. And when a business starts to grow cancerously, either cut it up, suppress that growth into remission, or kill it.

That may sound extreme, but it's often the threat of extinction in competition with these cancerous corporations that forces smaller, saner, and sounder businesses to go cancerous themselves. The cancer metastizes, and becomes systemic. As far as I can tell, that's what's happening in the financial services industry. I switched to a credit union after the local bank I'd grown up using was engulfed into one of the big nationwide banks, a victim of banking cancer. Now my CU is threatened by that, and seems prepared to become a cancer itself to survive.

One nice thing about credit unions is that the "customers" are also owners, so as a member I actually get a voice in this move. Needless to say, I'm voting "no".

You Are Here

The following is a photograph taken recently by the Spirit rover on the surface of Mars. It's a sunset, and the "evening star" in the Martian twilight is the next planet inward: Earth. It's a cliché, and not quite as profound as the single-pixel snapshot that Voyager I sent us of our home, from 4 billion miles away as it left the solar system, but this kinda puts things in perspective, eh?

Blood and Fat

I have new health insurance, and I'm now in the final year of "my thirties", so I figured it was about time I saw a doctor for a physical. After all, except for a visit to a health clinic several years ago (turned out to be non-STD urethritis, cleared up on its own), an emergency room (lacerations on my hand from slamming a beer bottle down on my desk over an infuriating e-mail), or a specialist (fixing a torn meniscus in my knee from a backpacking accident), the last doctor I'd seen professionally was a pediatrician. Plus with a history of cancer and diabetes on both sides of the family, one ought to be careful.

The good news is all the stuff that's not "broken". Blood, urine, and stool samples failed to turn up any kidney, liver, or gastroinstestinal dysfunctions. No diabetes, prostate enlargement, or high blood pressure. So most of the health-threatening ailments that I occasionally fret about in my more depressive moods have been ruled out.

The bad news is that I'm 15-20 pounds into "overweight" territory (which I already knew; I can read a height/weight chart and I do have mirrors in the house), and my serum cholesterol is in the "moderately high risk" range (which I did not know).

The doc is giving me 6 weeks to see what I can do with a change of diet and more regular exercise, and depending on the results, maybe he'll prescribe medication. I'm from the try-to-avoid-artificial-chemicals school, an attitude reinforced by my former boyfriend, a nursing and alternative-medicine student. And it's hard not to associate the phrase "prescription drugs" with "senior citizens", which is a category I'm not ready for.

So I'm all for trying the exercise and better eating strategy. It's going to be difficult, especially with a work and school schedule that leaves me little time or energy for daily exercise. And it's too bad I don't still have the aforementioned boyfriend to reinforce the better eating habits I used to have. But I'm going to try.

The Dreamers - Revolutionary Cinema

my rating:

The Dreamers is a film about cinéastes, for cinéastes. About revolutionaries for revolutionaries as well. And perverts, let's not forget the perverts.

And I mean that in a nice way. {smile}

It's a movie about three young students in the riotous Paris of 1968. One is Matthew, an American enthralled with the revolutionary cinema he discovers while studying French abroad. The other are a twin sister and brother, who not only share a birthday but also a very casual intimacy. Theo and Isabelle take a liking to Matthew and invite him to stay with them. Despite some uneasiness, Matthew becomes part of their world, in the process acting as a catalyst to change it.

Let's deal with the perversity first: This movie tackles a few sexual taboos, and does so largely without flinching. There's the relationship between the two siblings, which is incestuous by any reasonable standard, and arguably unhealthy (that's certainly Matthew's take on it), but not the one-dimensional treatment it usually gets in the movies (or any other mainstream fiction) where it's defined as equivalent to rape. There's also the voyeurist/exhibitionist aspect which has been an element of Isabelle and Theo's relationship and which Matthew becomes a part of. And we're in on it too, with many shots of all three characters naked, half-dressed, and even in the act of masturbation or sexual intercourse. As I recall, director Bernardo Bertolucci stops short of any erect penises or spread beaver shots... but otherwise it's quite explicit. Not just brief butt shots or glimpses of dicks in passing, but matter-of-fact inclusion of the naughty bits for as long as they're in the frame. The "scenery", whether it's the thin but amply-breasted Eva Green, the handsome well-built Louis Garrel, the deliciously androgynous Michael Pitt, or all three of them, is eye-candy, to be sure.

One of the things that binds the three together is their shared love of cinema, including classics from the early decades of filmmaking. They debate Buster Keaton vs. Charlie Chaplin, in the kind of intellectual discussion that it seems only the young - and enthusiasts - engage in. They re-enact scenes from various films, mostly as part of "name that film" challenges to each other, and some of these scenes are intercut into the scenes we are watching. This is clearly one cinéaste (Bertolucci) catering to the cinéastes in the audience.

In Paris in 1968, participating in the avant garde cinema scene was a revolutionary act, one which led to greater demonstrations and eventually riots in the streets. Going to see The Dreamers in America in 2004 is something of a revolutionary act as well. At the end of a row of screens showing Our Lord and Savior redeeming us on the cross, here's a movie of teenage siblings sharing a bed, and two guys taking baths together. Just buying a ticket for it takes a stand for freedom of expression... even the freedom to think of and talk about incest, homoeroticism, and revolution. (Just don't get too overexcited about the homoeroticism; the movie doesn't shy away from it, but both boys are far more interested in the girl than in each other.)

An interesting comparison of the two films: many Christian congregations have rented Sunday-morning showings of The Passion and held their worship services there, even including older children. Hard to think of many R-rated films they'd do that for. But then, the rating is for extreme and explicit violence; it reportedly has no sexual content to speak of. Meanwhile, The Dreamers has little violence (just a few brief police-vs-protestors scenes, nothing you don't see on the 6:00 news), but is rated NC17 for nudity and sexually explicit scenes. I certainly wouldn't recommend it for children, and I can't imagine any teenager making it through the movie in the company of their parents without dying of embarassment. So the rating is probably appropriate. But the raiting also limits the number of places that will screen it; The Passion is on 20 or so screens in this area, at least one screen at even the smallest beyond-the-suburbs multiplex; The Dreamers is on one, probably for one week only.

Anyway, The Dreamers is worth seeing for more than just "making a statement" or for the prurient thrills of watching this not-quite-ménage-à-trois in action (though it's worthwhile for either of those reasons alone). As I said, it's also worthy as a movie about the movies, and what they can mean to certain people in uncertain times.

Microsoft Funding Anti-Linux Suits

This is a bit like Lex Luthor providing financial support to the Joker. Or North Korea giving nuclear weapons to Osama bin Laden. Or Bill Gates diverting money to a company that sells Unix. Unexpected bedfellows teaming up makes for a big story.

And it actually is Gates funding Unix vendor SCO.

For those who aren't regular readers of nerd news site SlashDot, or paralegal-with-a-cause site Groklaw, here's the background: SCO is one of several companies that sells commercial versions of the Unix operating system, having purchased the rights to do so from one of the various companies that inherited AT&T's version of the OS. They also used to be in the Linux distribution business, giving away their own version of that free OS and selling support services for it.

Last year, with their financial status gradually sliding down the drain (they were never a strong player in the Unix market), they started claiming that Linux contained software code they owned, and that every person using Linux - which is licenced under terms that declare that you don't have to pay anyone a damn cent for it if you don't want to - owes them a $699 licence fee. But they wouldn't disclose what this code was, essentially saying, "Trust us: you owe us." And over the ensuing months, their claims have become increasingly bizarre and far-reaching, going so far at times as to assert that the General Public Licence (the licence that makes Linux free) violates the U.S. Constitution... brushing aside the fact that until very recently (even after they started making these claims) SCO distributed Linux under the GPL themselves.

They've successfully extorted only a handful of companies into ponying up licencing fees. The only significant company to get a "Linux licence" from them (software giant Computer Associates) got theirs thrown into the deal as part of an unrelated settlement between them and SCO, which wasn't even about Linux. SCO has spent millions trying to collect, and so far they've received... thousands. It's a suicidal strategy.

They've finally made good on their threat to start suing companies. But these suits aren't actually over this alleged theft of their software by Linux distributors. They have a suit pending against IBM that's really nothing more than a contract dispute. They've just sued AutoZone stores over allegations (based on pure speculation) that AZ is still using some SCO software even after dumping SCO in favor of Linux. And they're serving papers to DaimlerChrysler that have DC execs rolling in the aisles. It's becoming increasingly obvious that there's little (if anything) behind their accusation that Linux is uncorrectibly infested with stolen code. And even if there were, Linux developers would be more than happy to rewrite any sections that were improperly contributed... which is why SCO refuses to identify them.

The original theory was that this was just a "pump and dump" scheme on the part of SCO's execs, an attempt to pump up the value of their stock with news that sounds like it's going lead to a huge cash windfall, then sell it off. They've been doing that, of course. But it didn't explain the hyperbolic, crusading rhetoric. It was as if they were trying to trash the very reputation of Linux (and open-source software in general). That might be understandably self-serving for a company that sells a commercial alernative to Linux (SCO's UnixWare), but this is a company that's now going around suing its own customers. The litigious bastards are committing corporate suicide here. But why?

Well, the other shoe has just dropped. A leaked memo from inside SCO - and yes, it's authentic - states that Microsoft has contributed on the order of $100 million to SCO through a third party. That's pocket change to MS. But without this cash SCO would be drowning in red ink. With it, they're able to press on, filing suits that sound enough like their wild claims about Linux to fool most non-legal types into thinking that they really have a case. It makes Linux seem kinda risky.

Microsoft has been trying to discredit Linux for a few years now. There was an infamous memo known as the "Halloween" document (it was leaked to the public on 1 November 1998) in which they admitted that open-source software like Linux posed a real threat to their business model, and schemed ways to defame it. They're still holding their own pretty well, thanks to a series of anti-trust lawsuits that the government has capitulated on, and of course the inertial strength that their near-monopoly gives them in the market. Microsoft is still the 8000-pound gorilla of the tech industry.

But Linux is making real progress, with many governments (mostly overseas) actively exploring it as an alternative to expensive and entagling Microsoft licences, many businesses in America and elsewhere switching to Linux to run large parts of their infrastructure, major hardware vendors (especially IBM) promoting Linux and contributing to its development, and several vendors and groups offering desktop versions of Linux that for many ordinary people would be a fine substitute for Windows, with some fine alternatives to MS Office. People are also getting a little skeptical of Microsoft's PR campaign of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about Linux, recognising that the corporation has a major ax to grind. So Microsoft has lately been funding "independent" studies that say that Microsoft products are cheaper to deploy than open-source solutions. And in SCO, they've found an excellent proxy to spread FUD about Linux (and open-source software in general): a company with no obvious connection to them - ostensibly a competitor selling non-Windows software - with just enough legal standing to file suits... the very thing most likely to concern, well, suits. $100M spent funding an attack on open-source software is just a good investment for them.

I don't know enough about corporate law to know if what Microsoft is doing here is actually illegal. Probably not. Though it does raise questions about whether the settlement the U.S. government handed them was strict enough. After all, they seem to be engaging in anti-competitive behavior that wasn't part of the original anti-monopoly suits filed before. And they're demonstrating (again) that they can't be trusted to conduct themselves ethically. It may even qualify as evidence of a conspiracy between Microsoft and SCO, which could bring up some fresh charges against them. In a just world, it certainly would.

Electronic Voting and the Death of Democracy

If you thought the ballot counting in Florida in 2000 was bad, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Imagine if Gore had called for a recount and... there was nothing to count. No chads to examine and fret over. Just a piece of paper with some totals on them.

That's what we're probably going to get in the rush to replace all these "obsolete" mechanical voting systems with electronic ones. It won't exactly be the death of democracy, but it'll be another straw on the camel's back, or another nail in the coffin (depending on whether you consider democracy dead already or not).

Back in the Jurassic Period when I was a teenager, I wrote a school paper in which I asserted the reliability of computers. "They don't make mistakes. They can't! I've since learned enough about the physics of computer hardware to know that's not strictly