It's a blog.
I’ve always thought that safety and freedom were somewhat incompatible goals. You can have a very safe society, but next to no rights. (A police state.) Or you can go the opposite way, and have a very free society, one in which no one can stop me from detonating nuclear bombs. But there’s a middle [...]
Have you heard about McCain’s new ad? It’s on his main page, though there seems to be no way to direct-link to it. Somewhat bizarrely, it starts off with video of throngs of cheering Obama supporters, and calls him the biggest celebrity in the world, flashing images of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. (By the [...]
Do you remember standardized tests, especially in grade school and middle school, where they’d have you read a passage of text and you’d have to identify the “main idea” of the writing? Most of the choices were things that were in the passage, but only one of them was plausibly the main idea, whereas the [...]
I keep hearing people on the right reiterating that “the surge worked,” so that withdrawing from Iraq would be surrendering. To me, this is a non sequitur. First of all, there’s the simple question of why we’re at war. We went in as a pre-emptive strike against Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. We [...]
Rapper Nas has a new song, Black President [obscene lyrics, NSFW]. I don’t give it high marks musically, but it’s interesting to me for two reasons. The first is that rap music actually addressing contemporary issues is rare. (Though it’s not entirely unheard of: Changes, for example.) The seconds is that the song is about [...]
As I research candidates, I keep coming across a past proposed (U.S.) Constitutional amendment to ban flag desecration. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m hardly for flag desecration, and would be appalled if any American did so. But do people not see the irony that the flag represents our freedoms as Americans, especially our First [...]
The last paper I ever wrote in college was for my Power and Propaganda course, and addressed the propaganda being hurled against Obama. One thing I addressed was that many of the criticisms of him were blatant lies. It’d be like if I started posting here that John McCain said, “Thank God for the Nazis!” [...]
In: Rants & Raves
12 Jun 2008Today’s Cold Case Files included a bit with a guy who described himself as a devout member of the “religious right.” A poor man, a comparatively wealthy farmer let him stay in his home. The poor, religious person decided that the farmer was mean and shot him in the back of the back of a [...]
In: Computers|Cool Links|Ideas|OCD|Programming|Rants & Raves
10 Jun 2008This post christens my newest category, Thinking Aloud. It’s meant to house random thoughts that pop into my head, versus fully fleshed-out ideas. Thus it’s meant more as an invitation for comments than something factual or informative, and is likely full of errors… Aside from “time geeks,” those who deal with it professionally, and those [...]
In: Computers|Cool Links|Ideas|Interesting|Linux Tips|OCD|Performance|Programming|Rants & Raves|Uncategorized
10 Jun 2008From my “Random ideas I wish I had the resources to try out…” file… The way the “pretty big” sites work is that they have a cluster of servers… A few are database servers, many are webservers, and a few are front-end caches. The theory is that the webservers do the ‘heavy lifting’ to generate [...]