I’m probably one of very few (liberal) Democrats who is pro-gun. I’m not sure “pro-gun” is really the right term. Essentially, I think that the bad guys are always going to have access to guns, so I strongly oppose the notion that I shouldn’t be allowed to have one. “Gun control” is a really loaded (hi hi) phrase, but I’m not at all opposed to people being required to have a fairly clean background, or to demonstrate that they understand safe gun handling and whatnot. Because those things wouldn’t disqualify me, but would probably make society safer than issuing gun permits to felons, or allowing people to carry guns without them every demonstrating that they’re not going to put their sunglasses in their purse and accidentally press them into the trigger, accidentally shooting a baby in the head. I think it should be kind of like auto licensing.

But there are a few things that still don’t make sense to me. One is the type of people who carry guns with them everywhere. Honestly, this alone might make sense. If I lived in a bad neighborhood, I could see myself applying for a concealed carry permit, and keeping a small pistol tucked under my shirt. But to some people, a gun is just something else you put on in the morning, just like your shoes. And I always thought “open carry” was strange, too.

Today I was helping at my mom’s school, and ran down to the quaint little market down the street from her school to pick up lunch. You need to understand that, while I live in a town with very little crime, my mom’s school is in a place with astronomically less crime. I’m pretty sure that you could fill a wheelbarrow up with millions of dollars in cash, be a frail old lady, and push it around the town during the middle of night, and the only thing that might happen would be some people stopping to ask if you needed directions or wanted to borrow their flashlight.

When I was paying for my sub, the guy in line in front of me was well-dressed, but had an M1911 on his belt. He didn’t appear to be a cop (it was really way too “flashy” of a gun for a police department to issue, and I was once told that any plainclothes detective who’s openly carrying a gun will have their badge displayed right next to the gun), just a well-to-do business man who felt the need to bring his pistol with him as he went to grab lunch. It seemed a bit strange, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I thought it was kind of silly that he felt the need to do so.

It made me realize that I’d actually prefer that people who carried guns did so in a concealed fashion. The law tends to view concealed carry as something more “severe” than open-carry: in NH, you need a permit to carry a concealed weapon, but my interpretation of the law is that, if it’s in plain sight, no permit is needed to wear your pistol around in public. And honestly, if the purpose is safety, it’s probably an accurate assumption that those who carry a firearm in plain view are less likely to use it in a crime. But it just looks like the lawless west when people walk around with guns hanging off their belts, and it seems to creep lots of people out.

(Plus, most of what I’ve heard is that the “I want everyone to know I’m packing heat” school of thought is actually flawed. While you’re probably less likely to be attacked, the type of people who would still attack you are exactly the type of people that you carry a gun to protect against, and now they know what you’re carrying and where. Keep it concealed, and you have a nice element of surprise.)

I’ve also found that NH has a sizable contingent of the “free state” people, who seem to border on lunacy when it comes to guns. There was a video on Youtube a while back of a guy in NH who had a pistol strapped to his leg while walking around downtown Manchester, and he was seemingly marching around like a madman with it on display. A police officer happened to be in the area, and stopped to ask him what was going on. He started screaming about how it was turning into a police state, and how the police were trampling his constitutional rights.

The video was accompanied by a bunch of text about how it’s imperitive that people ‘defend’ their Second Amendment rights by doing things like that. And all I could think is that he’s really making a great case for stricter gun control. Legal arguments aside, if you take a random sampling of people and ask them how they feel knowing that thousands of NH residents choose to go about their daily lives with a concealed pistol, I bet the majority would say that it doesn’t bother them at all. But if you asked that same random sampling of people how they felt knowing that people were marching around the city with firearms strapped to their leg, screaming about how we live in a police state, I bet an overwhelming majority would agree that gun laws are too lax. The guy, at least to me, seemed to do a good job of showing exactly the opposite of what he was trying to prove.

Which leads into my next point: I never thought of the Second Amendment as a reason to carry a gun. You might carry a gun because you enjoy target shooting, because you’re concerned for your safety, or because you’re a hunter. And you might become a big supporter of the Constitutional Amendment allowing you to do so. But I’ve never understood the people who cite the Second Amendment as a reason for gun ownership. To me, it would be like burning crosses* on my front lawn because of the First Amendment, or me joining the Church of Satan because of the Free Exercise clause.

I suppose this is really just meandering diatribe. But my point is that a lot of what goes on with gun ownership just seems weird to me. Even though I don’t think we live in an area where it’s really “necessary” to carry a gun, it’s certainly something I can understand. (If I were to work again in a place that sometimes had be closing a big cash-centric business, and walking out of the building at 1am by myself, I might give it some thought.) But I’m struggling to think of a reason I’d want it on display, other than to show off: I think it would freak out “innocent” people, get drunkards to lunge for it as a joke… But more importantly, if I carried a gun, I wouldn’t want anyone who might do me harm to know anything about it. And the Second Amendment doesn’t make me ‘want’ to go buy a gun in any way.

• I don’t know the citations off the top of my head, but I should point out that case law on cross-burning is stacked against what’s probably the most common use of cross-burning. Burning crosses, in and of itself, is legally permissible (as long as you get a fire permit?). But when it’s used as a threat (as the KKK seems fond of doing to black people), it’s quite clearly illegal. It’s really no different than arguing with your neighbor and saying, “I’m going to go back to my house, get my axe, and come murder you and your family.” Freedom of speech doesn’t protect against threats, and it makes no difference if the threat is implicit or explicit.

Has anyone else found “Breaking news” to be way out of hand? To me, “breaking news” is something major that’s just happened. When you hear breaking news, your jaw drops and you run into the next room and tell everyone. 9/11 was breaking news. A major earthquake is breaking news nearby, but not overall. (I have friends and family in California, but I don’t think many of the wildfires or earthquakes there are breaking news. Cause for concern to me, yes. But I wouldn’t call it breaking news on the East Coast.)

In addition to being major, it has to be, well, breaking news. What was breaking news on the noon broadcast of your news show isn’t breaking news when the news comes on at 5.

But the bar keeps getting lower and lower for “breaking news.” A car chase in the next state over? Breaking news. The weird Rockefeller guy? That was breaking news for days, if not weeks. So wasn’t the polygamist sect in Texas. None of it really seemed like “breaking news” to me, as much as fairly interesting stories.

So today, the bar got even lower with this:

Breaking News: CBSNews.com – Who Is Michelle Obama? – 1 hour ago

I suppose it could be breaking news if, for example, Michelle Obama had just been outed as the guy that Barack Obama had secretly fathered two children with, or if McCain had criticized Obama for suspiciously buying his (only) house with a mysterious “Michelle Obama” entity. But anyone who’s ever watched the news will recognize that Michelle Obama is Barack Obama’s wife. She’s been on the campaign trail. She’s been on the news. In fact, unless you get your news from far-right attack machines, she’s not even a controversial figure. (And actually, none of those examples are really breaking news.)

The thing is, in addition to making me roll my eyes, and maybe discrediting the news a little further, I really think this type of thing, in the long run, is just going to make “Breaking News” lose its meaning. Breaking News isn’t something that happens every day.

I’ve noticed that “PM Spam” seems to be the new thing. A spammer signs up and sends private messages to lots of people. They’re usually not terribly obviously-spammy, either.

On one site, where I basically never used my account and never uploaded any info at all to my profile, I just got this private message:

Helo, i waz browsin over for people like me, and I unearthed ur profile. You look like you’re a rather noticeable person, but I’m somewhat inexperienced at how things work here, and dont know where to go. Shouldn’t they have some sort of chat thing here? i hate writing messages to ppl, & maybe not receiving a responce! Well, if you are interested in talking with me, you can catch me over @ [link to another site], my name over there is [redacted]. So, ya, hope to see you there. I’m always lookin’ to meet more ppl. [redacted]

My profile is totally blank, so I’m definitely not a “rather noticeable person.”

I think this is an easy problem to fix, though. For one, it should be easy to institute fairly sane limits on PMs. Don’t allow them to send more than [their total number of posts] PMs per day, or more than one a minute. (And you should have backend monitoring, so that if PMs are being sent exactly every 60 seconds, you catch on pretty quickly…)

Plus, when I have a PM, why not display, “This user has sent n private messages in the past 24 hours.” I can see, “This user has sent 1 private message in the past 24 hours” and think, “Wow, a real person! Contacting me!” But in this case, I’d see, “This user has sent 152,524 private messages in the past 24 hours,” and think, “Wow, way for the admins to be oblivious!”

Quite some time ago, I came to realize that the best ‘teachers’ of a subject (not necessarily academics, but real-world) were the people who had to learn something the hard way. For example, I absolutely, positively cannot explain third normal form for databases, simply because it’s intuitively “right” to me, whereas 1NF and 2NF are intuitively “wrong.” Even when I carefully read up on how 3NF is defined, it’s hard for me to explain to someone.

On the other hand, there are some things that I used to be exceptionally bad at, which meant that I had to work really, really hard to get better. For whatever reason, being a geek is strongly linked with having horrendous social skills. And I’m a geek. I’m still not Mr. Charisma, but I’m no longer the weirdo at the party who’s sitting in the corner talking to himself about linked lists versus associative arrays. Because social skills weren’t as intuitive to me as they were for others, I became pretty accustomed to studying little details in how people act, and to consciously thinking about things that other people never spend time on.

Being unusually “tuned in” to how people interact, I’ve recently come to another conclusion, perhaps related to the above: a lot of computer experts are ecocentric jerks.

Of course I don’t mean everyone. (In fact, I don’t mean anyone here.) But with open-source software, or really any community project, it’s easy to see what goes on behind the scenes. And since it’s usually not a formal job, no one has to worry about being fired.

I’ve had my server in the NTP pool for a long time, and am on a mailing list for people who run NTP servers. The other day, someone posted about how he was having trouble with his server frequently being flagged as giving bad time, and asking how he might figure out exactly what’s happening and fix it.

The first reply essentially said that it’s because his server is horribly-configured. And it went downhill from there. Someone else said that if he can’t figure out how to fix the problem, he really has no business volunteering his server’s resources to the pool.

And then my favorite people came out: the ones that start griping about your e-mail formatting. You see, on this mailing list, people tend to reply inline. This person replied to one of the ‘friendlier’ e-mails, giving a little more information about his subject. Like 95% of computer users, he hit “Reply” and typed his message at the top of the message. Someone on the list replied, chewing him out for this, citing it as evidence that the person was clueless about basic Internet standards. (It’s not quite as good as the people that complain that your message doesn’t look right in an e-mail client from the 80’s, but it makes up for it in terms of being aggressive and very deliberately insulting.)

This is the same thing that I think keeps a lot of people from embracing Linux. They run into a common problem and post somewhere asking for help. And someone replies, quite promptly, telling them that they’re an idiot and that it’s covered in a man page somewhere, and that they really should have searched before wasting everyone’s time asking. And that person probably decides that the Linux community, as whole, is a giant douchebag, and they go back to Windows.

A lot of projects also seem to fall apart over pathetic arguments. You get fights over the proper formatting for indenting source code. (Two spaces? Five spaces? A tab? One space?) People want to use slightly different algorithms to do something, and each side flips out about how the other side is clueless and clearly has no experience. Nothing is a matter of opinion or personal preference: you’re absolutely wrong when you use a tab to indent, and the fact that you put curly braces on a new line indicates that you’re clearly a novice programmer. No, it’s not easier for you to read, and if you wanted your code to be easy to read, you should be using Visual Basic anyway.

This type of stuff drives me crazy, because it sometimes seems that whole communities are full of little kids who have to get their way, who have no concept of what’s a big deal and what isn’t, and who have absolutely no clue what it’s like to try being nice to someone. Someone graciously donated some of his server resources to the NTP pool. When he started running into problems with it and asked for help, the community essentially flipped him the bird, telling him that he was useless and had no business trying to run a server if he couldn’t solve his own problems. We probably lost a member today. But do you think many people care?

Wikipedia has a policy called Please do not bite the newcomers, accompanied by what has to be the most awesome image ever created. Essentially, you’re supposed to try to help newcomers understand the way things are done, instead of insulting them with a bunch of obscure acronyms and telling them they don’t belong. And a decent amount of people there abide by the policy.

I’m sure it’s not limited just to computers. I think open-source development is much more highly-visible than commercial software development, meaning that the feuds between developers are done in the public eye. Any group is going to have some jerks. On a message board I frequent, a member returned after a several-month absence, during which it turns out that she almost died from cancer, but a couple other members helped to get her into surgery. So someone posted a thread welcoming her back. Lots of people posted uplifting messages, including some of the administrators welcoming them back and talking about how great it was that the community was able to help. And then someone–a regular member, no less–posted a reply that this type of thread was really inappropriate, and why should she get special recognition just because she almost died from cancer…

It’s almost classical behavior in children: be mean to other people to boost your own self-esteem, insist on getting your way all the time, and so forth. But really, it downright scares me that some people are growing up and still have such an insanely self-centered view of the world.

It seems that everything is up and running.

I fully expect something, somewhere to be massively broken, I’m just not sure what is broken or where. Let me know as oddities pop up.

Are we back online!? =-O

I’ve kicked off the backup to my home machine… The server’s under heavy load, so things may be slow for a bit. (Yes, I could ‘nice’ it down… But I want this to complete quickly.)

Let me start by saying that there have definitely been some “bad” court rulings, both recently and throughout history. But there are two points I’d like to make about “activist judges,” both of which are things people seem to overlook and that drive me crazy.

“Activist judges” has become a lot like “special interest groups,” in that it’s a term that one side uses to demonize the actions of the other. The Democrats speak out against activist judges ‘electing’ Bush, and Republicans speak out against activist judges allowing gay marriage and abortion. What the two sides call “activist judges,” then, isn’t at all similar–an activist judge is someone who makes a decision that’s unpopular with one political party.

Today’s Nashua Telegraph carries a letter to the editor from someone pointing out the major problem of judges “ignoring the will of the voters.” It’s very well-written, but has one glaring problem: that’s how the system is designed to work. The Founding Fathers¹ knew the problems of legislators running amock, and the “will of the voters” sometimes being misguided. (See tyranny of the majority, for example.) Throughout history, “the will of the voters” has been to deny women the right to vote, to enslave blacks, to deny blacks the right to vote, and many other things that, in retrospect, were just really ill-conceived ideas. (Unfortunately, it often seems that it’s legislators, not courts, that pave the way for progress, but I digress.) So the judicial branch is supposed to ignore the will of the voters, and instead focus on the founding principles of our nation. That’s why judges are usually appointed for life: to insulate them from political influence. Even if we end up with a radical² liberal or conservative President, they won’t be able to made too big of a difference to the Supreme Court. That’s deliberately in place.

Yes, the courts have made some bad rulings. Sometimes I think they’ve trampled the Constitution, and I do believe that a handful of judges over time have allowed their personal and political convictions to get in the way of justice. I’m not sure I’d call them “activist judges,” though: I’m not sure I’d call them “judges” at all.

But there’s a lot of ambiguity in the law. Sometimes the law even contradicts itself. There really isn’t a lot of black-and-white in the courtroom: even when the law is clear, there are probably different laws that could apply, too. Thus a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling doesn’t necessarily mean that 4 (or 5) judges were “wrong,” so much as that there are two strong, conflicting arguments, and the judges applied different reasoning.

I’m willing to bet that, throughout history, people have criticized rulings. Dred Scott? Brown v. Board of Education? Scopes v. State [of Kansas]? But all of a sudden, we’re applying the label “activist judges” and implying that judges are disregarding the law and just going with their own personal beliefs. Surely, it happens. But surely, it doesn’t happen nearly as often as people seem to complain about.  I’m not all that convinced that there’s a pandemic of “activist judges” all of a sudden, but that a lot of controversial issues have come to the surface in the past decade. What’s new, as far as I can see, is that people are rushing to blame the judges for their personal rulings. It’s sort of like an umpire at Fenway ruling that the Yankees tagged a Sox runner a fraction of a second before he reached the base: it’s going to be a very unpopular, very controversial ruling, and probably attract lots of booing. People are going to claim that the umpire was bought off, or biased, or just blind. But most times, that’s not really the case, and we’re just taking our disappointment out on the person making the call, even though the call was right.

So I’m not disputing that “activist judges” exist, perverting justice by imposing their own beliefs instead of the facts. I just think they’re a lot rarer than people claim. When dealing with controversial issues and applying very unclear laws to them, there are going to be rulings where the facts were interpreted differently than you like. So to me, “activist judges” are almost a sort of conspiracy theory: as if a cadre of liberal or conservative (depending on who’s making the accusations) judges have secretly infiltrated our courts and flagrantly disregarded all the facts, just going with their personal opinions. And I really don’t buy that there’s a judicial conspiracy on either side of the aisle.

But whether you believe that there’s a judicial conspiracy underway or not, you should at least refrain from complaining about judges that “disregard the will of the voters.” That just means that the system is working: they should be disregarding popular opinion, and only looking to apply existing law.

[1] This usually isn’t a proper noun, but I think it ought to be. [2] And I really mean “radical.” Both leading candidates have been called “radical,” but I mean it in a more literal sense: a “radical conservative” might espouse Fascism, and a “radical liberal” might think that Socialism was too conservative of a system. (Okay, and Bush and McCain have been called Fascist, and Obama et al. have been called Socialist, but I again mean it literally, not as an exaggerated way to demean someone.)

I just came across a reference to Intel’s E5440 processor. I’ve frankly kind of been annoyed with the multi-care phenomenon: it’s a great idea, but for the longest time, we were seeing things like 2x 1.6 GHz, which weren’t any better than the 1x 3.2 GHz you could buy a few years ago.

Not even mentioning the fact that it’s a 1333 MHz FSB, it’s all-around amazing. It’s a quad-core Xeon chip. 2.83 GHz clock speed, meaning that the chip is now much faster than any previous processors (since there are four 2.83 GHz cores on the CPU). So I was very impressed. But it turns out that it also has a 12MB L2 cache, which is gigantic.

Suffice it to say, I want one. 😉

My old (and current) server will start the next billing period on the 23rd. I need to give two day’s notice to cancel, which means, as I understand it, today (Thursday the 21st) is the last opportunity for me put in a cancellation notice. I intend to do so in the afternoon.

The plan is that I’ll deploy the shiny new Debian VM image Andrew got working on the new server in the morning, set it up to do DNS, update the domain records, make a full backup of the old system, and then request an “End of billing period cancellation,” which should mean that the old/current server will stay online through the 23rd, giving me two whole days to get the new one working, which should be something I can do in an afternoon. I suspect that DNS may become a major headache, though.

This is the only way to avoid paying for another month on a server that’s now very old and outdated, yet suddenly more expensive as my hosting company thought that they should give more than a 50% increase in costs to their long-term customers. The way I’m doing he move is hardly the ideal way to do it, but it’s the, “I’m not paying $86 for another month” way of doing it. This method has some risks, though:

• In theory, the cancellation should be an “End of billing period” cancellation, meaning that when I submit the cancellation order on the 21st, it’ll go dark on the 23rd. In practice, they may pull it earlier. (Which I’ll fight, but it’ll still be down…)
• The new DNS records may point people to the new server before the kinks are worked out. If the blogs are suddenly a default Apache “It works!” page, don’t fret. (Again, it’s poor practice to ever have DNS records pointing to servers before they’re ready, much less tested. But unless preventing this is worth $86 to anyone, it’s a risk I’m taking.)
• The old DNS records may not time out as quickly as they should, meaning that the new server is up and running well and life is peachy, but some clients may still be trying to connect to the old server after it’s offline.
• The new server might not be up before the old one is taken offline, in which case DNS doesn’t matter either way because neither instance of the site would work at the moment.
• Things could go better than expected, and the new server comes up tomorrow afternoon/evening, and the old server stays online until the 23rd. But some clients may get the old IP while others get the new one, resulting in major headaches trying to keep the data synced so that people see the same content.

I’m making a full backup before starting anything, and then I’m copying data directly to the new server, so existing content will actually be safer than ever. (As it will reside on three different disks.) However, there’s a decent chance that the sites hosted here will be unreachable at some point between now and the weekend, and there’s an even greater chance that anything posted between now and then will reside only on the server being decommissioned. If all goes according to plan, I can manually sync any new posts over, so it shouldn’t be a big deal in any case, but things with computers rarely work as planned, so the short version is until further notice, don’t post anything here that you’d miss if it were irretrievably lost. (However, do feel free to post, just please don’t post a painstakingly-composed, heartfelt post without saving a copy on your computer.)