I don’t think we’re done talking about the ideas in Prime Intellect just yet. Vernor Vinge told us in 1993 that “[w]ithin thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” I guess it’s time to read his paper. And eventually I’m gonna be able to get together all the thoughs that have been swirling through my mind for the last week about Vinge’s amazing novel A Deepness In the Sky. I’ve just finished it, and started it again, and it has caused me no end of mental anguish. Now, to get all that into words, it will be no mean feat.

The Singularity is a seperate issue, but hey, science fiction isn’t something I’ve been doing enough thinking about recently, so it’s all a bit of a jumble at the moment.

This quiz is pretty good. It takes about 15 seconds to complete and I think that the results make a good bit of sense. Many view politics as one-dimensional. Some push it into two dimensions, like this quiz does, with economic beliefs on one axis and social beliefs on another. I’ve seen more complicated layouts, but none that I’ve found extremely satisfying, at least not yet.

What does my analysis mean? I wrote up a few paragraphs trying to explain it, but in an attempt to be as fair as possible to all sides I found it very hard to say anything that wasn’t a broad generalization. Let me just quote what the site says, and try to explain myself later.

Left-Liberals prefer self-government in personal matters and central decision-making on economics. They want government to serve the disadvantaged in the name of fairness. Leftists tolerate social diversity, but work for economic equality.

Libertarians are self-governors in both personal and economic matters. They believe government’s only purpose is to protect people from coercion and violence. They value individual responsibility, and tolerate economic and social diversity.

Take the quiz yourself!

Went to Irvine Park today. You may remember that the last park I visited had a damn built by the Army Corps of Engineers some time ago. Well, this one was much more exciting. I washed my hands at a sink that bore a plaque on which was written, “Improved by the Work Progress Administration 1935-36”. Now that is cool. Other coolness: the smell of the trees, the squirrels that ran across my path as I biked along, the bird that flew beside me for a few seconds as I sped along the path, and the peacock whose parking space I stole. That was a nice, nice way to spend a morning.

This thread on The Straight Dope discusses how much one should be tipping. Go down a dozen or so posts and read a few of the long comments from waiters. None of them make over $3.00 an hour. The system completely sucks, but tipping the waiter poorly solves nothing, especially since they are taxed on x% regardless of what they get, and they need to tip out the rest of the staff with their puny earnings. What a crappy job.

They are still afraid of the dishwasher, says the New York Times, but that will change:

Mr. Edow dreams of owning an auto-repair shop someday. He wants to shed his old life, just as snakes shed their skins. But at night, he still returns, in his dreams, to the violence in Somalia. Like Mr. Yarrow, he saw his father executed. The killer, he said, used a hammer and nails. He buries his head in his hands at the memory.

“We want to move forward,” he said. “We want to forget the past.”

The State Department is offering these Somali refugees a new start, and it is a beautiful example of what America can be. (via Kevin)

The media is reporting what the US Army claims, that after a several-hour firefight, Saddam Hussein’s two eldest sons were killed. Do we have reason to doubt their claims?

I don’t know. What kind of tip caused the Army to raid the building they did? What kind of medical and dental records have they used to identify the bodies? And as for the former Ba’ath party officials who supposedly identified the men, are they Saddam loyalists covering up for dead doubles, or could they possibly not be able to tell?

If these men are dead, that’s probably good for the war effort. It would have been nice to try them, but that would have been very difficult without loss of further American life, which of course we want to avoid. But could this be another of Saddam’s games? It is possible. It’s awfully convenient that a tip would end up with numbers 2 and 3 on the Iraq most wanted list sitting ina building in the middle of Iraq.

I know everyone else is reporting the deaths as fact, but I’m going to continue to have lingering doubts until we get more information on just how we’re so sure these guys are those guys. And no, Fox News, those big bloody pictures on your homepage aren’t helping.

Robert Scheer’s excellent column lauds the BBC for being independent and impartial during times of incredible pressure for patriotism. Unlike the US news networks that just roll over to politicians, the BBC has consistantly broke sensational stories that have proved to be completely true.

Politicians here (and it Britain) frequently call the BBC “biased” for the other side of whatever issue they are on. The BBC isn’t biased, they just aren’t afraid to ask the tough questions. They don’t let politicians get away with saying whatever they want. They fight and yell and won’t take no. They don’t let the “official” version of events get in the way of a real investigation. In short, the BBC is everything American news should be, says it is, but cannot be.

Blair last week told the U.S. Congress that he and Bush were right to invade Iraq even if no weapons of mass destruction are ever found. Left unmentioned is that it was the coalition that chased U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq, claiming they weren’t doing their job and that the Iraq threat was growing. Clearly the immediacy of the threat from Hussein was a phony claim that Blair and Bush should have known full well was not backed up by any substantial evidence.

What’s left is the idea that we are in Iraq to build a democracy there by force. Yet the people on both sides of the Atlantic were adamantly opposed to this sort of nation-building, smacking as it does of past disasters, from the collapse of the British Empire to the U.S. war in Vietnam. In essence, we are now told to be happy with a rationale for war that we didn’t find convincing before the war started.

Scheer is right. When they write the histories, it won’t be Bush and Blair that they are lauding, it will be the British Broadcasting Corporation. Go figure.

In the other room two dozen salespeople are spraying, poking, pounding, and extracting carpets. It’s really cool. Each carpet sample has a different stain — gum, blood, various dirts and liquids. And they have a regiment of chemicals of various types and designs that they can use. The trick is to determine the spot, put down the right countagent stuff of the opposite pH value (indicated by the stain changing color), “agitating” the stain (pounding the shit out of it with a brush) so that the product does it’s work, and then applying enzymes and such, followed by drying it all (extracting the liquid). All the various chemical smells tickle the senses. The raw energy in the room is electric, and the competition to see who finishes first is leading to delightful shenanigans. This is a cool training!

The LA City Council reached a compromise yesterday in a somewhat contentious funding dispute. Apparently a very high number, well over 90% of burglar alarms are false alarms. The police already treats such alarms as a low-priority call and take on average an hour to respond. Because of budgetary concerns, the police was asking to be able to ignore all burglar alarms. The council decided on a policy where people are allowed two false alarms and then the police can choose not to respond.

Me: As soon as someone gets killed, they’re gonna rush to repeal this.
Dad: When would people get killed?
Me: There’ll be a home invasion robbery and someone will die and then everyone will get upset.
Dad: It’s a burglar alarm, not a home invasion alarm.

Followed by some bickering and then him telling me to stop arguing and listen to the radio. Well, I didn’t say I liked the idea, just that it’s something I’d expect. As soon as they cut funding for, say, traffic lights, someone gets killed at some corner, and they restore the funding. Unless this policy only applies to business alarms, I can see where in the next few years there will be some incident.

I was also thinking its easier to break into buildings now. Just trip the alarm twice, and your third attempt is free!

Must remember to record Doctor Zhivago…

No matter what I say I’m gonna get in trouble for this one. 😉 I’ve heard the name “Avril Lavigne” a few times, and had Jessica point out to me which songs were hers. (Since I don’t listen to top-40 radio, I’m always somewhat behind on these things). I went to the iTunes Music Store and listened to all the 30-second previews of Let Go and found a few songs I liked and several I immediately loathed. I’m only remarking on this (besides maybe to prove how un-hip I am) because I find this whole music business so fascinating. The Amazon reviews alternate between fangirls screeching in awe and bitter skater punk wannabes savaging the girl for not being albe to write, dance, play an instrument, or sing without the help of a vocoder. Maybe she should join the Party Posse.

I’m afraid to play “Complicated” because apparently to the radio afficinados among us it is so overplayed as to be rage-inducing, and I’d like to keep my head in it’s non-banged-in state…still, it’s a catchy song. Ooh, and Avril is Canadian! Fascinating.

This isn’t any kind of useful comparison, just what I’ve seen. I was using Debian unstable and then I switched to RedHat 9 + Ximian Desktop 2. Here are a few observations.

• It’s hard to get hardware working in Debian. It’s hard to install Debian. Neither of these things are problems in RedHat
• Debian package management rules. RedHat I don’t think has package management… XD2 package management is fine, but not wonderful.
• I like lots of good fonts. It took a while to get fonts right in Debian, and with upgrades sometimes they break again. One RedHat package and I got all my nice fonts working correctly, with good anti-aliasing. I know getting anti-aliasing to work in Debian was a real pain as well.
• I really like the XD2 Industrial theme.
• I like the idea of being able to setup a printer with a GUI, and do things like browse SMB shares easily. And I do those things from time to time. But I can live without that functionality.
• I really like being able to drag a bunch of files into a special window and then click burn and have a CD burn actually work for a change. I can’t yet do that in Debian, but that goes back to point #1: hardware support.

Despite what it may seem like, I’m not overly impressed with XD2. It’s very slick, very consistant, and I really like that, but I can see where it is meant for enterprise use – Evolution is a big ole groupware app, OpenOffice has been prettified and made more MS friendly, and RedCarpet Enterprise makes management easy. But I don’t need any of those things. I like Mozilla Mail better then Evolution, I rarely if ever use OOo, and I like the fine-grained ability to install just the packages I want that I can get in apt, but not RedCarpet. I want the XD2 theme, and I think what I want is a fresh install of Debian, maybe testing instead of unstable, and if it turns out better, if I can customize things right the first time, if I can get my DVD burner to finally burn, then I’d like to stick with that. Apt is just that useful.

The GameSpot review of Real Life is long, detailed, and funny.

Amazing but true, the RIAA has gone completely insane. Not that this was unexpected, that organization basically wrote the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, greased the wheels of Washington to get it passed, and are now using its provisions — which specifically take a judge out of the subpoena process — to file for and receive (with no review or judicial oversight) hundreds of subpoenas, straining the court system and revealing the names and addresses of people sharing as few as three music files. In the name of stamping out digital piracy, the industry continues to use scare tactics and go after it’s own customers instead of providing better alternatives, ceasing its anti-competitive practices, fairly compensating artists, breaking the Top 40 radio stranglehold, and allowing fair rates for webcasting.

That’s what Sally L. Stroup of the Department of Education says about the first changes in ten years to the way that financial aid is dispersed to college students. Meanwhile, the numbers don’t lie. Up to a million lower-income students are going to get their grants reduced at a time of economic downturn when they are least equipped to deal with it. Some 80,000 will lose their grants entirely. These are my friends, people I know and work with and study with and talk to. These are kids who just want to go to college, damnit, and they already have to deal with the huge costs and expenses of ever-rising tuition and formulas that over-estimate their income so as to screw them over. These are people with dreams just like everyone else, people who work hard to get by and study so that they can have a better life, contribute to our country, make the world better. And the administration can’t have that, nooo.

The current administration has perfected the art of doublespeak and the Orwellian behaviors that it signifies. I will leave no child behind, or noble president says, and then he cuts funding, first to Head Start, and now to this. You know what? Fuck you, President Bush.

The consensus seems to be that The League of Extrordinary Gentlemen reeks of its own suckitde. Well, that frees up some time today then.

“I went into this Diebold thing with no real knowledge of the voting industry. When I left, I not only had a complete grasp, but I had a complete disrespect for these machines.

“And with the folks in the office who were so — you know, ‘I’m the political person, you have to know how the system works’ — they were so much more concerned about their own self importance, they were losing track of DO THE MACHINES COUNT THE VOTE PROPERLY!

“Because that’s what the people in Georgia need. And I’m one of them!”

This New Zealand web site, Scoop, is running a series of very long, very detailed reports. They are opinionated as hell, but the content appears to be genuine, including several gigabytes of files from a formerly public Diebold FTP server.

What have we learned? Touch screen voting machines by Diebold are fraught with errors, have huge failure rates (as much as 75% in some cases), have not undergone independent outside testing and verification, are open to tampering, including losing votes, faking votes, and the like, and are being used in several states. Scared yet?

The book is going on sale soon. Coverage in Salon, Seattle Weekly, News-Press.

I need to do something physical. Yesterday I walked through a park, across a dam built in 1951 by the Army Corps of Engineers, over a stream, by a lake, and through duck feathers. I liked it. And I started reading Shadow of the Hegemon, and I’m liking it. I like books. Why did I stop reading for so long?

Yesterday I walked through a park. Today I’ll just walk in place, downstairs, on the treadmill. It’s stupid, but its too hot out to do anything else. And someone forgot to get me that free one month gym membership. (“But you’ll just waste it!”) Thanks Mom.

Apparently this program NOW has been on for 18 months or so, but this is the first I’ve heard of it. Bill Moyers interviews Jon Stewart, and Jon is, as ever, insightful and interesting. Bill asks him about the media helping people to understand politics, especially the Bush administration’s war and terrorism stuff, and Jon gives this reply:

BILL MOYERS: And what is the media doing to help us sort us out?

JON STEWART: Oh. they’re not. Yeah, no. That’s– yeah, they sat this one out. Yeah, they’re not– they’re not getting involved. It’s very tiring. And they have weather reports to give. Nah, the media is not interested in– fairness. The media is– look politicians have figured out the media. Let’s face facts. When– when television first appeared it proved itself to be a vital insight into the process.

Nixon– you mentioned the Nixon-Kennedy debates. It was– At that point, politicians didn’t know how to handle the media. So Nixon could say, I look fine. I don’t need make-up. These lights won’t make me sweat. I’m sure I’ll come off as calm and collected and eloquent.

And then, as he was sweating and looked you know maniacal, he ended up losing. Well, at this point– so at that point television was ahead of the game. Politicians have caught up. They understand that 24-hour news networks? They don’t have time for journalism. They only have time for reporting. They only have time to be handed things and go, this is what I’ve just been handed by the administration. And they read it.

So now that the administration knows that, and they’re very disciplined, they can manipulate what goes on the air and what sets the agenda. And– and that’s what they do.