The anti-choice crowd expecting heaven as described in the Bible will probably be horrified to discover, upon arrival, that it is populated chiefly by deformed embryos. According to an article I’ve been browsing in Reason:

John Opitz, a professor of pediatrics, human genetics, and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Utah, testified before the President’s Council on Bioethics that between 60 and 80 percent of all naturally conceived embryos are simply flushed out in women’s normal menstrual flows unnoticed.

I’m not encouraging anyone to get an abortion. In fact, I’d like to see abortions become an extremely rare event. However, the line of thinking from some anti-abortion advocates is absolutely bizarre: discouraging use of the birth control pill because it is an abortifacient? That’s true, if you believe that life begins at the point in which the ovum is fertilized. Who in their right mind puts a single cell in the same category as a 30-year-old mother?

Try this thought experiment. A fire breaks out in a fertility clinic and you have a choice: You can save a three-year-old child or a Petri dish containing 10 seven-day old embryos. Which do you choose to rescue?

My roomate Jeffrey went on a trip to southeast Asia and India. I was under the impression that he was inland and not anywhere near the ocean, so I was a bit surprised to learn that he narrowly escaped death in yesterday’s tsunamis. He was making a call to his parents, or he would’ve been at the beach.

Don’t let the holiday season cause you to drop your guard against vampires and zombies. The Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency wants you to be aware of of the threat and offers advice on how to defend yourself.

It’s a shame that congress had to whore itself out to private interests and pervert modern copyright law. If they hadn’t, there would be much more than 10,000 free books available at manybooks.net. Every time Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain, congress has suddenly felt a need to steal from the public domain and give to the rich with an ,a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie”>extension of copyright terms.

I recall hearing this story in anectdote form from a colleague, and the Washington Post brought it up in an article. It basically points out that people in the reds states are funding the very practices they profess to despise. Those who profit from the deal go on to fund the Republicans, who tell the red staters that the Democrats are responsible for their moral perversity.

There was never any doubt how the good people of Utah County, Utah, would vote on Nov. 2. It has long prided itself as a bastion of conservatism and family values. And so when voters were given the opportunity to choose between President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry, 86 percent of them went for Bush, making Utah County the second most Republican county in the most Republican state in the country. Utah County has a population of roughly 370,000. Its largest employer is the Mormon-run Brigham Young University.

But Utah County is also the home of a mid-1990s court case that demonstrated some of the ambiguity about “values,” even in the reddest of the red states. Randy Spencer was the attorney that the court appointed to defend a the Movie Buff video store in American Fork from local prosecutors who had charged the store’s owner with 15 counts of pornography for renting tapes such as “Jugsy,” “Young Buns II” and “Sex Secrets of High-Priced Call Girls.” The prosecutors claimed the store was violating the community standards of suburban Provo.

Spencer, who describes himself as a devout Mormon, challenged the prosecution’s definition of the community’s values by subpoenaing records that showed Utah County tolerated the consumption of porn in several outlets: Utah County cable subscribers had ordered at least 20,000 explicit movies in the past two years; the Sun Coast Video store in the town of Orem was deriving 20 percent of its rental sales from adult movies, even though adult movies only made up 2 percent of the store’s inventory; Dirty Jo Punsters in nearby Spanish Fork was racking up on average $111,000 dollars per year selling sex toys, blow up dolls and other adult fare; the Provo Marriott across the street from the courthouse sold 3,448 adult pay-per-view movie rentals in 1998 alone.

If there’s one company that can crush Microsoft…

It’s Wal-Mart. Selling sub-$500 Linux laptops. Well Mr. Gates, it was fun while it lasted, but you can’t stop the red tide of communism. Thanks for playing, though.

Yes, look at that! Freedom, marching away. March, freedom, march!

Hey, wait…

Where are you going, freedom? Get back here!

Why are you going to Canada?

Seriously, if terrorists hate freedom, why aren’t they relentlessly attacking Canada and Amsterdam?

To my legions of loyal readers: I’m sorry. Today I was forced to disable commenting on all posts. I had to break out the SQL kung-fu in order to clean the 400+ comments that were dumped into my blog. Then I used more SQL in order to disable prompting on all my posts. This all happened before I found this article bemoaning the sorry state of the Movable Type weblog. In a nutshell, spammers are getting extremely aggressive. I experienced this today, and decided to take action. I may end up bringing back comments in some form or another, but this is seriously making me step back and take stock of the situation.

The bigger issue, I think, is the problem of the utter lack of accountability. I’m having a problem seeing why it’s not O.K. to shut down, with extreme prejudice, sites which benefit from spam. Where is the government when you need it? I think the solution is to tie spammers to terrorism, and send them to Guantanimo. If the government is willing to shell out a few bucks to try to sell people on the idea that people growing Marijuana in their closets are contributing to Terrorism, why can’t they make the same leap with spam? Do we have any evidence that the profits from spam aren’t being funneled to Al-qaeda? Why don’t I ever hear of spammers being punished…ever? I wish someone had added a few lines to the PATRIOT act prohibiting spam on penalty of Abu Ghraib-style imprisonment. It would’ve made the it much more popular.

Comment spam may have a solution on the server side, if hosting services can coordinate, but realistically we may have to face the fact that the problem is intractible. Any technology developed will eventually be thwarted eventually. It’s an absolute shame that Lycos’ attempt to bring the war to the spammers was met with such heated resistance. It makes no sense when you make an analogy. Suppose an advertiser sent 500 pieces of junk mail to you every day, and the post office would do nothing to stop this flood. Is it wrong to send large amounts of mail back to the advertiser?

I’ll start you out with this quote:

There is problem with free speech in the USA:

Judge Gwin of the Federal District Court of the Northern District of Ohio has recently held that software is not protected by the First Amendment because it is a “functional device'’ like a telephone circuit.

For more read Editorial in Slahdot: Open Software & Constitutionally Protected Speech

So software != speech, right?

What if it did?

Enter c2txt2c: Accurate language to inaccurate language (and back) translator.

It turns code written in the C programming langage into English language. It can also turn the English back into C.

Take a moment and read what Judge Gwin says again. Software is not language, and is not speech, ergo it is not protected under the First Amendment. What about language describing software? What if you developed an algorithm which can understand language describing software and produced working software from it? What if you released it as free software under the GNU public license? The algorithm itself wouldn’t be protected, according to Judge Gwin. But what if you implemented c2txt2c in C, then used it on its own source code? That would make it protected speech (in theory, as long as algorithms implemented in the English language, count as protected speech).

I’m really interested in seeing where this goes. If the concept of code translated into conventional language is struck down, it would seem to place speech itself (or at least algorithms in the form of speech) into the same category as “functional devices”. It seems that this would pretty much snuff out free speech in this country.

Note: to see it in action, check out the blowfish cryptographic algorithm in English.

I stumbled across an interesting article via del.icio.us which discusses the issue of outsourcing in the software industry. It has a balanced tone, and makes excellent points: outsourcing development is very popular, akin to dot-coms in the nineties. Venture capitalists got it in their heads that, hey, if Nike can outsource shoe manufacturing and get product for peanuts, why not outsource programming too?

Fair enough, the article says, and if you don’t value innovation it’s a great idea. It’s only if you’re producing code for, oh, say, being competitive. The idea is that by outsourcing the coding, you are actually outsourcing the vast majority of your product’s design, which is the key element differentiating you from your competitors.

Then they call in the heavyweight, Michael Porter, to deliver the knockout punch:

“If all you’re trying to do is essentially the same thing as your rivals, then it’s unlikely that you’ll be very successful. It’s incredibly arrogant for a company to believe that it can deliver the same sort of product that its rivals do and actually do better for very long. That’s especially true today, when the flow of information and capital is incredibly fast. It’s extremely dangerous to bet on the incompetence of your competitors — and that’s what you’re doing when you’re competing on operational effectiveness.”

design != manufacturing; //or, software is not shoes.