Author: Aaron Weber

I can’t seem to work “It’s my party I can cry if I want to” into this

The folks over at the libertarian political rag Reason are fond of running little lists of government mistakes and overreaches, in the hope that they can illustrate their truths by example, and maybe elect some more small-government folks. Or something like that. Anyway, here are two absurd government overreaches promulgated mostly by the right.

In Britain, anyone under sixteen is now forbidden to do much of anything involving contact with others. Kissing, fondling, probably even close dancing, are technically against a new law, which is deliberately going to go unenforced. Great. Also they’ve finally gotten around to outlawing necrophilia, which I imagine was not specifically named in the past– you’d presumably be charged with some other corpse-treatment crime. OK, so it’s a silly law, but I imagine it’ll get sorted out.

More importantly, in the US, the FDA has written religious law into state policy by refusing to allow emergency contraceptives (a.k.a. “the morning-after pill,” sold under the brand name “Plan B”) to be sold over the counter, despite its medical board recommending exactly that.

What does this mean? It means that a council of doctors has determined that the drug is safe and useful, and that it should be available to people who want it, but that the FDA has bowed to political pressure from the religious right and will refuse it. Smaller government indeed.


Hullabaloo links to a Salon article in which Joe Conason interviews Joseph Wilson (who exposed the “Yellow Cake” lie and whose wife was subsequently outed as a CIA agent, endangering her life and whatever missions she may have been on)… the gist of the article is that Wilson grew up Republican in a Republican family, and this administration is not the Republican party he grew up with.

Conason: What’s the difference in the GOP from when you were growing up?

Wilson: If you’re fiscally responsible, this is not your party. If you believe in a moderate foreign policy characterized by alliances, free trade and the ability to operate in an international environment, this is not your party. If you believe in limited federal government, this is not your party. If you believe that the government should stay out of your bedroom, this is very definitely not your party. In fact, I would argue that unless you believe in the American imperium, imposed on the world by force, or unless you believe in the literal interpretation of the Book of Revelations, this is not your party.

I imagine Reason will be backing LaRouche this year?

Sterile Gloves Have Never Been So Creepy

You’ve seen this picture by now, but note the comment halfway down the page by someone calling himself Graydon:

The grinning fellow with the thumbs up is wearing nitrile gloves.

Those are used for much the same set of purposes as latex gloves, only they’re physically much sturdier, and less likely to cause skin sensitivities in the wearer with prolonged use.

So they’re used in surgical applications to avoid the risk of sterility punctures from surgical instruments, or for a number of kinds of solvent based materials handling.

That fellow is wearing the lined, long-wearing kind; the cotton liners are flipped down over much of the glove cuff. He’s wearing them with the same degree of disregard wood finishers who wear them all day, most days, do, and with absolutely no regard for their sterility.

Anybody who wants to argue for it all being passive — for values of “passive” as would shame the devil to utter — psychological coercion is advised to think very carefully about those gloves.

Reminds me of a sad song from my childhood…

Cribbed from /. but still good

Two rather good articles cribbed from Slashdot: Simson Garfinkel on robot gender, and the NYT on the living-ness of virtual pets.

Of course, when you talk about whether they’re alive, it’s a short hop to souls. Does Rover have a soul? Does Asimo or TiVo? And when someone says “what sort of relationship is it appropriate to have with an automaton?” I think immediately of the episode of Futurama where Fry dates a robot, and the rest of the crew shows him a social hygeine film explaining why dating robots is bad. Also Nat and Rony’s paper on robots and, you know, that thing people do.

You Don’t Have The Right

Someone asked recently:

If you buy a DVD movie, and then buy hardware (a DVD player on your computer) to play the DVD, don’t you have a legal right to watch it? There is open source software that allows you to watch DVDs, and also copy DVDs. If you are using the software to do legal activities (i.e. watch the DVD), and not to copy DVDs, isn’t that okay?

You’d think so, wouldn’t you. But it’s not. It’s legal to watch that movie. It’s legal to access that data. Just not with any tool you please. It’s like you’ve bought a car from Ford, but you are only allowed to use a Ford-approved wrench to open the hood. It won’t just void your warranty– they’ll track you down and sue you like the little rat you are. How dare you break into your property?

It’s been pointed out to me that it is possible to create a legal Linux-based software DVD player: you’d write one (closed source of course) and then pay the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA) a per-customer or per-year license fee to manufacture it. Then, you’d sell it. This is possible, but it hasn’t been done. There is not currently a legal way to watch a DVD on Linux. I guess you could use Crossover Office or some emulation layer and do it that way, but that’s not exactly the same.

And you can’t ever have a legal open source DVD player. Nope. No way. Same with MP3 players. Say what? A German consortium owns the rights to the MP3 encoding and decoding algorithym. Playing or ripping mp3s costs money. Try OGG instead.

Once, Mister Jack Valenti, the MPAA’s head lobbyist, tried to squash a popular piracy technology. He said it was “as dangerous to the motion picture industry as the Boston Strangler is to a woman alone.” What technology was that? The VCR. Because overwhelming consumer outcry forced it, it became legal over the objections of the industry, and the industry now makes billions just from videotape rentals.

Shortsighted? Yes. But he’s got the law on his side. Not justice, mind you. Not truth or the American way either. Just the law, and plenty of cash.

Naming, Branding, Marketing

Did I mention the KFC article? Well, read it. It’s good. It makes me think about the job of marketing, of presenting. Kitchen Fresh Marketing. Now that I’m being absorbed by marketing, I wonder sometimes if I’m going to turn into one of those pointy-haired bosses.

I’m certainly working on it. My reading list now includes things like “Positioning” and “The Product Manager’s Handbook.” I’ve started wearing shirts with collars to work. I’ve taken out my earrings. I’m going to go get a haircut during lunch, too.

Hippies sell out. Punks just grow up eventually. Not sure what I was when I was younger, aside from a bitter, self-absorbed, teenager. But I guess I’m growing up into a bitter, self-absorbed adult. Totally different kind of bitter and self absorbed of course. But nonetheless… it might be time to read Nick Baker’s “The Mezzanine” again.

Combination Platter

More on how bariatric surgery is often done badly and causes huge complications. Gastric bypass is a surgical answer to a problem with huge psychological components, it needs to be accompanied by huge amounts of counseling, exercise, and dietary changes. Otherwise, you’re treating the fatness, but ignoring the root causes of overeating.

Is the medicine worse than the cure?. Depression can feed on emotional detachment– it prevents you from forming real bonds, it drives people away… and not having those bonds can drive you deeper. So, the medication weakens those links. It’s treating the unhappiness, but it’s not solving any emotional problems that might have gotten the patient into the mess to begin with. Of course if it’s just a chemical issue, then it makes sense. But that sounds like a rare patient who’s just got a chemical imbalance and won’t benefit from counselling.

Let Me Remind You of Our Laws

People often ask me about the availability of particular pieces of software on Linux. They’ll say, “I have a .DOC file, how can I open that on Linux?” and I’ll say, “OpenOffice.org makes a great word processor for Linux, Windows and OS X!” Or they want to know how to edit photos, or use a web browser, or play music.

But when they say they want to watch DVDs, I have to tell them it’s illegal and they get confused. Maybe you didn’t hear the nerds screaming about it five years ago when the Digital Millenium Copyright Act passed, or when the Motion Picture Association of America arranged to have a 14-year-old Norwegian boy arrested (he was eventually freed after a three-year legal battle that destroyed his father’s business). Maybe you didn’t hear when the Russian cryptographer Dmitri Sklyarov was arrested in Las Vegas, or when the Harvard professors got a letter threatening them with legal action and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines if they published their most recent work.

Well, now you know why it mattered five years ago: you don’t own that DVD. You own a limited license to access the data on it from certain licensed players. You may not use still images. You may not skip to an arbitrary portion of it without watching certain advertisements and notices. You may not make backup copies. You may not transfer it to another medium. You may not edit out the dirty parts if you think your kids would be better off without them

It’s theoretically legal, under fair use rights, to do any of those things. It’s just that constructing an unlicensed player is a crime. You can build an unlicensed player, of course– the key bits are simple enough for any 14-year-old computer whiz with a good knowledge of software compilation and encryption technologies. Not brilliant? You’re SOL.

Write your senator. Give to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Or give up.

Department of the Obvious

Obese children more likely to be bullied, says study.

The article does point out that these kids also become bullies more often than skinny kids, but doesn’t establish which way the correlation runs: are bullies likely to become fat from eating all the candy they take from their smaller peers? Do bullied children seek solace in food, and refuse to exercise, and get heavy, in a self-perpetuating cycle of shame and regret?

No, they don’t ask any of the really interesting questions.