On Shareholder liability.

So there's this neat article on Modified Preorder Tree Traversal for storing hierarchical data in a database. It's of no use to me because I don't have any hierarchies to store in databases. I only ever work with digraphs. Does anyone know of any similarly handy algorithms for storing/retreiving digraphs? They're mostly acyclic, and maybe we could work at guaranteeing that, but nodes can definitely have two parents.

I just have a table for edges and a table for nodes with no special algorithmical sugars at all. It works great for dumping the whole digraph into a .dot file for graphviz, but anything else requires subquery after subquery. If we had an rdbms with recursive queries, we could use that, but something about recursive queries makes me go a cold wet one. Sounds like cheating and sounds like the wrong idea. Maybe there isn't a better way...

He's such a serious guy. I hope he'll get a laugh out of this, but maybe I'll just get banned. And I don't mean to put him off the lazyweb.

reddit
digg
slashdot
del.icio.us/popular
populicious
mefi
waxy links
linked list
<lj user="jwz">
my amigos
my lj friends

are various different ways to find dumb crap on the web. And they vary widely in quality even though they recycle eachother's content, intentionally or not. And there's probably room for new ones, because digg and reddit are new. Slashdot may not be dying from a business perspective, and I still use it all the time, but it's slowly dying to me. I no longer like to use it.

But not for any change in how /. works. It's different because the crowds at the different sites are different. del.icio.us/popular was always lame because it was filled with self-actualization and self-help bullshit all the damn time. That was just a consequence of filling up with "tagsonomy" dweebs, but not a consequence of how their site worked or its intended focus.

Reddit is excellent because it is apparently mostly used by people who are interested in the same things I am interested in. This is very different from /. or del.icio.us, and I love it.

Blah blah blah blah. I'm done talking now.

everybody-is-a-celebrity-now.com

or maybe

whattheinternetisfor.com

or something along those lines.

It would be a social networking reference site without participation from the people being listed. A wiki with an entry for every person that anyone feels like listing, no matter how unknown they are. A haven for libel, self-aggrandizement, harassment, and stalking. Everything would be public, and all information submitters would be anonymous. Perhaps each person listing might have an associated forum along the lines of the wikipedia talk page, or 4chan, or say-so.com, so that dialog about any given person would be longer-lasting.

Each page could have a section at the bottom with authoritative information (or rebuttals :) entered by the actual person being discussed, but then you'd have to vet whether this person claiming to be Ben-Donley-of-San-Francisco really is the dude being discussed on this particular person listing. Perhaps people could pay money in order to be vetted and put their information up, like a public encryption key.

Hosting would have to be in some kind of legal haven, because many laws would be violated in many nations. That would be the hard part. Maybe figure out who hosts the pirate bay, and go get hosting with them. Of course, if the primary function of the site turned out to be a libel/harassment machine, then it would be lame and I wouldn't want to do it. But I think it could be an incredible resource. Like Wikipedia white pages or something.

It could also turn into a public mirror of private credit information, like previous addresses, phone numbers, employment and relationships. If people started posting SSNs, it could screw up our current shared-secred identity system. Dunno. I'm really curious and I want to find out.

On physics breakthroughs in recent history.

On eyepatches, peglegs, and hooks

That's good. S-M-R-T. I am so smrt.

iPod prevents boot

I think it's because I use firewire to connect, but Windows won't boot when it's plugged in. Just sits there at the welcome screen interminably. Lame on everyone's part.

Firewire hard drive flakes.

Occasionally I'll get a write failure notification on my external hard drive, and then it won't work for a little while. Powercycling & rebooting usually fixes it. Haven't prodded much in the device manager.

The weird part is that when I tried to run the Ubuntu live cd, it wouldn't boot and carped about an IEEE1394 device, 'till I unplugged the thing. Even though it was off. Maybe the little built in hub is horked.

Keyboard sometimes boots wrong

Occasionally, my computer will boot but the keyboard won't work. It's USB. I can solve this every time by either unplugging and replugging, or by disabling and re-enabling in the device manager.

This also froze the boot process in Ubuntu: During loading USB, it complained that a device was "probably" using the wrong IRQ. I had to unplug my keyboard from the USB port to get Ubuntu up.

Google downgraded Google Deskbar

I installed Google Desktop 2.0, and it took over the ctrl-alt-g hotkey. I couldn't figure out how to switch it back, so I uninstalled the deskbar. I way prefered the deskbar, just because it worked nicely in the quicklaunch toolbar when I threw it on the right of my screen. Now I can't do that.

(Update: Solution to disable the Google Desktop Hotkey)

Outlook has trumped gtalk.

I installed MS Office 2k3, and now mailto: links go to Outlook, even though I didn't configure Outlook as a mail client. The "Set Program Access And Defaults" thing has no entry for gtalk, which I thought was supposed to replace the notifier. So I guess I should try switching back to the gmail notifier before I whine too much about this.

The monitor goes black randomly.

No rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes it's got no trouble, and sometimes it goes black repeatedly for thirty seconds at a time. The little sleep light never goes on. I don't want to spend money on this crap. Ugh. Whine.

My delayed reaction to the Miers nomination.

If slashdot allowed images, I'd post it here.

I read as much of O'Reilly's definition of "Web 2.0" as I could stomach and all I got from it is that "Web 2.0" means Tim O'Reilly likes it.

"Users must be treated as co-developers." That dude can spill some bullshit.

A quote from an interview with the author of "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man":

So, let's say we give this third-world country a loan of $1 billion. One of the conditions of that loan is that the majority of it, roughly 90%, comes back to the United States to one of our big corporations, the ones we've all heard of recently, the Bechtels, the Halliburtons. And those corporations build in this third-world country large power plants, highways, ports, or industrial parks -- big infrastructure projects that basically serve the very rich in those countries. The poor people in those countries and the middle class suffer; they don't benefit from these loans, they don't benefit from the projects. In fact, often their social services have to be severely curtailed in the process of paying off the debt. Now what also happens is that this third-world country then is saddled with a huge debt that it can't possibly repay. For example, today, Ecuador. Ecuador's foreign debt, as a result of the economic hit man, is equal to roughly 50% of its national budget. It cannot possibly repay this debt, as is the case with so many third-world countries. So, now we go back to those countries and say, look, you borrowed all this money from us, and you owe us this money, you can't repay your debts, so give our oil companies your oil at very cheap costs.

And that leaves me curious. Is there any reason this wouldn't work on the United States? I mean, sure, we're way richer than Ecuador, so it would take a whole hell of a lot more debt to sink 50% of our federal budget, but it's not like Bechtel or Halliburton are going after Ecuador because it's foreign. They go after third world countries because they are easier to get ahold of. Their government is easier to corrupt and their economy is easier to own. There's no America-World Bank-Halliburton team. Given enough cooperation from our government, I bet they could sink us just the same.

Afterward, I read this Slate article about fiscal conservatives getting the shaft.

I suppose it's obvious how that Katrina rebuilding money is going to get spent. Some of it will go to poor people who lost their shit, but way more of it will go to property owners who lost more expensive shit. They will rebuild, and they won't necessarily need to focus on low cost housing. (That way there won't be any poor people in New Orleans...) The majority will go to government contractors. Halliburton may be planning exactly the kinds of ultra-expensive and unnecessary projects that they used to stick up Latin America. Anyone out there have a television? I can't find any sweeping narratives about where the cash will go.

Maybe not. Maybe they'll build a hurricane-proof elevated train. They could build it out of silk and diamonds for their part of the $200 billion. What did it cost for Bechtel to build BART?

So what's the point of the $1 trillion war in Iraq, the $145 billion drug company handout, the $260 billion highway bill, and $200 billion for Katrina aid ($200,000 per person! To Halliburton!)? How about the reduction in taxes worth $2.2 trillion over 10 years? We'll have over a $500 billion deficit this year. This isn't even Reaganomics. No one has argued that this combination of reduced taxation and deficit spending will improve our economy so much that we can afford all this shit. Way to fucking go, "conservatives".

Putting two and two together, I would like to suggest the possibility that our wealthy elite are conspiring to pull off an "economic hit" on us. I bet they could do it. They already are the government.

Does anyone know if there's a PAC or nonprofit dedicated to eliminating shareholder indemnity and increasing corporate liability in general? Maybe the National Lawyers Guild or the Association of Trial Laywers of America is the closest we've got. What do y'all libertarians have to say for yourselves?

I'm curious if there's an organization that focuses on this exclusively.

It's kindof important.

This is along the same lines as I want favicons everywhere.

If an item in an RSS or atom feed contains a picture, and your feed reader doesn't display it to me in whatever size fits its GUI, your feed reader sucks. Sucks!

For example, Google's new blog search does not show picture thumbnails. That's dumb. Dumb!

Also for example, syndication in WordPress is lame. Lame!