dmca song

dmca song

the Box of Eternal Donuts

I Answered All My Spam

I saw this link somewhere in Slashdot, and added it to my "to read" list. But I have unfortnately forgotten which post (or the poster) that I got this from.

Anyways, here's an interesting and well written article regarding the educational and performance gap between boys and girls. Though not a peer-reviewed publication itself, it's still an interesting read.

I find myself, too, wondering about the issues raised in this article. As far back as I can remember, I always remember girls being smarter than most of us boys. It was to the point that they were generally considered the smarter sex. That trend appears to continue past high-school, since the vast majority of students at my undergraduate university were females, and here at graduate school, almost 60% of the incoming graduate students were female.

So why is it that males are still considered dominant? A good question. I find myself torn on this issue, since looking around my computer science classes and groups, I still see more males. But is this a crisis? Is there a "Men in Psychology" group in the same way there is a "Women in Computing" group?

I must admit that I feel disdain for the idea. It's fine to have a group, but to have scholarships and workshops available only to women for "women in computing"?

To me, this issue is even more powerful than that of race.

Ah well.. but I ramble on. Time to stop.

Here's a quote from the article... it felt very close to me, since I have often been placed to feel this way when it came to girls and computer science.

A boy today, through no fault of his own, finds himself implicated in the social crime of shortchanging girls. Yet the allegedly silenced and neglected girl sitting next to him is likely to be the superior student. She is probably more articulate, more mature, more engaged, and more well-balanced. The boy may be aware that she is more likely to go on to college. He may believe that teachers prefer to be around girls and pay more attention to them. At the same time, he is uncomfortably aware that he is considered to be a member of the favored and dominant gender.

oh man... for shits and giggles, here's the poem he wrote:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Oh my, lump in the bed
How I've missed you.
Roses are redder
Bluer am I
Seeing you kissed by that charming French guy.
The dogs and the cat, they missed you too
Barney's still mad you dropped him, he ate your shoe
The distance, my dear, has been such a barrier
Next time you want an adventure, just land on a carrier.

"In India, Asok has an intern...
... named Dilbert"

quite an interesting post by pi_rules. Just wanted to save a pointer to it here.

interesting post with quotes about gun rights

For a long list of reasons, my father uses a Windows machine for his home busines computer, which I got and set up for him. We got the system about a year ago, and I installed the Chinese version of Windows XP (yes it's legit). When it works, it works okay. Enough for my dad to use from day-to-day for his computing needs.

What's good is that he can read, write, and print Chinese, and explore the system by himself. But on the downside, WindowsXP (atleast the chinese version) has had a strange habbit of dying about once every three months or so.

And I mean totally die. I don't know what the problem is... sometimes it's a corrupted registry, bad pagefile, windows-update-gone-wrong-killing-the-installation, you name it..... And I know it's not the hardware. They've been tested, re-tested, and replaced multiple times. To be safe, I've even underclocked his gigahertz machine to make sure it never over-heats.

So here I was, spending about a whole day trying to recover this computer of his. The damn computer was set to auto-reboot whenever there's a kernel panic (or whatever they call it in Windows land). And since this latest problem actually prevented windows from fully starting, it would be stuck in a continuous cycle of rebooting!

Talk about lame! The system recovery disk didn't work and the "fix windows installation" option didn't work. Boy what I wouldn't have given for a bootable rescue disc with a shell and text readable configuration files. But I digress...

Anyways, that's when I decided to just re-install the damn machine. Luckily, we had a very recent backup of his data. This is when it gets REALLY frustrating.

Now, in an attempt to install over the old installation, the install process blue-screens half-way through. Even after doing the suggested changes from google, the install still crashes.

And so, I decided to wipe the drive and start over.
Same results.
Over and over again.... I tried every combination of BIOS settings and pulling out unnecessary hardware that I could think of.
And still the install crashes. This must've happened about a dozen times.

Finally, I decided that I would install RedHat 9 on it instead. I'd have to work a little harder to try and customize the box and re-educate my father on how to use the computer, but it'd be worth it to save myself from the current Winblows hell.

So, I put the WinXP disc in one last time, and got it installing... again... while I ran off to download and burn a set of RedHat discs.

Upon returning, with RedHat/GNU/Linux discs in hand, I saw, in amazement, WindowsXP installed (albeit barebones) and running on my dad's computer.

*sigh*

So, I know that this whole SCO thing has been flogged to death on Slashdot, and many of you are sick of getting an O.J. style play-by-play.

But one thing which has really made me curious, is why there have been no insider leaks from SCO?

Now assume that these alleged code fragments came from some developer instead of management trying to play with diff. Surely other developers would know (or have an idea) of what the similar passages are.

And I have to believe that atleast one of these developers has enough of a conscience to leak something. I mean, c'mon! I know SCO is trying to do a last minute ditch to raise its stock prices or get bought, and I know how much it sucks to have options worth nothing. But are there really no developers or IT staff at SCO that have the moral guidance to not play along with this sick charade?

After all, the really huge winners in this for SCO are going to be the top executives and the lawyers.

Here is a very interesting CNN article about the reach of laws, constitution, and individual rights. Not exactly tech oriented, but still a very thought provoking read.

Personally.... The US believes its government to be the best in the world, though not perfect; and the US believes its courts to be the best in the world, though not perfect. If so, then the US should apply in full all fundamentals and limitations of its own governing laws to peoples of lands it controls, whether via occupation, lease, or territory. To do otherwise, would be hypocritical.

Here's another very interesting CNN article regarding tax deductions for artistic works given to charity. The law as written is very narrow, and much more representative of non-digital works of art. Maybe a future expansion would allow for some kind of digital equivallence? What if an artist could write off the works of music he donates to the public domain? The value of that work could be evaluated against his works that sell. An interesting idea for how the future economics of digital art might be influenced.

limekiller4 make this nice little comment regarding governments, government reports, and their "truth-factor".

It's something that many people in free countries tend to forget about. Especially in the US and Canada. Propoganda comes in many forms.

Well, the Slashdot editors, in their infinate wisom, decided to reject a story about a town in California named Arcata, which passed an ordinance ordering town officials to not comply with the Patriot Act.

An article with the basic story.

Did I miss something? I don't recall any previous Slashdot stories about this; and this seems like a pretty compelling story. Maybe if the government won't listen to individual citizens, we can make them listen to communities. Seems like a very effective grass-roots statement, especially for the geek population communities.

Will this be the way we can combat PatriotII and SuperDMCA's? By boldly standing together as communities, representing large voting blocks?

Some more links....

link

link

link

I've said it before a thousand times, and I guess I'll continue to say it well into the future. "Piracy", as the industry and media like to use it, is a dysphemism. (dysphemism is the antonym for euphemism)

It has been used so much so that if you look up "piracy" in Webster's online dictionary, it has even included copyright infringement as one of the definitions of the word.

I guess there's no point in trying to get the media to stop using this horridly loaded word. That's like trying to get them to understand the difference between "hacker" and "cracker".

The issue of copyright and copyright infringement has been discussed at length from many angles. I am not here to say which side is right or wrong. But in this battle for the all-mighty-buck (and let's face it, for both sides, this is what copyright is all about), let us try to not forget the humanism of what we are trying to protect -- art.

Art, that elusive creation that is an expression of a facet of humanity. Perhaps it is wishful thinking that we not strangle art from both sides of the argument with something so cold and lifeless as money. Or perhaps it is a chilling foreshadowing of where we as a race and society is heading.

Ok... I'm done ranting.... *step off soapbox*

So, I've been on slash for a while now, and for amusement's sake, I decided that it's probably time to try out some of the user features like friends and fans.

So, once in a while, I'll start adding people to my fan list. Just for the hell of it.

Why is it that I always get moderator points when there's stories that I couldn't give two shits about? The latest Blizzard game, a review on Tom's Hardware, or some Lego accomplishment... who cares? And yet only when those stories pop up do I get mod points. I'm going to start modding up trolls.