Category - Computers

So, I took pictures documenting my February 29th as I said I'd do. I don't think I'll put them online right away. They're mainly awkward photos of classrooms and me eating things. That reflects pretty much all I did on Friday. As I keep saying, they'll be interesting in about twenty years, so you can expect to see them online then. Maybe earlier if I feel like re-posting the photos from February 29, 2004, along with them.

(Actually, I did have a rather interesting Friday night because my suitemate Evan realized his dream of putting a kiddie pool in the bathroom and having a jacuzzi party. It's not against the rules, but it will be when the wrong people find out, so we kept it hush-hush. I didn't take any pictures because they might be incriminating once having a jacuzzi party in the bathroom is a crime. I didn't get in the water, but I hung out. There was music playing and everything. It was fun.)

(Oh, that Evan is quite a character. He also recently realized his dream of buying a gorilla suit. Will hilarity ensue? Most probably.)

I was just reading some old posts, and I noticed how much funnier I was in them. Like in this one. And, you know, other examples. Just go to a random post in the archives and you'll see what I mean. Have I grown up and stopped being funny? I hope not. I think I just have more serious things to talk about. Like philosophy.

Still, there are overarching themes that continue to this day. And speaking of rejection, last night (actually early this morning) I asked out a friend via IM an she totally said yes. I feel compelled to add at least five exclamation marks here (such was my feeling after my über-cool roommate helped me with the asking-out process), but I say it with cautious optimism. Every time I ask a girl out, something happens and/or I just get the cold shoulder. Fourth time's a charm? We'll see.

And now, the links.

If this doesn't make your blood boil, check your pulse: Complaining About God in School Can Have Dire Consequences.

From the guy who brought you Human Space Invaders, it's Human Tetris.

In Manchester, there's a street with no name. They call it The Street with No Name, so I guess that means it has a name.

I often attend meetings of Gator Freethought, a club for students to evaluate religion with a critical eye. We're a motley bunch; although there are a lot of atheists and agnostics, there are also theists who may be questioning their own religion or who just want to see how other people think. A few weeks ago, I ran into a guy I recognized from the first meeting of the year. We've talked to each other a bit since then, and we've gotten to learn a lot about each other. He's a Christian, and he wanted me to check out this lecture called "If You Could Ask God One Question." It was supposed to be about what one guy thought God's answers to big questions would be. I thought it was interesting, so I decided to check it out.

The lecture was Wednesday night. I didn't give any consideration to the kind of group that would be putting it on and the kind of agenda they might have. Turns out it was hosted by Campus Crusade for Christ, which likes to refer to itself less confrontationally as CRU. The first half of the lecture -- one hour -- consisted of the speaker offering various arguments for the existence of a supreme god. At first, these were framed in a general theistic context, but then the arguments took a decidedly Christian turn. Here were some of them:

1. If God didn't exist, life would be meaningless.
2. That sounds really depressing.
3. Therefore, God exists.

1. The Bible says Jesus is the Son of God.
2. Bible scholars say that the Bible is true and that the discovery of Jesus's empty tomb is a historical fact.
3. Since the Bible is true, then it is more likely that Jesus is the Son of God than other explanations such as, for example, that the disciples stole Jesus's body.
4. Therefore, Jesus is the Son of God.

1. The Bible says that if you try hard enough, you can feel God's presence.
2. Therefore, God exists.

1. If God didn't exist, there would be no absolute standards of morality.
2. If there are no absolute standards of morality, who's to say that the Holocaust was bad?
3. Therefore, God exists.

Couldn't morality be genetically hard-wired into us as a mechanism of survival? The speaker brought that up but scoffed at the idea. However, he had no problem presenting the following argument:

1. If God existed, he would want us to believe in him.
2. New evidence shows that god-belief tends to be hard-wired in humans.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Amusingly, he compared hard-wired god-belief to object permanence -- the understanding that objects still exist even after they have disappeared from one's vision. Although he didn't use the term itself, it happens to be the only thing I remember from high-school psychology. He said that babies are born with object permanence, when in fact, they are not. They acquire it over time.

Getting back on subject, I think it's clear that while morality is beneficial to the survival of a species, there are no totally absolute moral standards. Interestingly, the speaker mentioned discrimination as being an absolute moral wrong. While I agree that discrimination is immoral, it seems to me that morality varies from time to time, from place to place, and even from person to person. In the recent past, discrimination was considered perfectly moral.

Allow me to present another example. Throwing rocks at gay people till they died was once considered virtuous by everyone, and to some people it still is. Why the change? People have discovered that being gay does nothing to harm society. Thus, our society's morals are changing before our eyes, and they fortunately seem to be converging on the doctrine that "If it harms none, do what you will." If morals are absolute, I would think that they should be based around that idea; that's what I feel would be best for society. I think that a sign of maturity is recognizing that there are few (if any) absolutes. We'll probably always be trying to perfect our morals and keep our selfish human nature from getting in the way.

So, anyway, I found the speaker's arguments pretty weak overall. They seemed to reflect what he wanted to believe rather than what logic would lead him to. (The second half of the presentation, in which he answered questions from the audience, is outside the scope of this post. I don't have much to say about it anyway.)

I've found more evidence that people tend to believe what they want to rather than what makes sense. Gator Freehthought's meeting last night featured James B. Twitchell, a professor who recently wrote Shopping for God: How Christianity Went from In Your Heart to In Your Face. He described the premise of the book, which is that people tend to buy things for the feeling they get when they buy them, and that advertising serves to create that feeling. He extends this idea to Protestant Christianity, namely megachurches, which have offered people basically the same doctrine but with a more satisfying church experience. (I was going to say "worshipping experience," but apparently these churches extend beyond improving that. For example, with their diverse social clubs, they try to replace the fraternal organizations that were popular in the early 20th century, according to Dr. Twitchell.)

Fox News makes a lot more sense when there's a laugh track added. Here's a Bill O'Reilly interview that's suddenly a lot more entertaining.

30,000 speech bubble stickers were printed. They were placed on top of ads all over New York City. Passersby filled them in. Later the results were photographed. It's The Bubble Project.

Here are 10 Incredible Old Computer Ads. They're pretty credible, actually.

I got to spend a weekend with my suitemates. On Saturday, Adam, Cameron, and I went with Evan to his house in Tampa, and we went to this post-Gasparilla parade. Actually, we left kind of late from Evan's house (having been treated to steak), so we only arrived in time to see the last float. After that, people were just sort of... reveling, I guess you would say. They were throwing around beads and stuff. Evan, who was in New Orleans a few weeks ago, says it was much more tame than Mardi Gras. Biggest excitement: we went into a cigar store, and Adam bought a cigar. It was either that or seeing the hippie-types with their tie-wearing dog.

So, no, we didn't get drunk, pass out, and wake up in Nevada a week later. We left around 11 as things seemed to be dying down. We went back to Gainesville the next day after having breakfast. It was cool getting to spend a weekend with my suitemates. I wish we could do stuff like that more often.

I've been getting into Ekiga lately. Do I really need a phone/videophone program on my computer? No, but it's awesome. Speaking of which, I've found a webcam that works. Since it was so terribly hard to find information about which webcams worked with Linux and which didn't, I want to spell it out here for you, me, and Google:

The Logitech QuickCam for Notebooks (model #961404-0403, USB product ID 046d:08ae) uses the gspca driver and therefore works out-of-the-box with Ubuntu 7.10.

And here's the proof:

Ekiga is available for Linux and Windows (the latter being beta). The only programs whose audio and video are compatible with the latest version of Ekiga (2.0.11) are XMeeting (Mac), NetMeeting (Windows), and Windows Messenger (not Windows Live Messenger). But many others have compatible audio, and better video compatibility will be included in the upcoming 3.0 release. See this page from the Ekiga wiki for more details on compatibility.

So, does anyone want to say hi? I'm sip:jordon@ekiga.net.

Last Wednesday, one of the men standing in the background on the cover of the Beatles' album Abbey Road died at the age of 96. His name was Paul Cole, and he was visiting London with his wife. Since he was tired of visiting museums, he waited on the sidewalk outside one while his wife was inside. That's when he happened to observe some young hooligans being photographed crossing the street. He didn't realize he was on the album cover until about a year later, when he saw the family's copy at his home in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Yes, a resident of my hometown was on the cover of a Beatles album. Who knew? (Here's the full story).

RSS is pretty handy, but RSS feeds can be annoying. Maybe there are some things you'd rather not see in an RSS feed, or maybe you'd like to combine several feeds into one. That's where Yahoo! Pipes comes in handy. You can use it to make mashups of RSS feeds. Here's one I use for reading the J-Walk Blog. It excludes posts that mention banjos or bacon.

Ever notice how some celebrities look like crosses between other celebrities? It's celebrity math(s).

I'm still alive, really. I've been busy. I present to you a post I started working on yesterday but didn't have time to finish.

Tuesday was Free Pancake Day at IHOP, and my sister really wanted to go. We went with our friend Amanda. The pancakes were good. They tasted really free. Since man cannot live on pancakes alone, I also had some eggs Benedict. The point of letting everyone have a free short stack was to raise money for charity, so we did our part. In that sense, the pancakes weren't really free.

They still tasted free, though.

Also Tuesday, I had my first test in my programming class. I think I got an A. It helps when you already know some basic programming concepts. Today in programming discussion, we were doing exercises with loops (which were just taught yesterday). The hardest one was to implement Leibniz's calculation of pi. I got it, and I've been playing around with it. It turns out that it converges to pi extremely slowly. With 1 billion terms, it's accurate only to 8 decimal places.

Of course, the proverbial elephant in the room is that it's Valentine's Day. You know what that means: it's my anniversary... of switching to Linux. You probably know how I feel about Valentine's Day, or you can probably guess. After reading this, you will be able to guess.

I went to a Gator Freethought meeting last night. To make things interesting, the topic of discussion was how your religious beliefs affect your views on love, sex, dating, and the like. To make things more interesting, "stoplight" dress code was made optional: wear green if you're single, red if you're taken, and yellow if you're "It's Complicated." While the people there spent the entire time debating the definition of love, I couldn't help but wonder: Why cant everyone dress this way all the time then we wouldn't have any problems or rather I wouldn't have any problems. Seriously the last 3 girls I asked out or wanted to ask out were already taken and I didn't know it at the time WTF. I hate this. I really do. And it's only getting worse. I'm just going to make this clear:

I can't get a date.

There. I said it, for everyone to hear. It's hard to exude coolness and confidence with a track record like the one I have.

However, I do have some joy in my life by volunteering for Get Carded, which gives out organ donor cards. Today we gave out cards with a Valentine's twist: "Have a heart, sign a donor card" was the slogan, and the idea drew some people. The chocolates also drew some people, no doubt. It was a productive day, though, and that's good. I like knowing that I'm helping to save lives.

Time for Ask Jordon:

Brian: Is Justin secretly Stephen Rea?

Your IP address indicates that you sent this from the University of Oregon. Is Brian secretly my friend Luke?

Dan in Japan: Did you ever read Pulp Novels? If so, did you have a favorite hero? (Example - The Spider, the Shadow.. etc.)

No, Dan the Man in Japan, I've never read those kinds of things. I think they were before my time. I thought Pulp Fiction was okay, though. By the way, your IP address indicates that you are in Japan. Good job.

Just to fit into the theme we've got going here, here are 50 Very Simple Ways to Be Romantic.

And this probably fits in too: Your Eyes Don't Lie - Reading Thoughts By Eye Movements.

I've long enjoyed the reasonable prices that my web host, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, offers, not the least of which has been their $1/GB bandwidth rate. But as my bandwidth has slowly but steadily increased, my costs have slowly increased as well, to the point that a significant amount of my charges are for bandwidth. Here's a graph showing the breakdown of my hosting costs for the past year:

At this rate, I'd just keep paying more and more for my site, and the pay-for-what-you-use pricing model would no longer be worth it. Not without some big change, anyway.

That change has arrived.

The folks at NFSN have long been aware of the relatively high costs that its popular sites incur, and now that they've gotten some savings on bandwidth, they've decided to pass it on to the customers who need it the most. Now only your first gigabyte of bandwidth costs $1: from there, the cost per gigabyte will go down logarithmically. Once your sites have accumulated 10 GB worth of transfers, you'll be charged $0.50 per gigabyte. By the time you hit 100 GB, it'll be $0.33. Of course, the decrease is smooth at every value in between, so, for example, you can expect correctly to be paying about $0.62 per gigabyte once you've racked up 4.13 GB worth of transfers. The savings continue until you've accumulated 10,000 GB of transfers, when the cost per gigabyte will be fixed at $0.20.

For the more mathematically inclined, the cost per gigabyte as a function f of gigabytes transferred x is as follows:

I've been playing with my graphing calculator to see what my savings will be. Of course, it helps to have some real numbers. I know that the bandwidth cost for my site during the past year was $53.72, which works out to 53.72 GB of bandwidth. Now that this new pricing plan is in place, my next 53.72 GB will cost $24.39, and the 53.72 GB after that will cost only $18.55. (I knew calculus would be helpful in real life.)

I've fallen in love with NearlyFreeSpeech.NET all over again, and I recommend them to basically everyone (except people who need stuff like SSL and e-mail, which they don't offer).

Super Bowl XLII is tomorrow. Have a look at Super Bowl logos from the past.

This is pretty cool: The Freecycle Network is all about giving away and reusing stuff so it doesn't go to waste.

And, to finish this post, something you've always wanted to know about but have never been able to because you didn't know what it was called:

Shave and a haircut, two bits!

I can't imagine spending two whole years running for president. In November 2006, I started hearing about people gearing up to run. Finally (well, not finally), on Tuesday, Florida has its primary, where the people will get to choose their party's candidate... or not.

Okay, so here's the deal. Certain states arbitrarily have super-early primaries, meaning that they're often the most influential. Florida wants a piece of the action, so they move their primary from March to January. The Republicans punish Florida by stripping the state of half its delegates to the nominating convention, and the Democrats decide to remove Florida's delegates entirely. So, as a Florida Democrat, my vote actually doesn't count... maybe.

To make things worse, the dude I was going to vote for dropped out of the race on Thursday. That's right: Dennis Kucinich has called it quits. I could go on like certain people about how he was ignored by the mainstream media, but it's really a chicken-and-egg issue, isn't it? A lack of support leads to a lack of media coverage, which leads to a lack of support and so on. But he probably was the most liberal candidate in the race, and it seems that you have to be close to the center to get the votes.

Way back in August, I took a political quiz to see which candidates would be closest to my viewpoints. Kucinich topped my list at 88%, which is how I actually heard about him in the first place. But the playing field has narrowed down quite a bit -- case in point -- so I thought I'd take the test again to see how things have changed.

1. Barack Obama (85%)
2. Hillary Clinton (76%)
3. John Edwards (72%)
4. Mike Gravel (63%)
5. Ron Paul (45%)
6. Wayne Allyn Root (30%)
7. Mike Huckabee (29%)
8. Rudolph Giuliani (27%)
9. John McCain (27%)
10. Mitt Romney (22%)

There were actually 31 results in all; the 21 I haven't included were people who had dropped out of the race or were rumored to run but didn't. I actually got a 0% match: Stephen Colbert.

So, Tuesday is the first time I vote ever. I've decided who I'm going to vote for instead. I mean, I wouldn't feel bad about voting for Kucinich just to show my belated support, but it doesn't really matter anyway.

I knew my Greasemonkey user script MySpace Ignore Bulletins was popular, but I didn't know until recently that it was given a 5-star rating in a review on About.com. The reviewer calls it "handy," "easily configurable," and "a nice ability to have for any MySpacer." (Not "fun for the whole family"?) I'm surprised at how good the review was, especially since it doesn't make reference to even more convenient features I've added (probably after it was written). The only bone I have to pick is that he says "The instructions in the show/hide box are slightly misaligned in My Bulletin Space." It's aligned that way for a reason: so you can still right-click and copy your friend's profile link when the box is open. But oh well. It's a pretty nice honor. The article has even been Dugg. My next two most popular scripts also have reviews: MySpace Birthdays on Homepage earned a 4/5 and MySpace Go Right Home got a 3.5/5.

This guy made up a detailed list of every Bush scandal. The result: a 60-foot-long scroll. (The list is here. Some of them aren't very scandalous, and some aren't his responsibility, like #81: "Selling creationist materials at the Grand Canyon gift shop claiming it was 6000 years old." But many of them are egregious.)

I bet you've always wanted to read a list of animals named after celebrities. Well, here you go. Thanks, Wikipedia!

Here are some fun examples of folded currency.

Esperanto. It was created to be a second language for the whole world. The number of speakers is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, at least. I took up Esperanto briefly in 2003 and again in 2005. To prove how into it I was, I still have the category of Esperanto-related posts. But I haven't used it much in the past two years. I got somewhat bored with it because I had no one to talk to. (If I were in a sitcom, this is where the audience would say "Aww...")

Last week, I made a new friend and got her interested in learning Esperanto. (She has a boyfriend, by the way; I left my last post open-ended because I wasn't sure.) Anyway, I haven't gotten a chance to meet with her again, but we've been talking online quite a bit. As I was talking about her to Joey (from down the hall) and Adam (my roommate), Joey mentioned that his roommate Andy knew Esperanto. Sure enough, he said he'd studied it recently, and he was familiar with some Esperanto web sites, books, and authors. He also said it would be cool if we started an Esperanto club.

Do you hear that? It's opportunity knocking.

I'm thinking that such a club would eventually consist of both Esperanto classes and social events. I've been trying to find information about other college Esperanto clubs to see what they do, but I can only really find two: one at UT Austin and one at Rochester. I guess it's better than none.

I've been looking into the process for starting a student organization, and it doesn't sound too terribly difficult. You have to have a president and a treasurer, three student members in all, a faculty advisor, and a constitution. Finding a faculty advisor will probably be the hardest part. His signature is required for you to start your club, but you can decide what his duties should be. Andy mentioned that the guy who teaches "The Tao of Star Trek" (it's an actual class) might be a good person to ask, but I'd rather not promote the idea that Esperanto is only for freaks 'n' geeks. It's a real language used by real people in real life, so I'd rather have a foreign language professor helping us out.

As for a name, I tried to think of one that would have the same initials in English and Esperanto, but eventually, I came up with "Esperanto@UF": that way, it would be the same in both languages. I think it'd be good for other Esperanto speakers who will get the idea that we're representing our university (the University of Florida) in the Esperanto community, and it'd be good for our fellow students who will find that "Esperanto@UF" implies that Esperanto doesn't exist just at our university but also elsewhere. Plus, the @ is reminiscent of technology and the future.

The three of us will have to get together and talk about it this weekend. There's a lot to plan.

How do you know when you've been procrastinating too much? I'll tell you how. Last week, rather than doing some homework, I figured out how to get the Java Runtime Environment (necessary for running Java applets on web pages) working on my computer. Even though I installed the sun-java6-jre package from Ubuntu's multiverse repository, Firefox wasn't recognizing Java applets. So I referred to some documentation that explained everything. All I had to do was the enter the following commands:

cd ~/.mozilla/plugins
ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

One of the things that makes a neighborhood good is its walking distance from important places. Find your home's Walk Score to determine how walking-friendly its location is. My house has a score of 43/100. My dorm gets a 37/100.

This guy tried to get the most expensive drink at Starbucks. It cost him $13.76 (after tax).

I visited my suitemate in the hospital on Thursday along with some other people. His mother and his brother were there. He was asleep at first, but very slowly he woke up and we tried to make small talk. We stuck around for about two and a half hours. It was a little awkward, but I hope he enjoyed our visit. I can't imagine whether he would have or not.

He lives near me, and it turns out that we went to the same mom-and-baby-type place when we were little. Maybe we played together. Maybe our moms remember each other.

I don't think he'll be back for a while.

Thursday night was the spring kickoff meeting for Gator Freethought. It was at this place called Tim and Terry's, which is a house-turned-restaurant with just enough room for a little live music. The main dining area was the former backyard, so that's where I made my way. There were a lot of people from the group just chatting, which was the point of the get-together. I sat away from everyone else at first, but then someone beckoned me to join in, so I sat between a girl and a guy. The guy introduced himself to me, and we made a little small talk. What's your name? What's your major? What year are you? Where are you from?

I decided to initiate similar small talk with the girl next to me. We talked for a while. Then we were both hungry, so we ordered some food at the counter inside. When we brought it back outside, we found our own table and talked some more. Did we ever. She's a first-year student who lives alone in an apartment. She hardly has any friends in town. She goes home on the weekends to work, and she has a job in town during the week. She doesn't like to go to parties. Sometimes when she's bored, she makes up math problems in her head and solves them. She loves learning languages, and when I told her about Esperanto, which I studied a few years ago, she said she'd want to learn.

Almost four hours after saying hello, we were still talking as she was walking with me back to my dorm even though her apartment was really close to the restaurant. Now that I'm home for the long weekend, I'll be able to bring my copy of Teach Yourself Esperanto for her to learn from... or for us to go over together.

It's not often you can say with certainty that something is going to happen at a specific time in the future. But 30 years from today, on Tuesday, January 19, 2038, there's going to be a Y2K-like problem that will affect many of today's computers -- if they still happen to be running.

Unix-like operating systems (such as Mac OS X and Linux) internally represent dates and times as the number of seconds since midnight on January 1, 1970. On 32-bit computers, the most common kind in use today, these operating systems store the time in 32 bits. But on January 19, 2038, the number of seconds will get too long to be stored in 32 bits, so the extra digits will be ignored, and these systems will think it's December 13, 1901. In other words, it would be like Y2K, but on a smaller scale.

Don't panic, though. Not every computer runs a Unix-like operating system, and anyway, the problem is slowly being fixed with the introduction of 64-bit computers, which allow twice as many bits for storing the time. This should serve us well for about 290,000,000,000 years. But because computers can and do last for more than 30 years, there will probably be some around that will experience the bug. Hopefully, though, they'll be historical curiosities by then and not repositories of important data. Wikipedia has some more information about Y2K38.

If the text of this blog post survives 30 years, I wonder if people will read and laugh at it. I'll probably laugh. Hey 2038 people, do you guys have flying cars yet? Does everyone use Linux? Are there still ice caps? Are we in a cold war with China? Oh, the questions I would ask the 48-year-old me. Where do I live? Am I married, and do I have kids? How much money do I make? (In 2008 dollars, please, so I can understand. 2038 Chinese yuan would be okay too.)

Rolling Stone presents The Almost-Impossible Rock & Roll Quiz. I got 30 right out of 58. That's over 50%. I made a lot of guesses.

Do you know what Congress is up to? Now you can keep track at GovTrack.us.

Find out how many five-year-olds you could take in a fight with this quiz called "How Many Five Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight?" at howmanyfiveyearoldscouldyoutakeinafight.com. Turns out I could take 10 five-year-olds in a fight.

I'm not sure how much of this I should say. I got back to my dorm room late this afternoon when my roommate gave me some awful news. Apparently, one of our suitemates tried to kill himself last night. He took about 60 pills, and he's apparently still in the hospital.

I wasn't sure what to do when I first heard about it. Couldn't we have been better friends with him? He definitely has other friends, but he's never really been very happy. And I know that forging a friendship with him wouldn't solve all of his problems, but everybody could use some more pals. But now look. He's in the hospital, and he might not be back here for a while. I wasn't sure what to do when or if he comes back, so I thought I'd ask you all here.

As I was writing this, Evan and Joey from down the hall came in, and we talked about it. Evan said it would be nice if we could visit him in the hospital tomorrow; after all, it's right on campus. It looks like we're going to do that tomorrow morning. I hope we can get some more people to go.

Jack Kevorkian spoke here at UF last night, and my sister and I went to hear him. So did a lot of other people. The speech was at the basketball arena, and there was a huge, huge line outside that moved pretty slowly because they searched everyone with metal detectors. Kevorkian, an advocate (and erstwhile practitioner) of physician-assisted suicide who was recently paroled after eight years in prison, is no stranger to controversy. There was a relatively small number of protesters outside as people slowly filed in, and the bomb squad was there too. (What better way to stop people from dying than by killing somebody?)

Pretty much everybody expected that Kevorkian's speech would focus on euthanasia. Of course, that's an issue that's important to him, but he didn't talk too much about it because apparently the conditions of his parole stipulate that he can't talk to anyone about it "in detail." He did try to set some things straight. He made clear that he killed people to relieve their suffering rather than for the sake of them dying; he compared this to a doctor amputating a person's leg to get rid of a cancer rather than for the sake of cutting off the leg. He also talked about the historical use of euthanasia among the ancient Greeks, who pretty uniformly accepted and even regulated it. (Only the Pythagoreans, he said, were opposed to it, and it was their fringe belief that was incorporated into the Hippocratic Oath.)

The second part of his speech was concerned with reforming the judicial and penal systems. (If you feel you were wrongly imprisoned for such a length of time as he was, you'd probably concern yourself with the same thing.) He presented the idea that people who break the law should be placed in a "sanctuary" where they would be able to work out with the victim and his family how they should pay for their crimes. (If the perpetrator is uncooperative, only then should he go to jail.) This, he said, would minimize guilt and wouldn't ruin people's lives like prison often does. He said he read about this idea in a book and has since made contact with the author. He also called on UF's law school to offer classes on the "sanctuary" idea and sponsor a pilot program.

The last part of his speech concerned civil liberties, and the Ninth Amendment in particular, which reads in its entirety:

He said that the Ninth Amendment has been pretty uniformly ignored. I'll agree with that. But he also said it has never been used in court, which is obviously not true. He was big on civil liberties, saying that the government is pretty authoritarian in structure, like Nazi Germany, but "more subtle." (An actual example he gave was that "the tyrants" make you wear a seatbelt so you'll think that they care about you.) He said that the Republicans and Democrats were basically the same, and that the only way to go was to vote Libertarian. The audience applauded. But at almost the same time, he said something pretty confounding: "Everyone should refuse to vote. That will give the tyrant a message." This was one of the only times he was booed by the audience. And although he was running over time, he spent some time condemning the war in Iraq and listing some characteristics of fascist states that sounded uncomfortably familiar: things like rigged elections, pompous displays of patriotism, the glamorizing of soldiers, and the if-you're-not-with-us-you're-against-us mentality.

When his speech was over, a lot of people started leaving, even though there was going to be a Q and A session with questions submitted in advance through a moderator. I figured I'd heard enough by then. It was interesting to go to, although I wish he could have talked more about euthanasia. He sure did stir up a debate around here, though, and I guess that was the idea of hiring him.

Here's a humorous version of the Microsoft End-User License Agreement (Flash).

Learn some Everyday Loopholes "to get annoying things done the easy way."

Tonight, Jack Kevorkian is speaking at UF. As an advocate (and erstwhile practitioner) of physician-assisted suicide, he's pretty controversial. Over the past week or so, the debate has been heating up around campus. As I walked past the facility where the former doctor is due to speak, I saw that there were seemingly makeshift "free speech zone" signs posted around. My sister reports that a plane is currently flying over campus with a banner saying that Planned Parenthood kills babies and Jack Kevorkian kills parents. I think we can expect about as much protest as there was when Alberto Gonzales spoke a few months ago. That is to say, a lot. Difference is, I'm actually going to this one.

Opinion: Terminally ill people in a sound state of mind should be able to put themselves out of their suffering. And why is it any of your business?

(Let the flames begin!)

From the Why-Don't-You-Join-a-Club Dept.: I went to the first few meetings of Gator Freethought hoping to have some intelligent discussion with freethinking Gators. But the meetings got increasingly boring as they tended to focus on yawners like philosophy. I didn't even go to the last few meetings, which were about morality and Nietzsche and things. Luckily, the student organization's "new year's resolution is to have more fun," and they're going to start the fun with a meet-and-greet on Thursday night at a local restaurant-type place.

The meeting after that will be just before Florida's presidential primary and will deal with how our religious beliefs (or lack thereof) will affect our choices in the polls. The next meeting will be around Valentine's day and will be a discussion on religion and dating. This is an issue that affects me (in fact, I've been meaning to complain about it here), so I'll be sure to attend... unless I have a date. In fact, I've figured that going to Gator Freethought meetings is probably the best way to meet a sweet atheist (or agnostic -- I'm not that picky) girl, so it should be really interesting to see what other people in my situation have done or are doing.

If you're a freak who notices every single little change I make on this site, you'll know that last week, I changed the Creative Commons license for this site to allow commercial use of my content. (Previously, commercial use without special permission was prohibited. Attributing to me and sharing alike -- that is, releasing the derivative work under the same license -- are still required.) Here's a brief summary of the old license, and here's a summary of the new one.

Why the change? I've occasionally gotten requests for commercial use of my images, which, because they were prohibited by the old license, had to be approved by me on a case-by-case basis. To give a recent example, the Piute County (Utah) Chamber of Commerce asked to use my image of a $1 bill signed by former U.S. Treasurer and Piute County native Ivy Baker Priest. I decided to allow their use of the image as long as they credited me and my web site. Every time someone asks for special permission to use my stuff commercially, I allow them to do it, so I figured I'd change the license to allow it in general.

Some people might be concerned about this apparent display of flip-floppery. Most of the content that was under the old license is now under the new one. Which license applies? It depends on when you accessed the content. If you saved an old copy of an article or post from this site, that copy still falls under the old license. But if you access that same sexy article today, the new license (which has fewer restrictions) applies.

You've probably heard a lot about the OOXML standardization debate, but it's all very confusing. Here's an overview of the ISO standardization process that OOXML is attempting to go through.

Read some stupid essays by some guy. They don't look like they were really printed out and graded by an actual teacher, but they're still funny.

Here's a film from 1967 (confirmed authentic by Snopes) reporting on what technology would be like in A.D. 1999.