May Contain Nuts

Okay, while this is cool and all, I don’t think I’d want to (or even be able to) surf this new interplanetary internet. Can’t we make with the particle-entangled communications arrays yet?

(For those who may not know, entangled particles are a pair of particles that reflect changes made to each other instantaneously, regardless of distance. Forget subspace, Quantum Mechanics makes science fiction more awesome every day.)

For some unknown reason I have actually reloaded this site no less than a half-dozen times today after discovering it through Engadget.  I find myself simultaneously frustrated and relieved that the site’s status hasn’t changed in 4 hours.

As was suggested by a co-worker, they really need some sort of notification service you can sign up for in the event that it ever does change.  Given that the LHC has someone familiar with such scenarios on-staff, I’m somewhat more conerned than I might be otherwise.

(I jest)

Evidently, for just $100,000 (or more), we could register the .dni domain name.

Or maybe .myst; I’ll take either ;).

Can’t say anything registered as .dni or .myst would be even remotely as clever as Marten’s Rel.to, but what’re ya gonna do?

So apparently, James Dobson won’t be voting if Giuliani is the Republican Presidential candidate. While I can at least appreciate his beliefs and his reasons for having them which would ostensibly keep him from voting, this raises an interesting question about the role of religion in politics…

The former NYC mayor is apparently on record (according to CNN) as personally despising the practice of abortion (around which half of Dobson’s issue apparently revolves), but is committed to a woman’s right to have one. While his personal views on homosexuality aren’t spelled out in the CNN article, it seems to indicate that he is also an advocate of equal rights for said individuals. I think that there’s an important point to be made here, and it’s this:

In the realm of politics, your personal religious beliefs do not necessarily reflect the best direction for public policy. There are plenty more people in this country than Christians, and the law needs to encompass all of those people, providing a legal framework for support and behavioral regulations that favor no one group over another. This is obviously a hard thing to do, and when you get into the supposedly moral gray areas of things like homosexuality and abortion, it becomes even harder. Obviously, groups opposed to such practices (and I use that word knowing that it applies better to abortion than to homosexuality, but I’m going with it because I don’t feel like using a thesaurus) wish to see them outlawed in their country of origin (if not everywhere…). Yet other groups find nothing wrong with these practices, and believe that it is morally wrong to legislate against them on the basis of religious belief alone.

I don’t want to get too deep into the whys and wherefores of these issues, because they’re whole papers unto themselves (I know, I wrote one on the subject of gay marriage in school), and there are obviously exceptions to the notion I’m about to put forward, both in these issues and in others, but on the whole, I think it’s a good rule of thumb, and I’m likely to support any candidate on either “side” of the aisle that adopts it as general course. The government should not be required to legislate morality to its citizens (nor do I think it’s appropriate for it to do so). That’s the role of religion, and if religion is doing the job it’s supposed to, then citizens will make “right” choices based upon it. The government’s job is to ensure the safety and security of its citizens, as ordained in the Constitution (oh noes, I’ve invoked the C word!):

[...] in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity [...]

To that end, it must encompass all of its citizens in the approach it takes to legislation, regardless of the personal beliefs of a segment of those citizens or the lawmakers themselves.

Now, if Giuliani is just intentionally waffling in an effort to garner support on both sides of an issue, first off, he’s not as smart as I would have liked to give him credit for… in this era of 24-hour news, anything you say gets re-processed about a billion times and played right next to other comments you’ve made… and if the press doesn’t like you very much, those comparisons may not be very favorable. Any discrepancies in your comments will get torn to shreds, so if he’s waffling and not expecting that to happen, he’s lost some serious points in my book. On the other hand, if he’s really serious about his personal beliefs versus his public stance on these issues, I’m willing to grant him more than a few bonus points for being honest about it, plus a few more for putting the country ahead of himself. Realistically, I think he falls somewhere in the middle of these two possibilities; I don’t think even the most starry-eyed politician is idealistic enough to think that the sort of idealistic notion of the role of government I proposed is going to get them elected. Everyone panders and doublespeaks… it’s just a measure of degree these days.

Lawmaker wants to prohibit Muslim from using Quran during swearing-in at Congress

At the risk of sounding like an angry liberal whiner, I’d like to draw people’s attention to something I read in this CNN article on the possible advancement and passage of some liberal rights laws in the new Congress next year.

Another conservative leader, the Rev. Louis Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition, asserted that the gay-rights bills likely to advance next year will infringe on the rights of those who condemn homosexuality.

“All Americans must be prepared to endure serious threats to their freedom of speech, their right to make employment decisions as business owners and their religious freedom in the business world,” Sheldon said.

I simply can’t help but think that this is the same sort of rhetoric that was thrown about in the past during the movement for equal rights for Blacks (sorry, African-Americans… have to keep up the liberal Pee Cee-ness ;P) in the 50’s.

I was going to say something else, but the more I stare at this guy’s comment, the more I think it speaks for itself. So, I’ll just end on this: What the HELL is wrong with people?

CNN.com - House approves wiretap law before hitting campaign trail - Sep 28, 2006

I honestly fail to understand how not wanting a warrantless wiretapping program and demanding that prisoners be treated like people is equivalent to “coddling terrorists”…

Seriously, I’m getting really, really sick of this “with us or against us” crap. It’s the same damn tune the Republican party has been singing for the past five years… first with the Taliban in Afghanistan, then with Saddam Husein in Iraq, and now with the much more amorphous and generalized term of “terrorists”, who could be (and, presumably in some people’s minds, are) anywhere and everywhere. Nothing is black and white, and questioning motives or practices is not logically equivalent to siding with the enemy. Of course, since nobody in Washington (along with most of this country) seems to have been capable of actually passing a logic class, this kind of rhetoric usually works wonders in an election pinch when you’re down by a few dozen points in the polls… both sides are guilty of this, but I’ve been listening to Republicans do it more consistently and with greater fervor lately, and it’s kind of starting to piss me off.

There are days when the fact that half the people in my college logic class didn’t grasp that the statement “Bill Gates is rich, Bill Gates is a software programmer. Because Bill Gates is a software programmer, all software programmers are rich” is a logical fallacy makes me fear for the future of debate.

Can we elect Jon Stewart as president? Seriously…

Oh, and while I’m on the subject, when exactly did election season become a mud-slinging exercise? Really, that’s all any of these ads ever do anymore… nobody ever goes on TV and says “this is what I stand for, this is what I will do”. It’s all about “this is what Jackass McStupidface has done in the past. Why on God’s earth would you want to vote for that asshole?”

Maybe I should make an ad that actually says that, and get someone to run it… even if it’s just on a cable channel late at night so I can actually use the words “jackass” and “asshole”. I just wonder if anyone would get it…

Microsoft Windows Vista goes on sale at Amazon - Aug. 29, 2006

A tad early, don’t you think?

CNN.com - Conservatives ask FBI to investigate hotel porn - Aug 22, 2006

Seriously? I mean, c’mon, isn’t there something actually useful you could be doing with your time and money?

CNN profiles complaints from safety experts who claim that the recently-installed security measures on the site aren’t enough to keep kids from being preyed upon by sexual predators.

Honestly, since when was it ever really possible to truly identify users with 100% accuracy and confidence? People are going to lie about their age, gender, name, weight, interests, etc… perhaps even more so than usual because of the extremely socially-oriented nature of the website. Hell, people don’t even give you their name or age with 100% honesty in reality… just go to any bar or club and pick five people at random. I’ve got $20 saying one of them fibs, for whatever reason. It’s just a LOT easier to do so online. Unless MySpace wants to restrict itself to US users and require something inane like your social security number to confirm your identity, there’s no realistic way MySpace is going to prevent people from lying about who they are.

Furthermore, since when was it MySpace’s responsibility to keep an eye on kids who may or may not have signed up with an assumed name, gender, or age? Sure, you can have all of the child safeguards and parental control mechanisms for underage users you want, but they all rely on kids a) having their parents’ permission and b) being honest about themselves when signing up for an account. Someone in Texas is suing the company for $30 million in damages because her daughter was sexually assaulted after meeting up with someone she found on MySpace. As horrible as that is, and as heartless as this next question may be, I have to ask, where was the mom and what was she doing to keep an eye on her daughter’s activities? Did she approve this meet-up, or did her daughter just go without telling anyone?

And the 16-year-old who flew to Jordan? Seriously, does it make any sense for some kid’s friend’s mom to organize a trip to Canada (which doesn’t require a passport, I might note, assuming you’re driving anyway) without calling the other parents to discuss it? And wouldn’t it also make just as much sense to want to discuss the trip with that kid’s friend’s parent before going to get your 16-year-old child a passport? (I’ll leave out the question of where the hell this girl got the money to buy a ticket to Jordan on the grounds that maybe the Jordanian guy bought it for her).

I really can’t help but think that, with as much as MySpace has been in the news lately - good and bad alike (though mostly bad) - parents would start taking a bit more of an interest in their children’s online activities and have a nice conversation on the general stupidity of blindly trusting folks you meet on the internet. In that respect, I have to say that it’s nice that I sort of “grew up” in a community online that seems to be pretty much devoid of deviant behavior like the aforementioned cases. It’s good to know that, should someone ever actually go missing for real at a meet-up like Mysterium, folks are willing to get the National Park Service rangers to go looking for you.

Anyway, ultimately, there’s a certain degree of responsibility on parents to make sure they know what’s going on, and as I will admit from first-hand experience that it’s easy enough to hide what you’re doing if you have your own computer, there’s something to be said for not letting underaged kids have unmonitored access to the internet, especially without a nice long chat about how dangerous places like MySpace could be. I think it’ll be interesting as our generation takes the parental reigns, because we pretty much know all of the tricks to pull to hide stuff, and hopefully we’re good at spotting those tricks too and can figure out ways of keeping our kids from getting around us.