Blazer-Sharp, Prattle-Ready, Brainless Steel Samurai Banana

Jonathan Coulton on the whole paranoid security-theater freedom-hating racket that's got the government by the balls these days, albeit in a much more rhetorically balanced and fact-checkable way than I usually so it.

Is it really as dire as all that? It’s an emergency is it? Tim points out that he and a lot of other content creators have been happily coexisting with piracy all this time, and I’m certainly one of them. Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan. The big content companies are TERRIBLE at doing both of these things, so it’s no wonder they’re not doing so well in the current environment. And right now everyone’s fighting to control distribution channels, which is why I can’t watch Star Wars on Netflix or iTunes. It’s fine if you want to have that fight, but don’t yell and scream about how you’re losing business to piracy when your stuff isn’t even available in the box I have on top of my TV. A lot of us have figured out how to do this.

Which is seconded by a commenter:

The real trick is making the content available to consumers. A great example of this is Valve’s digital distribution platform. Before Steam came along there were lots of games you simply could not get without pirating them. Now, you can legally obtain almost the entire last decade of PC video games from Steam AND the publishers get a cut, unlike the used games market. I can honestly say that I haven’t pirated a game since Steam started having summer/winter sales. It just isn’t worth the trouble to pirate when its so easy to get what I want legitimately.

What I did not quote was the part where he drives home the fact that the threat this anti-Internet legislation is supposed to fight has not been demonstrated to cause any measurable harm.

Some random sullivanic obamaphilia.

[Obamacare] does not have a public option; it gives a huge new client base to the drug and insurance companies; its health-insurance exchanges were also pioneered by the right. It’s to the right of the Clintons’ monstrosity in 1993, and remarkably similar to Nixon’s 1974 proposal. Its passage did not preempt recovery efforts; it followed them. It needs improvement in many ways, but the administration is open to further reform and has agreed to allow states to experiment in different ways to achieve the same result. It is not, as Romney insists, a one-model, top-down prescription. Like Obama’s Race to the Top education initiative, it sets standards, grants incentives, and then allows individual states to experiment. Embedded in it are also a slew of cost-reduction pilot schemes to slow health-care spending. Yes, it crosses the Rubicon of universal access to private health care. But since federal law mandates that hospitals accept all emergency-room cases requiring treatment anyway, we already obey that socialist principle—but in the most inefficient way possible. Making 44 million current free-riders pay into the system is not fiscally reckless; it is fiscally prudent. It is, dare I say it, conservative.

A little bit too much over that way (and anyone who says they say it as it is sets of my bullshit detector), but tone down the rhetoric and it more or less matches what I've been seeing.

Now about that whole SOPA thing...

http://mosex.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/the-internal-clitoris/

In 1953, Kinsey wrote: “The vagina walls are quite insensitive in the great majority of females … There is no evidence that the vagina is ever the sole source of arousal, or even the primary source of erotic arousal in any female.”

Then in 1970, Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch, which scoffed at Kinsey’s theory. She wrote, “It is nonsense to say that a woman feels nothing when a man is moving his penis inside her vagina. The orgasm is qualitatively different when the vagina can undulate around the penis instead of a vacancy.”

Interestingly, they’re both right.

Spoiler as to why: The clitoris in the very first illustration in this article is in yellow.
(hat tip: conuly

First: a doctor on dying. Almost perversely I find myself feeling much more sympathetic to the unreasonable family members than I have normally been in these discussions - the care may be futile, perhaps, but if I were in that room could I walk away having said no and forever guessing?

Certainly a thing to be read which is about people.

Or, conversely, the slave owners of our history were and are parasites upon their fellow human beings. I despair at this issue being resolved to anyone's satisfaction.

Design Is War - a lesson on how to fuck around with visual messages and media. Read it all, no money quotes here lest I have to hotlink an image. (and yes that is how cigarette packs look like in Not-Soviet Canuckistan, it is as horrible as you imagine it is)

A voice of authority for those of us pixel fans out there.

Rule: In order to paper print an icon or a screenshot, you have to simply resize the image with no prior smoothing. If a printing person gets in your way saying: “72 dpi images for printing? Over my dead body,” go ahead and drive in the stake.

And now, fireflies.

And the best cover of this song I've heard yet (and I have looked):

Judging by Mr. Obama’s call on Keystone XL, and kindred energy calls, the great age of capitalist accomplishment in the New World appears to be coming to a close. Exhausted by political gridlock, bureaucratic regulation and progressive populism (which gives everyone a veto on everything), the U.S. seems incapable of imagining, or doing, heroic things. Big business is widely regarded as a criminal enterprise, profits as the proceeds of crime and shareholders as co-conspirators. Sic transit gloria.

Let the Empire State Building serve as an iconic reminder of the America that once was. It was 1930. The architect produced the design plans in two weeks – and 3,400 workers built the world’s highest skyscraper in 410 days. Government didn’t get involved until it cut the ribbon. It would take a decade to complete a comparable project today – as the World Trade Center site attests. Americans appear to live more and more of their lives in the Country of Can’t, in the Age of No.

Where we used to have the personal jetpacks and space station suburbs, our contemporary pop-culture futurisms overwhelmingly favour some manner of collapse of our civilization. Considering my gut reaction to this column (substantial agreement "is", polar opposite "ought"), perhaps these visions are no less utopian.


...


While reading Paleo-Future it occurs to me that there are certain things that are always gotten wrong in futuristic speculation.
( In before someone quotes that bit about debunking in The Abolition of Man. )

So what must I keep in mind?
( First, that tropes are not necessarily bad, BUT. )

Just a cleaned-up version of some idle notes saved to my thumb drive when I couldn't focus on work. Still no concrete ideas at the moment, though I expect an initial glimmer by Christmas...

Artist wanted. For what I have seen to be a quite worthy cause.

In other news: it's "watch Matt clear out half the tabs he's left open in the browser" time again! I'm going to deliberately leave out anything that would normally catch the Helm's Deep* tag for my own sanity - the way things are now I'm sure everyone reading this has seen their share of the heads catapaulted into Minas Tirith already.

Time to slow down and sail on the river...

*(that said, speaking of Helm's Deep... which I have just read with this overlaid.)

Note that I list each tag only once in the descriptions below.

( On a better empathy )

personal: matt is dumb: many stories, political: sex and gender stuff: manly!, pyxolytical: clothed ape

( In which a man is more legitimately sure of his own humanity than most of us can dream )

linkdump: aural masturbation focus, linkdump: death by awesome, political: hoplophilia, pyxolytical: not a vegan, pyxolytical: is-ism

( On the everyday life of our everyday lives. )

pyxolytical: evolution, pyxolytical: evolution: ants

Win7: YOU WIN. YOU PLAY YOUR SILLY BABY GAME. BUT YOU INJURE ME AND NOW EXPLORER CRASH EVERY TIME YOU ATTEMPT TO CUSTOMIZE DESKTOP. THOSE ARE THE TERMS.
Me: FINE.
Bastion: ::is absolutely fucking awesome::
Me: *_*

...

Me: Why aren't my updates downloading?
#!: It works fine! You can even post on Dreamwidth!
Me: ..... ::looks::
Me: Oh god, you installed exactly the wrong driver.
#!: It's the correct driver! In fact the other one isn't even installed or on any my repositories!
Me: ...
#!: ENJOY YOUR MODEM KID LOLOLOLOL

[EDIT as of the morning of December 5, 2011: It seems that [citation needed, have window open in other computer] Ubuntu has completely dropped the old manufacturer's driver I was using ("rt2870sta") in favour of the community-based "rt2x00" builds. In light of how much support for the damn driver I was able to find on Ralink's site (they were unavailable for download) or the readme files (which are fine provided you are perfectly comfortable with compiling drivers and modifying code while reading bad Engrish) this may well be for the better in the long run.

Having installed the updates (which required downloading several hundred megs over this gimpy late-Alzheimer's-with-sudden-random-moments-of-lucidity connection at my slightly-less-than-old-normal max rate of 120k/s) seems to be helping things... let's hope this lasts.]

Cost of Living Increasingly a Struggle for China's Poor

BEIJING — China’s poor are being hit hard as the cost of putting dinner on the table soars, sharpening resentment and highlighting a fast-growing gap between rich and poor.

Vegetable prices are up anywhere from a third to double over the same time last year. Cooking oil, fruit and some meats are also up, according to surveys, official figures and testimonies from food sellers and shoppers.

The upshot is that China’s poor — though not its rich — are struggling.

In pictures: China's Wealth Gap

"The agricultural tax is high. Government officials say they are going to reduce the rural taxes, but they haven't and we don't know when they will.

If they did reduce our taxes, that would really change our lives. We are so poor because there is no development here.

The government does give aid but for some reason there is hardly any allocated to this area. I have no way to buy fertilizer. We need economic help."

( and a smattering of cyberpunk dystopia goes here. )

Now, in the context of the foregoing:

Michele Bachmann: Look To China On Social Program Cuts

Bachmann said that Lyndon Johnson's Great Society has "not worked, and it's put us into the modern welfare state...If you look at China, they don't have food stamps."

She continued, "They save for their own retirement security, they don't have AFDC (Aid to Families With Dependent Children), they don't have the modern welfare state, and China's growing...and so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us, with the Great Society, and they'd be gone."

Cain Would 'Overturn the Supreme Court If They Overturned DOMA'

"If the Perry case or a DOMA case gets to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court were to overturn DOMA or to find a -- quote -- unquote -- constitutional -- a U.S. Constitutional right to same sex marriage, if you were president, what would you do?" Brown asked.

"I would lead the charge to overturn the Supreme Court if they overturned DOMA," Cain insisted. "Whether that was new legislation coming out of the Congress like Rep. [Michele] Bachmann said. The United States Congress is supposed to pass laws so if they did overturn DOMA, that charge, I would lead to reverse that."

(hat tip for original link that started this: flemco)