So, about commenting…

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Probably the best thing for you to do is register here, at Heathen, to comment. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get the Google thing hooked up again, but the reason I discouraged it before was precisely because the move to WordPress was imminent.

More on SOPA/PIPA

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Via TechDirt, we find something very clever from Tim O’Reilly. Here’s the core bit:

I found myself profoundly disturbed by something that seems to me to go to the root of the problem in Washington: the failure to correctly diagnose the problem we are trying to solve, but instead to accept, seemingly uncritically, the claims of various interest groups. The offending paragraph is as follows:

“Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, and threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios. While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders.”

In the entire discussion, I’ve seen no discussion of credible evidence of this economic harm. There’s no question in my mind that piracy exists, that people around the world are enjoying creative content without paying for it, and even that some criminals are profiting by redistributing it. But is there actual economic harm?

Seriously. Show us. Remember, O’Reilly is a publisher. He makes his living in the content business. But all the hollering about piracy assumes that every pirated copy is a lost sale, and that’s never been the case. Assuming that the entertainment industry is correct about its supposed losses, or even that it’s being honest at all, is just a bad idea — this is a group that has fought every innovation tooth and nail going back a hundred years or more. They hated player pianos, they hated radio, they hated cassettes, they hated the VCR. Why should we think they’re on the level now?

NOW DONT STRUGGLE

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WE HAVE TAKEN CONTROL OF THE HORIZONTAL, THE VERTICAL, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY THE BLOGGING ENGINE.

Chief Heathen Technology Officer Dorman has graciously converted Heathen once again, this time to WordPress. Movable Type was, sadly, just about done. Let us know if you see anything weird.

Comments may be janky for a bit. It’s also possible you’ll need to reregister IF and ONLY IF you tried to use a local-to-Heathen authentication plan. If you’re using Google or something else, that should carry over just fine.

HeathenFact: This is the 5th platform for Heathen in eleven years:

  1. Blogger (pretty brief — November 2000 through July of 2001)
  2. GreyMatter (July 2001 through sometime in 2003)
  3. Blosxom (2003 through about 2008, I think)
  4. Movable Type (2008 through today)
  5. WordPress

I think that’s all.

One, Two, Three

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A quasi-resolution this year is to blog more about books. I’ve finished 3 since the first of the year; here’s a brief rundown:

The one I loved
Ready Player One is a beautiful love letter to geeks of a certain age. Set in a dystopic near-future, it centers on the wild scavanger hunt set up by the will of a dead video-game billionaire equal parts Richard Garriott, Bill Gates, and Howard Hughes — a hunt that takes place entirely in a virtual world, but which has very, very high stakes in the real one. Said billionaire has left his entire 12-figure estate to the winner of an online game centered around his love for 80s nerd culture. It’s all there: the films, the books, the video games, the whole nine yards. This one’s particularly recommended if you enjoyed Stephenson’s REAMDE earlier in the year.
The one about which I’m ambivalent

Seriously, I am, and that’s a first for China Mieville. He’s move on from his Bas-Lag world in recent works, mostly to great success. The City and the City was mindbending and awesome without being full of the sort of physical weirdness that dominated his primary trilogy. Kraken was a bit more of a return to form, but set in an urban-fantasy version of London, and was no less compulsively readable and thought provoking.

So imagine my surprise when I found Embassytown too clever by half. I really had to sort of make myself finish it, and was only kinda-sorta glad I had. What Mieville is doing here is definitely interesting — this time it’s a novel-length rumination on the role of language in cognition, among other things, so if you’ve got linguistic leanings, jump right in — but it tends to overpower a narrative I found murky and slow. Having one’s Big Idea overshadow one’s Story is an ongoing risk in the world of speculative fiction — the so-called “literature of ideas,” as if realistic or literary fiction was somehow free of them — but given his past work, I thought Mieville was immune. It’s probably still worth reading if you’re a fan, or if my thumbnail description here piques your interest, but it’d be a bad place to jump into the deep pool that is Mieville. (For that, go for Perdido Street Station.) piques your interest, but it’d be a bad place to jump into the deep pool that is Mieville.

The about which I almost forgot

I am forever making notes about books I want to read. After Amazon happened, and especially after Amazon’s app meant it was always in my pocket, one way I handled this was to just order the damn book with the idea fresh in my head. In this way, I developed a fucking enormous stack of to-read books in my office.

Fortunately, the Kindle has made this process a little better, but without making the to-read list any shorter. Now, instead of buying a book I might want to read immediately, I hit Amazon and tell it to send a sample to my Kindle for free, which I’ll get around to reading eventually. I do this a LOT. If I enjoy the sample, I buy the book. If not, I found out for free.

That’s how I found myself reading The Trinity Six, which has been described all year as a “literary thriller.” I’m not exactly sure what that means, unless it’s a reference to the fact that the protagonist is a university professor instead of a special forces operative. I found it compulsively readable without being particularly filling, but also without the sort of literary hangover I experience when I read utter crap. Definitely worthwhile for air travel, but otherwise unremarkable.

Slacktivist, right again, this time about the New York Times

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Yesterday I ranted about Arthur Brisbane’s inane worry about the Times becoming “truth vigilantes.” Fred “Slacktivist” Clark, a longtime member of the journalism tribe, has some choice words for Arty:

OK, Brisbane seems unclear on both sides of “All the news” and “fit to print,” so let’s review.

“If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

That’s the job. That’s it. That is what being a reporter and a journalist means.

If your mother tells you she loves you and you turn around and repeat, “My mother loves me,” or even the slightly more careful, “My mother says she loves me,” then you’re not a reporter or a journalist. You’re not reporting, just repeating. That’s stenography or gossip, not journalism.

Checking it out is what makes a reporter and what makes a report.

It’s amazing to me this needed to be said. Clark has more:

Arthur Brisbane’s column is an admission of journalistic malpractice. He should be told to step away from his desk and go home before he does any more damage. The New York Times ought to be furious for what he has done to its once-respected name.

And his name should become a shorthand epithet for all who are clueless about the most basic purpose of their jobs. The next time a cornerback totally flubs the coverage to allow an easy touchdown, the announcer should say, “Boy, he really pulled a Brisbane on that play. He looked like he had no idea why he was even on the field …”

You should, of course, go read the whole thing.

The Times Wonders If It Should Do Its Job

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Remember how, in the past, journalists routinely called out public figures who said things that just weren’t true, and that were trivially proved false? Yeah, that was awesome. Back then, we called it “journalism” when, in an article about John Doe quotes him as saying “the sky is green,” the reporter inserted a note stating that the sky is in fact blue.

This wasn’t controversial. Of course, that was also before ninnyhammer right-wing douchebags started insisting they had their own set of facts.

In this op ed, the Times’ public editor Arthur Brisbane wonders if they should engage in what he terms “being a truth vigilante.”

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

The most WTF moment in the article comes here: “Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?”

A reporter cannot correct “one fact over another.” Only one fact is true. Fact checking is not vigilantism. Fact checking is a public service.

Hey, Arthur? How about you sack up and do your fucking job and stop the descent of journalism into a pit of PR?

HEADDESKBANG

Color Me Surprised

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So, the Heathen Mother — who would dislike being referred to that way quite a bit — has a fancy new sewing machine that costs as much as a used late-model Honda. It’s an upgrade from the not-quite-so-spendy model she got just a year ago, and is said to count for many, many present-giving occasions this year. (I think it’s safe to say my stepfather adores her.)

Anyway, said machine has lots of capabilities best explored by plugging it into your computer. In true niche-market fashion, the software appears to be pretty poorly written (as has been the case for most of her quilting tools), but the real shocker is that this machine also appears to ONLY work with Windows 7. That’s kind of amazing to me, given the fundamental technological conservativism of 71-year-old grandmothers into high-end quilting. The market share of Windows XP is still only barely below 50%. It’s a dog and a pain, but it’s what’s out there in lots of places — not the least of which is the Parallels virtual machine on my mother’s 2006 Macbook.

This Macbook still works great for everything she’s needed to do so far, up to and including using the WinXP VM to connect to prior sewing machines and quilting accessories. XP’s great for this, too, because its needs are so modest — the whole VM is barely 6 GB on disk. That’s important because a 2006 Macbook comes with 2GB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive, and Mother’s down to about 15GB free. (She takes lots of pictures, too.)

Windows 7, on the other hand, appears to want at least a GB of RAM and 15-20 GB of hard drive space just to run. Oh joy.

I got her on a path to a stopgap with Amazon links to a Win 7 Home disk and a new external drive, but at the same time I went over to Apple to see what a replacement computer would cost. And that’s where the surprise crops up.

I figured the 13″ Air would be the right call for her. Small, light, and with a solid-state drive? What’s not to like?

Well, lots as it turns out.

This will be her only functioning computer once she gets it, so she needs an optical drive. An Air’s only option is the external one, which means something else to keep up with. Sure, my stepdad has a nice iMac, but we can’t be asking Mom to figure out how to share his optical drive.

She also needs materially more space. If you’re already almost full with an 80GB drive, going to a 128GB is a dumb move. That means the 256GB model is the only truly viable option.

So I did a comparison. Before Applecare, a kitted out 13″ Air with the 256GB drive is nearly $1,700.

On the other hand, a 13″ Pro with a 500GB drive is . . . $1,200. Add AppleCare, and it’s out the door at $1,448.

Moral: Tiny computers with flash-only drives are cute, but they’re not ready for prime time with even the modest needs of 71-year-old quilters, apparently. Who knew?

Also: We live in an age of miracles and wonders, wherein I am routinely called upon to help my mother sysadmin her sewing machine. How exactly did this happen?

This Just In

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Roll Motherfucking Tide. First title shutout ever. Take a gander at those numbers, boys: 21 Tide first downs, vs 5 for the Tigers. 384 offensive yards for Alabama; LSU managed only 92. McCarron, in only his second year of eligibility, threw for 23 of 34 and 234 yards. LSU’s Jefferson was 11 of 17 and 53 yards.

As the man said, defense wins championships. And with a D like the Tide’s, it hardly matters that the finally tally was mostly field goals — especially if the other team can’t get across midfield.

This, of course, marks the sixth consecutive BCS National Title for the SEC. Alabama bags its second BCS title, third since I matriculated in ’88, and 14th overall. For those who loathe our conference, I will also note that this marks the very first time an SEC team has played for the BCS title and lost. That honor is, sadly, uniquely LSU’s.

Roll. Damn. Tide.

(In case you were wondering: The SEC have won 8 of 14 BCS games. The other 6 winners were:

  • FSU in ’99
  • Oklahoma in ’00
  • Miami in ’01
  • Ohio State in ’02
  • USC in ’04 (Vacated)
  • Texas in ’05

As should be obvious, none of these teams beat an SEC opponent.)

Dept. of Weird Feelings

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As a native of South Mississippi and lifelong Saints fan, I still find it a distinctly odd (yet awesome) experience to see them in the playoffs at all.

It’s even weirder that they’re not a rag-tag underdog. It’s really, really weird that their playoff opponent today has an even sadder tale of football woe than the Saints I grew up with.

Playoff Chicanery: Heathen Edition

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Largely because this is the first year I’ve actually paid enough attention to the NFL playoff system to understand it, I have picks. One game in, seven to go, and quite honestly I’m 0 for 1 — I was sure the Texans would lose. It’s nice to be surprised.

For the remaining games, here’s the Heathen picks:

AFC Wild Card Games

CIN (#6) @ HOU (#3): I’m shocked, but they won. Who knew?

PITT (#5) @ DEN (#4) (Sunday): Tebow gets stuffed. The Steelers should win, and that’s what we want to happen.

NFC Wild Card Games

DET (#6) @ NO (#3): Saints should win. Saints will win. Who dat? Not Detroit.

ATL (#5) @ NYG (#4): Giants. Giants. Giants.

Next week, the wild card winners get to play the top seeds in either conference, who get a first round bye because of their regular season performance. In the AFC, that’s the New England Patriots (#1) and Baltimore Ravens (#2). In the NFC, it’s the Green Bay Packers (#1) and San Francisco 49ers (#2).

The #1 team in either conference plays the lowest remaining seed, and the #2 plays the higher, so a number of games are possible. These are the Heathen Picks based on the picks above.

AFC Semifinals

HOU @ BAL: The luck stops here. I’d be NICE to win again, but I’d be VERY surprised. Ravens by 10.

PITT @ NE: Can’t they BOTH lose? Good CHRIST I hate both these teams. I’m hoping Pitt. I’m thinking NE gets it, though.

NFC Semifinals

NO @ SF: SAINTS, even on the road. WHO DAT.

NYG @ GB: PACK. Hard to hate on the Pack, really.

AFC Final

BAL @ NE. Baltimore by 5 is what I want. In reality it’s too close to call.

NFC Final

NO @ GB: SAINTS.

SuperBowl XLVI

Saints vs. Baltimore. SAINTS WIN! SAINTS WIN!

Dept. of Cry Me A River

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Some TSA union reps are whining that their public perception as useless, ineffectual doofuses is hurting their bargaining power. You think? Or could it be, as Balko notes, that their low esteem and morale is due to their role in enforcing policies that “hassle, degrade, and humiliate” travelers while producing precisely zero security benefits?

The most hilarious part of the linked story is the apparently unironic assertion from TSA drone/screener that “any bag I open could be my last.” Um, jackass? I’m pretty sure the death-due-to-explosions count for TSA employees is 0.

The author of the sympathetic article is also a real piece of work. Despite a lack of any evidence, he claims that TSA screeners “have some of the most dangerous jobs in America.” Really? Seriously?

In the article, he suggests that TSA’s job would be easier if they could arrest people — but then whined when Balko suggested he was actually calling for them to have arrest powers.

How about let’s all support the STRIP act instead, which prohibits any TSA employee “who has not received federal law enforcement training or is not eligible for federal law enforcement benefits from using the official job title of officer, or wearing a metal badge resembling a police badge or a uniform resembling the uniform of a federal law enforcement officer.”

That makes much more sense to me.

Oh, PLEASE nominate this boob

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Emboldened by a stronger-than-expected finish in Iowa, Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum — a guy who, in December, insisted nobody ever died in America for want of health care — is doubling down on the crazy. Today he got in a pissing match with a college student over gay marriage, which is precisely the sort of thing that’s going to keep happening.

But the best gift he’s given so far is this:

One of the criticisms I make is to what I refer to as more of a Libertarianish (sic) right. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. That is not how traditional conservatives view the world. There is no such society that I am aware of where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.

He said that. Really. The video is from a talking-head show, but it includes actual audio of Santorum explaining how it really is the government’s business what goes on in the bedroom. Remember, this is a guy who’s opposed not just to Roe v. Wade, but also to Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird — cases that establish the rights of persons both married and otherwise to buy birth control. It’s hard to imagine today, but there WAS a time when it was considered Constitutional and acceptable for a state to outlaw birth control, or to outlaw its sale to unmarried persons.

That’s the world Santorum wants to return us to. So please, GOP, please please please nominate this man. I beg of you. Really. Bring the crazy. Bring it all the way to next November.

PS: The New Republic has a great list of the craziest stuff Santorum’s said so far, but look for that list to get even LONGER, especially if he wins a primary.

Police will bully until there are consequences

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Cops who order or engage in the kind of behavior outlined here should suffer lasting, serious repercussions, including personal liability to lawsuits. We’ve gone far enough with this immunity bullshit; departments feel free to violate the rules because there are not consequences. The balance of power is entirely too tilted towards the state. Insisting police commanders and patrolmen be held accountable is an excellent step in the right direction.

More Things Designed To Irritate Customers

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I’m trying to get some support from Mozy now, on our corporate account. Mozy have a pretty good product that I don’t mind paying for, but their support SUCKS.

The first sin they’re committing is in the back-end user-self-service portal. It’s a nice set of tools for managing their product, but there are no support options. Support is sequestered on an entirely different site, with different credentials. WTF, Mozy? I can’t just log in and open a damn ticket when I notice something weird.

The second issue is something I suspect some idiot marketing droid thought was a good idea. It’s a variant on an old problem. The right way to do hold music is to play something decent and inoffensive so the holding party knows they haven’t been disconnected. Real music is best, not made-up production library bullshit — and then just fucking let it play. Do NOT periodically pitch me with ads, or tell me how important my call is, or babble incessantly with little messages the Chi O in your marketing department thought were cute. Just shut the hell up and let the music play.

Why? Because if it’s music, I can just put the call on speakerphone and go back to work, and maybe even get something done while I’m on hold. It’s easy for my brain to half-listen to the hold music and notice when it’s a human voice again, which signals I should pay attention again and shift back to the task at hand (in this case, figuring out why my backup didn’t run). Peppering the hold channel with lots of meaningless human chatter means I have to basically listen to the fucking thing much more closely, which makes it commensurately harder to shift to a different task while on hold.

At Mozy, the music never plays for more than 20 seconds without a cheery message popping up. It’s insane.

Truth vs. Truthiness

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I alluded in the last entry to a problem in modern “journalism:” the apparent need to balance a story about party A lying with a story about party B lying, in order to preserve the superficial appearance of impartiality. Even if Party A does lie more than B, we’ve reached a point where this can’t be pointed out without claims of bias surfacing from party A, and being echoed by party A’s loyal mouthpieces, which is enough to muddy the water and prevent any real discussion of the mendacity.

This approach has allowed one party — the GOP — to basically say and do whatever they wanted, knowing full well their lapdogs at Fox would protect them, and knowing mainstream journalists NOT owned by major donors would be too timid to point out that “hey, these guys lie WAY more than the Democrats!”

A logical outgrowth of this is something like the Politifact Lie-of-the-Year thing, where a factually true statement (the GOP sought to end Medicare as we know it) is instead presented as a massive falsehood precisely because the ledger at previously-trustworthy Politifact is so full of Republican lies already that people were claiming Politifact itself was biased.

And, as Krugman points out, this is par for the course today.

Exit Politifact

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Politifact, in naming the Dems’ claim that the GOP was seeking to end Medicare their “Lie of the Year,” have basically destroyed any credibility they had. That’s a damn shame; they’ve basically allowed themselves to be bullied into picking a Democratic point (a true one) as their “lie of the year” to avoid appearing biased, since the vast majority of their analysis suggests that the GOP engages in regular and shameless mendacity. The fact, as they say, have a well-known liberal bias.

Briefly, they’re calling it a lie because, if the GOP got their way, there would still be something called “Medicare.” It just wouldn’t have much in common with Medicare as it’s known today — but hey, if it’s got the same name, it must be the same thing, right?

Washington Monthly has more, as does MediaMatters.

Politifact, for its part, just doubled down, not unlike certain douchebag “marketing” professionals we could name.

Advice for Millionaires, from a Deranged Millionaire

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John Hodgman Lays It Out For You.

At one point on my book tour, I was approached in the airport by a former banker.

He told me he was a life long Democrat and a huge fan of The Daily Show, but he also felt that Jon and the show had it all wrong.

(Because he was a multi millionaire, he has the right to just start critizing anyone in the airport he wants.)

He said that the bankers were not the bad guys in the subprime mortgage scandal and near financial collapse that they had everything to do with. They were just doing what the government allowed them to do.

And so: he felt it was unfair and hurtful to make the bankers out to be the bad guys.

I was very happy to finally have the chance to say this to someone’s face:

I told him that as a freelance person, I had no idea how much money I would make this year. I never do.

But during the previous few years, due to hard work and exceedingly strange circumstance, I had made more money than I had ever conceived of making in my life. I had also paid a huge bucket of local, state, and city taxes, and that was JUST FINE WITH ME.

Because I knew that I had very little to worry about when it came to providing for my family and me this holiday season. And I suspected he didn’t as well.

But there are many, many people who are VERY worried about this. And out of consideration to them, it seemed to me a little unseemly for wealthy to care so much about the names they might be called.

“From my point of view,” I said, “I think you and me and other wealthy people should just suck it in and take it.”

I have never said anything like this out loud to a stranger before in my life, never mind a stranger who has money; but as I am now a Deranged Millionaire, I now have that right to speak my mind.

Go read the whole thing.

Dear Congress

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It’s no longer okay for you people to be completely clueless about technology. KTHXBI.

We get it. You think you can be cute and old-fashioned by openly admitting that you don’t know what a DNS server is. You relish the opportunity to put on a half-cocked smile and ask to skip over the techno-jargon, conveniently masking your ignorance by making yourselves seem better aligned with the average American joe or jane — the “non-nerds” among us. But to anyone of moderate intelligence that tuned in to yesterday’s Congressional mark-up of SOPA, the legislation that seeks to fundamentally change how the internet works, you kind of just looked like a bunch of jack-asses.

[…]

But the chilling takeaway of this whole debacle was the irrefutable air of anti-intellectualism; that inescapable absurdity that we have members of Congress voting on a technical bill who do not posses any technical knowledge on the subject and do not find it imperative to recognize those who do.

Merry Christmas. The Government Says It Can Kill You And Not Say Why

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Both JWZ and BoingBoing point us to this post about a Freedom of Information request filed surrounding the assassination, by us, of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki.

The source blog’s title is worth noting: “For Christmas, Your Government Will Explain Why It’s Legal to Kill You” — except, of course, that it won’t do that, either.

Here’s their summary, quoted in full:

Summary:

  • The government dropped a bomb on a U.S. citizen,
  • who, though a total dick and probably a criminal, may have been engaged only in propaganda,
  • which, though despicable, is generally protected by the First Amendment;
  • it did so without a trial or even an indictment (that we know of),
  • based at least in part on evidence it says it has but won’t show anyone,
  • and on a legal argument it has apparently made but won’t show anyone,
  • and the very existence of which it will not confirm or deny;
  • although don’t worry, because the C.I.A. would never kill an American without having somebody do a memo first;
  • and this is the “most transparent administration ever”;
  • currently run by a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

I’d really love for someone to explain to me why I shouldn’t be utterly terrified by this.

Holiday Travel Update

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Wired reminds us that the jury is distinctly still out on the porno-cancer scanners in use by the TSA. Opt out. Every time. And, frankly, fuck the milimeter-wave ones, too — health issues aside, they serve no security purpose.

I imagine him thinking “alright, okay, we can stop for you to play with the weird animal”

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Over at MeFi, there’s a great single-link video post of a man having a very, very close encounter with a group of juvenile mountain gorillas in the care of a simply tremenous silverback.

Take five minutes. Watch this. Nature is amazing.

Now, having watched them, realize that the gorillas on this video are unfortunately a statistically significant proportion of the remaining wild population.