Geek Drivel

It’s very interesting to study the differences between legal systems in different parts of the world.

In the US, all crime — no matter what it was, or how minor, or whether anyone was injured or endangered, or even if anyone was actually responsible for it — must be punished. If no specific person is responsible for it, then someone is declared responsible anyway and punished for it. A kid ignores No Trespassing signs, climbs over a fence, and breaks his leg while trying to steal a lawnmower? The kid can actually sue the owner of the property! According to the legal system, the owner is responsible: he should have had a bigger fence, or provided safety netting to catch would-be thieves so they wouldn’t break any bones while stealing from him.

Someone must always pay, whether by money or by jail time. And jails are essentially warehouses, where a person is “put away” for a time. This does nothing to help him become a better person, so that he wouldn’t do whatever he was jailed for again; apparently the only idea is to appease the victims of his crime (or the government) by doing something that hurts him just as much.

In New Zealand, as I understand it, less serious crime is considered a social illness and treated as one would treat any illness: with a regime designed to cure the illness. Criminals are put in prison, but they’re taught a trade there, a way to make a living. The rate of recidivism there is, from what little I’ve read, very low.

I know I’m not the first to talk about this, and I know it will have all the effect of a drop of red food coloring in the Atlantic ocean. I just felt the need to say something.

I’m not into Halo 3 itself, but this article (thanks, Joshua) reinforces what I’ve been saying about computer gaming for the last couple decades, back when “multi-player” meant two players using modems at best, or a hot-seat arrangement on a single system.

DRM troubles are driving people — including formerly-loyal Microsoft ex-employees — to Linux. A major European think-tank is recommending “naked PCs” (PCs sold without an operating system) to foster competition and bring down prices. Microsoft has been forced by consumer pressure to keep selling Windows XP for an extra half-year. And even a CNET technology journalist is telling them to scrap Vista.

All in all, it hasn’t been a good week for the Beast of Redmond.

I ran into a frustrating programming problem today, and one that I’d really like to find a solution to.
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There’s something I’ve never understood about people: how some (most?) people will adopt a specific position about a subject, and thereafter simply won’t be able to comprehend any argument to the contrary.
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This is a fascinating story in it’s own right, but I really love the last sentence of it, on someone else with a similar problem: “It might sound funny to others, but suddenly thinking you are French is terrifying.” I couldn’t agree more.

The LifeHacker site had an interesting poll last week, on whether people prefer a laptop or a desktop system. Most of the people who said they preferred a desktop system gave one of four reasons for it: bigger monitor, more comfortable keyboard/mouse, expandability, and running the latest games. Those who preferred a laptop liked it’s portability and size.
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…oh good heavens. And I thought numerology went the way of phrenology within the last couple hundred years.

If this is the kind of thing that anyone with money has to put up with, I’m tempted to abandon Project X now, before it can make any.

I’ve just finished loading our CD collection onto the new hard drive. The grand total: eight hundred thirty-six albums. 41 gigabytes of data. I could listen to it for a month straight, twenty-four hours a day, and still never hear the same track twice. Some of them were already loaded onto my desktop system, but I’ve still been feeding CDs into the drive practically every minute I’ve been on the computer for the past couple weeks.

It’s odd, but I find that I now appreciate a number of songs that played constantly during my youth, but that I couldn’t stand then. The songs haven’t changed, nor my reasons for disliking them in the first place, so I must have.

Of course, that mechanism works the other way too. For example, you can still occasionally catch the original Transformers cartoons — the exact same ones that seemed so fascinating to me when I was in my early teens, but that now seem so shallow and trivial.

Anyway, now comes the really hard part: going through all of them and creating playlists of the ones that I want to hear regularly.

Maybe you heard about the recent flap over a lawsuit that Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers filed against God last week? Apparently God just answered.