In 2009: YOU are their health insurance!

In 2000, it was pretty darn clear to me that "George W" was an accident looking for a place to happen. Well, he didn't dissapoint in that regard. In fact, he exceeded my wildest expectations. But I didn't vote for Gore, I voted for Nader for several reasons-- 1) he clearly had the guts to take on the REAL problems, which are the ones that both mainstream parties are in denial about, and 2) it was clear to me that the problem had to get MUCH worse before it got better because that's the only way the country and the government could ever get past that mainstream denial.

A HUGE shakeup is needed (and still is) in order to box the ears of government and the populace that supports them into the realization that the system is FUNDAMENTALLY broken and rearranging the deck chairs by voting R or D just isn't doing anything to keep the boat afloat. So I figured George W was just what the doctor ordered in order to show the US just how screwed up it was. No, not just to SHOW them, but to RUB THEIR FACE IN IT.

To be specific, it has been COLLOSALLY irresponsible for the government to allow 1) Wall Street to run the banking system, and 2) Big Pharma to run the healthcare system. That was totally obvious even in 2000, to me at least. Of course, the reason these things are the case is because both Wall Street and Big Pharma together have bought us our government.

One of the big complaints about messing with Big Pharma is that IF you were to, for example, take away their drug patents to open up price competition, there wouldn't be enough R&D money for new drugs. But GUESS WHAT GANG-- we're living WAY ABOVE OUR MEANS in that regard. We simply can't AFFORD that kind of R&D for new drugs. It's clear that the entire rest of the economy must be dragged down to its knees before Big Pharma is allowed to be impacted in any way by the economic downslide. Well, we're getting there.

In the meantime, they're still asking YOU to cut back so that THEY won't have to. They're asking YOU to pay for development of THEIR drugs. No, actually they're EXTORTING the costs of their drugs from you in fact. Geezer politicians figure they NEED those drugs, and YOU are going to pay to get them developed before they die off. YOU are their health insurance.

MDs are addicted to the various forms of PAYOLA to keep them throwing expensive drugs at any and all ailments. PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF!

And it's pretty clear that Obamanomics hasn't got the cojones to fix it. Just look at the proposed solutions to the "Healthcare Problem." See anything that has any real effects on costs at all?

TAKE YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE SAND! How much worse will it have to get before you WAKE UP? Stop subsidizing the incompetence, fraud, extortion and other irresponsible excesses that make up both the Red and the Blue parties. KICK THE BUMS OUT! And hold their replacement's feet to the fire to change the laws about political contributions. Give us our government back.

Graphical User Input on Crack

This was posted to Slashdot in response to an article about Mozilla possibly losing some of its financial support from Google now that Google has chosen to get behind Chrome. It ultimately hit upon one of my pet peeves of Windowing interfaces, and that is interrupting the user while he's typing with new windows and input focus changes. The curmudgeon in me is out in force in this one.

"BZ" wrote:

Popups on typing is an interesting issue. Right now, popups are only allowed during the handling of certain user events, and the ones relevant here would be: * keypress of a return key * keyup of a space key (needed for handling space being used to trigger buttons) * input I'm not sure why input is on the list; that should probably be revisited. Is there a bug filed on this, or were you expecting people to fix your #1 beef without knowing anything about it?



It would appear, given the number of applications that have this problem, that it's not actually seen as a "bug" but simply a characteristic of general computer interfaces that users have grown to put up with. I suppose then, it is actually a feature request, though that presumably gets entered into bug reports as well. If I were to file it as a bug report I'd have to do it in dozens if not hundreds of programs that could be enhanced to address. Frankly, it should be a characteristic of the underlying windowing system, but none actually implement it that I'm aware of. Loss of focus while typing is a problem that is system-wide and not specific to browsers, though a browser feature that attempts to do it within the browser might raise awareness of the fact that as users we shouldn't have to put up with it.

It's also true that there are potentially complex implications in solutions for the problem. A windowing system could certainly connect a timer to key input and place popups in a queue until sufficient time has elapsed with no keystrokes. Then you also have to ask, what about mouse input? And what about a popup queue that begins to get rather large? The user experience would be that when you pause in typing, you may get a series of popups appear all of a sudden-- hopefully less disruptive than when you're actually typing. Perhaps a better way to handle it is to queue the popups until the user takes a specific action that would change window focus, on the presumption that changing focus at that point is acceptable.

Presumably, applications that use popups know that the user may be asleep and/or choose not to acknowledge it immediately, so I think we could safely assume that blocking the app for a time via its popup should be workable.

As an example, back in the old days with printing terminals, it was often that an equivalent to a popup was used-- such as in broadcast messages. If you were in the middle of editing a line of text on the printing terminal, it was seen as inappropriate to simply blast a broadcast message out and mess up what the user was doing. I think this was a perfectly reasonable idea, and the solution was usually to queue up the message until the next CR was entered by the user. This worked pretty well-- but that concern for the user experience went "out the window" with the advent of windowing interfaces. Of course, it happened slowly, as running dozens of programs simultaneously along with automated background tasks that check for update availability, didn't exist when windows were new-- but now we're at the point where you end up typing your input into the wrong windows and losing keystrokes all over the place when popups mechanisms assume that the users actions are less important, less critical, than the computers-- which is plainly incorrect (or should be).

Another possible solution for popups is to reserve a spot on the screen where popups are relegated to appear, and make it so they do NOT redirect input focus (something that frankly, I think only the USER should ever be allowed to do!). A status line that popups must use, where they can use color and perhaps even sound to signal an important event, but where they will NOT interfere with what the user is doing. In fact, if I had the time to dig into it, I'd find out if it's possible to intercept the Windows API for programmatic focus change generally, and simply disable it? Perhaps a utility could be made that would help raise the bar in user experience. There's still the problem with new windows, but at least it might address part of the problem. I ask, just who is in control of the computer here? Not the user, at the moment.

So given the point made by "BZ" above, it ought to be on the bug list for Microsoft Windows, and probably rather than for X, for the individual window managers such as KDE & Gnome, which is where I think the "bug" exists, if it can be said to be a bug, or at least where the feature request should go. In the meantime though, individual apps could improve things and set a good example by at least making sure their own popups a little more courteous.

But instead of thinking about groundbreaking new features, or simply making sure the product is the most secure and most stable ever, we have the addition of unnecessary browser tabs, which in every modern windowing system I've ever seen they are simply redundant-- the operating system supports multi-window selection already, in the task bar or status bar , or dock, or whatever. And does it cross application. Let the OS decide if you want to aggregate your tabs by application. But instead, that ability is removed from the OS by the application because the OS is now unable to organize the tabs embedded in one application with those in another. And in Firefox anyway, last I looked (I've stopped using it, frankly), tabs that you can't completely turn off and insist on taking up real estate. Did someone actually ask for those stupid things? I'd like to see the original feature request in the bug reporting system for THAT particular annoyance. It's made Firefox the Oprah Winfrey/Phil Donohugh of browsers, "I'm just giving people what they want," as if dealing crack cocaine is somehow virtuous simply because there's a demand.

But then, I'm just a curmudgeon, so you can safely ignore me (and undoubtedly will).

The Pathology of Perfection...

In my youth, I was inclined to be a perfectionist.

But eventually, I realized something important about it. To be happy, you must be satisfied. And a perfectionist is never satisfied.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that perfection is fraught with misconceptions. It became clear to me that perfection is vastly overrated. In fact, it is a significant distraction away from characteristics that have actual value.

There's a distinct tendency to confuse perfection with beauty. An erroneous presumption that perfection is somehow more objective (less subjective) than beauty. Or to myopically conclude that, "there is beauty in perfection," and thereby characterize things in irrelevant ways. But in fact, "perfection" is not only not objective, it is also discriminatory and therefore divisive, whereas beauty is generally not. While some may consider it heresy to claim this, the Universe is not perfect-- but it is beautiful. That observation however, should by no means be construed as a criticism of the state of the Universe, quite the contrary.

Perfection is contingent on a purpose-- things are perfect "for some purpose." But beauty is not-- things can be beautiful for no purpose at all. Perfection's "purpose" gives it the apparent status of being more utilitarian, and thereby more objective, but that is an illusion.

By focusing on perfection, and thereby its "purpose," might we be concentrating on the tool, rather than the goal? To see everything as a nail, from the perspective of the hammer, rather than considering the perspective of the fastening task at hand? Perhaps there is another, preferred solution, but a solution we cannot see, clouded as our perspective might be, being so enamored with the "perfection" of hammers? On the other hand, a hammer may be beautiful, but is rendered no less beautiful by the presentation of a problem which appropriate solution might turn out to be glue.

By implication, something "completely" perfect would have to be perfect in all ways, for all purposes. But that is ridiculous, as there are contradictory purposes-- a perfect sphere cannot also be a perfect cube. One has to apply the subjective process of evaluating the value of it's purpose in order to qualify and quantify something as "perfect." Is the perfect "weapon of mass destruction," to be considered somehow better than the perfect "glue" without applying subjective criteria?

Some perfectionists even get to the point that they are compelled to suppress their emotions. Perhaps they feel that the way we handle our emotions is what separates us from animals. Well, that may be true, but I'd say it's also true that the way we handle our emotions is what separates us from machines. And to suppress one's emotions will necessarily make one unhappy. Why? It's quite simple, because happiness is itself an emotion. One who is ruled by logic has thereby ruled out happiness.

Perfectionists have difficulty making decisions. In some cases, extraordinarily so. This is partly because it is near impossible to completely analyze all the information that might contribute to a decision. But it is also because there is inherently a significant amount of subjectivity involved in making a choice. Whether you decide to eat the chocolate dessert today rather than the strawberry one, is not a supremely logical decision but a completely subjective one, potentially subject to change at a moment's whim. That's not to say that all caution should be thrown to the wind or that decisions should be made with a roll of the dice, but there is no point in belaboring a decision in the hopes of arriving at the perfect result.

And perfectionists really hate making mistakes. Odd though, because that itself is a serious mistake. For it really is true, that you learn from your mistakes. Science itself, for example, makes far more progress when a scientist makes a mistake and it is discovered, than when one thinks he's got the answer perfect. As Issac Asimov once said, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'"

Upon those realizations, I chose to give up perfectionism. I see it as the epitome of the banal, the bland, the rigid. I see it as lacking in character. The concern of the overconscientious milquetoast.

And subsequently, growing past it-- I chose to instead embrace that which makes one unique. To look for beauty instead of perfection, and not confuse or conflate the two.

I've since realized that it is important to not just overlook imperfections, but to take time to actively appreciate them. Humans are not perfect, but their imperfections are not tantamount to flaws-- one's imperfections are what gives one character, what makes one who they are, and what makes one beautiful.

It's rather ironic really, because for a perfectionist to achieve, at least conceptually, the greater perfection they desire, one of the things they would have to do is actually relinquish their perfectionism. For it is a significant flaw-- the inability to recognize sufficient value in imperfection. To even waste time, looking at things in terms of perfections and imperfections, seems folly. To evaluate things in such terms, in the confused belief that they are somehow being more objective. To focus on the unimportant pedantic details and miss the beauty.

It is our humanity that makes us who we are, not our perfection, and it is in that humanity that we should find value.

Our concern should only be for imperfections that are harmful, which certainly exist, but many imperfections are harmless or even beneficial. To see them as weeds to be eliminated, is to remove that which makes us human and unique.

Perfectionism seeks to homogenize the true value out of the human race-- to turn everyone into identitiless clones, intolerant of individual personality, worth, and beauty. It is an astonishingly outstanding flaw, one that makes people insufferably authoritarian, judgmental and condescending.


And that is why nobody likes a perfectionist. Not even the perfectionist thyself.


--

Sync

Passive? Or At Peace?

In society in general, we often see problems with anger. There are industries of anger management experts who tell us that we need to control our anger, and can control it with learning. Churches tell us to model ourselves after Jesus, who was kind and gentle and would forgive those that trespass, and turn the other cheek. Pacifists tell us that we should use peaceful means of passive resistance in order to fight injustices.

But we should not forget that the passive resistance of pacifism is not peaceful, simply because it is passive. The opposite of peace is not simply "war." No, actually the opposite of peace is *discord*. We should not forget that the operative word in "passive resistance" is not "passive" but "resistance." Resistance is discord, by however means. Passive resistance is every bit a resistive act, a focus on , a calling attention to, a significant discord. It is an expression or communication of displeasure, veiled behind the kind and gentle.

The crucially important thing in passive resistance as practiced by pacifists, is that the resistive act is combined with an explanatory act-- some direct explanation of the purpose of the resistance. Otherwise it represents a critical disfunction-- if you come across a group of people sitting down in the street for example, and ask them, "why are you doing this?" and they DON'T tell you anything, then it is left up to you to infer the purpose-- it is a blank slate that onlookers will likely project either their fears or their hopes upon, and consequently the resistive act becomes a misrepresentation of its intent. The resisters should not then be surprised if their act is portrayed as widely in variance with their intent, as they did not make their intent clear.

It is true that the outward expression of anger can make things worse in some circumstances. But the passive expression of anger without an associated intent, can be far more insidious, and can also make things worse but via a disconnect between the cause and effect so that the expression of anger has been somewhat anonymized-- anger is directed, but its recognition may be delayed and the source has been disguised under a mask of passivity. Passive resistance is no less a hostile act merely because it is labelled "passive."


Does that mean that, as pacifists, we should give up the use of passive resistance as a means of expressing our displeasure? Certainly not, but we should realize that one's passive resistance does not make one a saint, that it is not the turning of the other cheek or the forgiveness of trespasses, that even passive resistance is a discordant act that is in fact, an outward expression of anger. We should not confuse passive resistance with peacefulness. And we should always insure that the intent of the resistive act is made exceedingly clear.

Perhaps it is useful in this context to consider the role of anger. Those who strive for peace may not be able to achieve it without the expression of anger. And anger does have its legitimate and illegitimate forms. While it is not good to let anger rage out of control, it is also not good to restrain anger to the point that it transforms itself into insidious and harmful forms. There are times when the straightforward outward expression of anger may be more honest and more productive than the covert anger expressed by passive resistance.

Programming: The anachronism that is APL

Originally posted to Slashdot as a response to a comment about the programming language APL as of possible interest for parallel programming on the emerging multicore processor machines.


The programming language APL was totally brilliant for its time. APL is probably the only serious pictographic programming language ever devised, a fascinating characteristic that unfortunately even Kenneth Iverson (the originator of APL) himself gave up on in resorting to ASCII digraphs with his later language J.   I often complain about the fact that programming on our current keyboard, originally adapted from existing non-computing devices as it was, relegated us to resort to the symbols * and / for multiply and divide because proper symbols were not available-- we're still using essentially that 50 or more year old keyboard standard completely for reasons of ancient practicality, not modern elegance.   The original APL included a valiant but failed attempt to change that.

One big problem with APL as a pictographic language is that extending it implies a need for new pictograms over time, and a typewriter keyboard, even redesigned for the language, is a poor candidate for such expansion. The earliest forms of APL kept that problem somewhat in check via the use of overstrikes, so that you didn't have to provide a separate key for each symbol but instead could learn a relatively manageable set of symbols that could be reused in combination to produce the entire symbol set.   However, the use of overstrikes seemed to be out of place on video terminals, and so the innovation of overstrikes gave way to video terminal keyboards with a vast array of stick-on symbols that one would have to learn in order to write programs.

APL is also about the most terse programming language ever devised, a crucially important characteristic at a time when dial-up baud rates were often 110-300, and memory systems were large in size but small in capacity.   When it takes that long for characters to transmit, one-liner programs of a hundred or so pictographic symbols work pretty darn good.

And despite APL's inherent array operations, automatically parallelizing APL is a relatively crude means of taking advantage of multi-core processor systems, as the setup and teardown overhead would require additional logic to determine if the size of the arrays and/or complexity of the operation would warrant it.   Logic that would have to be done even when determining that parallelism is not appropriate for the operation.   While programmer guided parallelism would be more sensible and certainly feasible, even that would be insufficient to resurrect the language from its current status as largely an anachronism of the past confused by some to be ahead of its time.   I'm afraid the peak of its "time" though, was the late 1960s and early 1970s, roughly coincident with the IBM System/360 and System/370 mainframes. Once terminal output went to glass, APL began its divisions and its decline.

APL's real failure has been in the immense difficulty of standardization-- no two people (let alone APL vendors) ever thought about it alike, the various extensions and workspace formats differ significantly, and implementing a full APL is a complex undertaking as language implementations go.   In fact, the APL community still seems to have a hard time deciding whether or not to maintain the pictographic character set or to resort to ASCII in the mistaken belief that it will make it more "acceptable."   In a world where "write once run anywhere" is an important goal, APL fares rather poorly in the transportability department.

While I'm sure there are some APL die-hards that are just waiting for the advent of many-core desktops as the chance for APL to "shine again," I on the other hand, fully expect it to disappear as anything more than a historical curiosity, and fairly soon now as the original die-hards have been entering retirement age already for some time now.   And many of those not quite ready to retire, like Iverson have chosen to move to the J language or some other ASCII based array language, giving up one of the most important things that I think made APL special, if not uniquely valuable-- its pictographic character.

For me, APL will always have a soft spot in my heart, being the first computer language I was ever exposed to and on which I learned to program (on an IBM 2741 selectric terminal).   Long ago I wrote my own APL interpreter and have recently given it somewhat of a facelift for Windows (mine still supports overstrikes, as I don't need the stickers-- I still remember where all the original symbols are).   I use it as a super-Calculator and little else (it remains really good for that).   While I sometimes get wistful about its now misplaced potential, and periodically try to think of ways it might possibly mutate into something important in the modern world, I harbor no real illusions of a resurgence...

The joke that is DRM...

There've been a lot of complaints about the BBC utilizing a proprietary streaming media system that only works on Windows. It's all about the DRM contained therein.

The funny thing is, with some of these DRM systems, even if you have the platform that it is supposed to work on, many people still can't make it work. I downloaded a legal FREE download of a TV program from AOL and found that it just wouldn't run on my Windows XP box due to some DRM issue with the computer (now, this is a FREE download, mind you). I'd like the program bad enough to actually PAY for a DVD of it if one were available. Whoever the content provider is can actually get MONEY out of me for this if what they provide isn't defective, but given they haven't I'm spending this weeks media budget on someone else's content. Doesn't matter if it's FREE, it's useless if it's defective. Ya gotta laugh at the arrogant and clueless minds that conceived of this stuff.

In my book, it's not about free stuff. I'm perfectly happy to pay for content. But, it must have these characteristics for that to happen:

1. Not just downloadable. I want something physical for my money-- a disk in the mail, primarily. Frankly, if I'm paying, one of the things I'm paying for is something that preserves the value of my purchase-- my purchase must be resaleable, and that legitimate disk is that resaleable entity. Etherial datastreams have little percieved value, and the media corporations insistence on it in the face of new distribution and replication technologies is IMHO the reason for the drop in their sales.

2. No time limit. It can't "stop working" after awhile, either based on elapsed time since purchase or the number of times it's been watched or listened to.

3. In an OPEN format. A format that can be made to play on future devices that don't even exist yet, possibly on a different media, that can be converted and that can be backed up.

4. Reasonable cost. DVDs <$20, CDs < $10 (don't ask me about HD, I'm in no particular hurry to go there and it doesn't yet meet #3). Note that most of these criteria are about preserving value. I rarely go to the movie theater because the experience does not justify the cost for me. I will go to a live concert or live theater performance, and there the cost is justified-- I can't see paying $8 or whatever movies cost these days to sit in a too-small theater and have to pay inflated prices for unhealthy snacks when I can buy the DVD and watch in the comfort of my own home and pause it when someone has to take a leak or refill their snack dish. Even at home though, I'm not willing to pay $5-$20 for media that I can only watch for a limited time, won't work with the next generation of playback systems, that I can't let friends borrow or can't resell. Just like I won't buy a book whos pages will fade to white after a couple of months, I won't buy crippled or short-term media.

Can such a combination be abused? Undoubtedly, but that's the age we live in-- even without P2P music trading, college students can still convert their CDs to MP3 and trade them en-masse to their local circle of friends, which can significantly propagate the content. Welcome to the information age, guys. GET USED TO IT. The RIAA isn't gonna fix it, and their pathetic attempts are *really* bad PR. And DRM doesn't stop the abuse, it just pisses off those who try to legitmately access the content and motivates them to look for alternatives that actually work.

That's my criteria for spending $$$ on content. I buy quite a bit of media that fits all the above criteria (though DVDs only do because of deCSS, and not all DVDs because many are overpriced). But I don't buy ANY media that does not, and waste no more time on supposedly FREE media that's simply, broken.

Want my money you big media corporations? It's simple-- all you have to do is EARN it.

Dead Snake Oil Salesmen Walking...

Symantec and McAfee have been whining in EU courts and more than a few other places about Microsoft Vista's security protections making it hard for them to produce their anti-virus software. Poor saps, their chickens are coming home to roost...

The concept of antivirus software is inherently flawed. Antivirus software can never keep up with the latest virus. There are far better ways of protecting a system than detecting known virus signatures.

Execution protection, user permission controls and good firewalling are far more effective methods of defending against such attacks. All of these things are built into Vista, and in fact are most of what is new that is in Vista-- showing Microsoft "gets it" at least regarding this sort of security. Even on Windows 2000 or Windows XP, all of these things are available (though not built-in) except useful user permission controls.

Even before this latest Vista whine-song, Symantec and McAfee have been going into FUD PR mode in order to try to save their market-- their latest conflict of interest due to the fact that they are mostly out of business if the above facts about effective virus protection gets out. They're dead men walking, having painted themselves into a corner and now they're whining about it. Simply pathetic.