General

I have a great idea for an enormous increase in computer speed! VM's are fantastic, right? Like JVM, .NET, the runtimes of various interpreted languages... Sure, why not? They're wonderful things. Hell, how did we ever manage to scrape by without them? Fuck native code! That shit sucked! And worse yet, it's the old way! I ain't no dinosaur! But we always want more speed, right? Well, VMs are created in software...So...What's faster than doing something in software? Much, much, much faster? Doing it in hardware! Imagine! A super, super fast VM! Super-charged with actual hardware! Sweet! Oh my god...and what if...just what if...these languages could all get together, and use a common VM! Holy Hell on a Shit Scraping Stick! I want it! We have to make a CPU that operates on a set of standardized bytecodes!!!

Oh that's right, we have one. It's called the x86...

Fuck!

Ok, the hell with speed. Let's talk Cloud. You know, that thing we used to call the Internet? (God, "Internet" is soooo 90's!) Yes, we'll go to the cloud and we'll give up writing efficient software. We can live with text-entry forms that are sluggish compared to a 386's word processor even though they're running on what's comparatively a super-computer. Shoot speed in the head, it's dead. RIP speed. And efficiency. And the environmental impact of the extra power used by lots and lots of inefficient software. After all, I do my part: When anyone asks, I tell them I'm against global warming! Yes! So screw efficiency. It's sad, but it's ok! It's all so we can write our software in nicer, easier, saner, more expressive, more reliable, more productive languages! Yes! Of course! The worthwhile benefit for our sacrifice is that we get to use fantastic, expressive, rock-solid languages like...JavaScript?..........Motherfuck!

Security! Security! Yes! That's the benefit all this roundabout crap is getting us! Security!

These web apps and such are all sandboxed. Software can't do anything bad in a sandbox! Like Adobe's Flash Player! After all, the Flash Player is known for never having any exploi...Wait, forget I said that...Like I was saying, software can't do anything bad in a sandbox. It can't delete your system files. It can't steal your data. It can't log your keystrokes...wait...umm...It can't delete your system files or steal your data! Of course, that means it also can't let you edit or even view any of the files you have on your computer...Or let you change your system settings...Or...Hmmm...

You know what? Those sound like great ideas! I want to make web apps that let people view and edit their files and adjust their computer's settings so that their system settings follow them around to any computer they use! Yea! Ok, we'll we need to add some new features to these sandboxes...open local files, save local files, access system settings...Oh! And this is in a web app, so it's all totally cross-platform by default! That saves me time and effort! Wow, yea, I'm loving these results, this is fantastic! Huh...wait a minute...I could have sworn that important file I couldn't afford to loose was right here but now I don't see it. Wha...Weird, how'd those people get hold of that, because I don't remember uploading tha...Why are my window borders covered in animal porn?!?! Well, that's what I get for using "M$" Windows. No matter, I'll head to my nice safe OSX. Huh? Same thing?! Et tu, Linux?

Ok, well, obviously the problem here is because I was trying to use a local system instead of the fundamentally superior Cloud. I'll just use an Internet-based ser...erm, I mean a Cloud-based service to store my data. Obviously I'll want to use a respectable big name company. That way I can have their professionals handle security for me! Yup, as long as I stick to a reputable company, they can always be trusted to keep my data secure! After all, it's not like Google or Facebook would ever have security breaches or privacy cock-ups or...err...umm...whoops! No, see, what I mean is, it's not as if GMail would be susceptible to the same super-well-known exploit like session hijacking for over a year or so...uhh...shit. Well, at the very least, if I switch to their browser they'd never install any other always-resident software on my computer without telling me or giving me an option to disable it or...

Goddammit, I give up.

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There's two groups of people: Hard workers and lazy workers. I'm convinced that improvements arise from people who exhibit both attributes. Either one alone results in stagnation.

If you have absolutely no problem with working hard, that's good, but there's no motivation or incentive to improve processes. Thus, difficult or time-consuming tasks will remain difficult or time-consuming. Higher-level work (work which uses the work at hand as a stepping stone) continues to take an order of magnitude more resources. Things work, but they don't advance.

On the other hand, if you're not willing to do harder work, then you do have the incentive for improvements, but lack the follow-through. Any externally-developed advancements will get adopted, but only if they actually get created.

It's best to have both attributes: The willingness to put in hard work when necessary, but also a strong desire and preference for easy, lazy approaches. This way, you have both the incentive to create improvements and the follow-through to actually manifest them.

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"Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom..." - Richard Stallman

I could never hope to come up with a more perfect description of Steve Jobs myself. The rest of Stallman's post on the matter also earns a resounding "ditto" from me (Yes, I said "ditto". I'm not even going to try to top what's already been so well put.):

"As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, 'I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone.' Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective." - Richard Stallman

I'm irritated at Iternational Business Times's Amrutha Gayathri referring to Stallman's post as "grossly inappropriate". Stallman stated flat out, "I'm not glad he's dead". So, yea, let's continue our society's idiotic little game of pretending that dying automatically turns everyone into a retroactive saint.

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Online petitions have a reputation for being useless. But I was surprised to see whitehouse.gov has their own online petition site. The really impressive part is their policy that for any petition receiving 5,000 signatures within 30 days (numbers subject to change), "an official response will be issued" (whatever that actually means).

There's a very interesting one right now: Direct the Patent Office to Cease Issuing Software Patents.

As with any government website, the implementation is a complete piece of garbage that only barely works. But when it comes to something as important as finally killing off Software Patents, I think it's well worth putting up with. There's a lot of other very good petitions up there, too. I signed a number of them.

I am absolutely appalled, however, that the Ban non-therapeutic routine infant circumcision has only a mere fraction of the number of signatures as Legalize and Regulate Marijuana in a Manner Similar to Alcohol (1,583 versus 41,339) even though they were started just one day apart. I'm certainly all for the legalization/regulation of weed (even though I have no interest in using it personally), but seriously: What the fuck is wrong with our society that we care that much more about a recreational substance (yea, yea, "with medicinal properties", I know) than such an absolutely colossal and barbaric violation of basic human rights? And against babies, for fuck's sake! (Not to mention the blatant disregard for the Hippocratic Oath.)

And before you knee-jerkers try to mislabel me a neo-nazi: Even though this country has religious freedoms, there are many things that religions are not allowed to do. Religions are not permitted to kill (erm...I mean "sacrifice") anyone. They can't oppress women, or men. They can't break and enter. Etc. But the key in this case is that they have no right to commit blatant human rights violations even as a religion. Which they currently do on a regular basis anyway. They get rid of that and I'd have no more problem than I have with any other religion. And it's not as if this is purely a religion issue anyway: There's plenty of people with no connection to that religion that have willfully butchered their sons, too.

BTW, If you think it's a "hygiene" issue then you're a fucking idiot. Have you ever washed one of your fingers? Seriously, how fucking hard was that? Just ask any non-gimpdick man how hard it is to wash one simple body part.

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I started this "not-a-blog" for two main reasons: To practice and hopefully improve my writing ability, and to act as a pressure release valve. I hate shit. I hate tons of shit. That's no secret, just look through the archives here - I'm a serious virulent fucking ass when I choose to be. What do you think happens when that shit doesn't have an outlet? Certainly nothing good.

But, contrary to what the hippie, feminazi, PC-brigade would have everyone believe - that's normal. Unless you're a spineless doormat, of course, but I'd rather be an ass than have such a disgraceful lack of self-respect. YMMV. That's a blatant lie, of course: Spineless doormats are no exception at all - they're a classic example of an internally destructive consequence.

Whether productive or destructive, internal or external, pressure gets out one way or another. Always. Unless you use a really good sealant...No, always. Pretending it doesn't exist, willing it away...Not gonna work, you're flirting with disaster.

So I write venomous shit. Write. I write shit that no one really even has to read anyway. Shit that nobody has any legitimate reason to even give a crap about. And even if nobody reads it, which is likely anyway, merely writing it and putting it out there makes dealing with that crap manageable.

But as a notably wise man once observed: "I look and see it's not only me..."

The fact of the matter is, our society breeds stress. That's a terrible thing, and it needs to change, but that's modern society's dirty little truth.

So everyone's stressed halfway to the breaking point, if not more, (especially high school students - fuck, I wouldn't go through that hell again for anything in the world) and all the resulting excrement gets sucked up into the Internet by the metric fuckton.

A bleak, unfortunate result, right? I don't think so. Pressure gets out one way or another, right? How did we relax and get by without the internet? Uhhh...alchohol, some other fun substances, domestic beatings (family fun for all ages!), school violence (yes, it has been decreasing - try turning off CNN, "Action" News, and Fox News sometime, your brain might heal) and a fine selection of various other misdemeanors and felonies. Oh, yea, and drum circles...Hmm...Yea, umm, so tell me more about that "felony" thing...

But now we've got a bunch of asinine keyboard-diarrhea filling up the internet. Really not so bad, all things considered. Of course, that's still no reason to feed the trolls...

So basically, the internet is one big collective mega-fart. Ahh. Much better.

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So why do we celebrate birthdays? In the case of kids, the reason is obvious: a birthday is a marker of progress. But for the rest of us, cliche'd as this is, the only progression most birthdays mark is the progression towards death. That sure as hell isn't a cause for celebration. So why the traditions and party? I think it's to make losing another year down the drain slightly less miserable.

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