Human Stupidity

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The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, by Carlo M. Cipolla:

  1. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
  2. The probability that a certain person will be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
  3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
  4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
  5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
    • Corrolary: A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

(via Jerry Kindall)

Back from the Meetup

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Just got back a bit ago from this month’s Seattle weblogger Meetup. Saw and chatted with quite a few people there (most of whom I have to admit I can’t remember names/sites of), including Anita, Scoble, and dayment, who was kind enough to give me a couple CDs (Tones on Tail’s “Night Music” and The Faint’s “Danse Macabre”)! All in all, a quite pleasant evening.

Same sex marriage OK in Massachusetts

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CNN: Massachusetts court rules ban on gay marriage unconstitutional:

Massachusetts’ highest court ruled Tuesday that the state cannot deny gays and lesbians the right to marry and ordered the state’s lawmakers to devise changes in the law within six months.

Google News’ collection of related stories can be found here.

The key points of the ruling, as outlined in an e-mail I received this morning from the Human Rights Campaign:

  • Same sex couples in Massachusetts who choose to obtain a civil marriage license will now be able to:
    • Visit each other in the hospital, without question;
    • Make important health care and financial decisions for each other;
    • Have mutual obligations to provide support for each other;
    • File joint state tax returns, and have the burden and advantages of the state tax law for married couples; and
    • Receive hundreds of other protections under state law.
  • Churches and other religious institutions will not have to recognize or perform ceremonies for these civil marriages. This ruling is not about religion; it’s about the civil responsibilities and protections afforded through a government-issued civil marriage license.
  • By operation of law, all married couples should be extended the more than 1,000 federal protections and responsibilities administered at the federal level. These rights include the application of federal inheritance laws, social security benefits, the right to unpaid leave to care for a family member, the ability to file joint tax return, and the like. However, the so-called Defense of Marriage Act purports to discriminate against same-sex married couples and deny them these protections. Because no state has recognized civil marriage for same-sex couples in the past, this law has not yet been challenged in court.
  • Other states and some businesses may legally recognize the civil marriages of same-sex couples performed in Massachusetts the same way they treat those of opposite-sex couples.

[Update:]{.underline}

Kirsten looks at some of the potential pitfalls. Pessimist. ;)

Creators admit Unix, C hoax

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VNS TECHNOLOGY WATCH: [Mike Taylor, VNS Correspondent] [Littleton, MA, USA]

COMPUTERWORLD 17 November 2003

CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX

In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix operating system and C programming language created by them is an elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for over 20 years. Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson revealed the following:

\”In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the GE/Honeywell/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started working with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus Wirth’s ETH labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant simplicity and power. Dennis had just finished reading ‘Bored of the Rings’, a hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual users’ frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as well as other more risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called ‘A’. When we found others were actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C. We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:

for(;P(“n”),R–;P(“|”))for(e=C;e–;P("_"+(u++/8)%2))P(“|”+(u/4)%2);

To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and other US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even marginally useful applications using this 1960’s technological parody, but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the general Unix and C programmer. In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have been working exclusively in Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly bad programming that have resulted from our silly prank so long ago.\”

Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at this time. Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C tools, including the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++, stated they had suspected this for a number of years and would continue to enhance their Pascal products and halt further efforts to develop C. An IBM spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had to postpone a hastily convened news conference concerning the fate of the RS-6000, merely stating ‘VM will be available Real Soon Now’. In a cryptic statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of the Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P. T. Barnum was correct.

(via the usual suspects)

November Weblog Meetup

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For the first (and quite likely only) time, I’m going to be able to attend one of the local Weblogger’s Meetup events, as my training schedule for this Wednesday has me off work at 6pm. Once I start my 1pm-9:30pm schedule I’ll be missing them again, but at least I can make this month’s.

So, for any local Seattle bloggers, looks like I’ll be seeing some of you at Uptown Espresso, Wednesday evening at 7pm!

(via Anita)

Major referrer spam attack

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Looks like there’s a major referrer spam attack going on at the moment. The sites in question look like real weblogs but aren’t — instead, many of them have similar (or the same) content, comment and trackback links just link back to the home page, they have a hidden graphic that leads to porn sites, and many (if not all) of them are stealing their designs from other weblogs. Ignore (or block, if you can) any and all referrer links you might see in your logs from:

http://www.a-b-l-o-g.com/
http://www.akksess.com/
http://www.bongohome.com/
http://jennifersblog.com/
http://kwlablog.com/
http://www.malixya.com/
http://mikesplace.com/
http://www.saulem.com/
http://www.teoras.com/
http://www.websearchde.com/
http://www.websearchus.com/
http://www.worldnewslog.com/
http://www.wr18.com/

More information on this at A Preponderance of Evidence, MetaFilter, idly.org, milov.nl, and probably more.

The sound of silence

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Silence in America:

  • Over four hundred American soldiers killed in Iraq since the beginning of the war — 283 since the Bush declared that the war was over. Silence.
  • Constitutional rights being suspended via the Patriot Act. Silence.
  • Bush urges us to support the troops, while cutting pay and benefits for the military. Silence.
  • Prisoners detained and held indefinitely without charges in Guantanamo Bay. Silence.

Silence in Italy:

The sight was extraordinary, but less so than the sound, or rather the lack of it. Although thousands upon thousands of people filled one of this city’s most chaotic squares during the evening rush hour on Monday, the decibel level seldom rose above a whisper’s.

Silence was just one way in which those people sought to show their respect for 19 Italians killed in a suicide bombing in Iraq last week. Another was to wait two to three hours, in the drizzle and dark, for a chance to walk past the victims’ coffins, arrayed inside a palace that towers over the square, Piazza Venezia.

The line went on and on, just like Italy’s mourning.

Why can’t we as a nation honor our four hundred and twenty two dead as touchingly and honestly as the Italians do their nineteen? Of course, if behavior like that was sanctioned here — or, heaven forbid, encouraged — the public might just realize the extent of what’s happening in Iraq, to the US and to our allies. We can’t have that, now can we?

(To clarify, this is in no way meant to belittle the bombing of the Italian soldiers. Rather, it’s meant to belittle the lack of facts, knowledge, and questioning in the US media, who instead all too often seem to blindly accept the shameless posturing foisted upon us by our government.)

(via Atrios)

Fight Link Rot!

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link rot n.

The natural decay of web links as the sites they’re connected to change or die.

Calpundit has an excellent summary posted on how to link to New York Times articles without having the links succumb to link rot. This should be required reading for all bloggers, IMNSHO — citing sources is important, and it’s best if the sources don’t later disappear.

Update: Even better than Calpundit’s method (as good as it is) is the New York Times Link Generator! Just feed it the URL of a NYT story, and it will generate the link rot proof version of the URL for use in your weblog. Thanks to Aaron Swartz for providing this, and to Jason Kottke for pointing it out in Calpundit’s comment thread.

Calpundit also breaks down the most archive-friendly (i.e., least susceptible to link rot) sources:

  1. Tier 1: CNN, the Guardian, and the BBC all have permanent archives that never disappear.
  2. Tier 2: The Washington Post places old articles behind an archive wall, but previously existing links to the articles work forever. The New York Times makes permanent links possible, even if they’re a bit of a pain.
  3. Tier 3: The LA Times places all its content behind an archive wall after a few days and breaks any existing links.
  4. Purgatory: The Wall Street Journal is in a class by itself, since their content is never accessible free of charge on the Web.