The Book of Eli
January 17th, 2010
I saw The Book of Eli the other day and thought it was pretty good. I’ll admit right off the bat that what attracted me to it was the trailers that showed it to be about Denzel Washington kicking ass in a Fallout-style post-apocalyptia, and on that count I was not disappointed. There’s plenty of excellent post-apocalyptic action and a great deal of effort was put into making the world feel realistic.
That said…
** WARNING: ** This next part contains spoilers! Click to read. Although if you don’t, this post will probably seem very short.
Okay, so there are some pretty gaping plotholes. But the movie manages to redeem itself to me through the rest of it. Maybe it’s because I’m totally in love with the Fallout universe, but seeing Denzel Washington barter for electricity with salt packets and shoot goggled biker thugs with a sawed-off shotgun just makes me happy inside. The world they all inhabit is indeed pretty derivative of Fallout’s but I don’t care because I love that world, and they manage to infuse it a great deal of detail and life.
So yeah, it’s flawed and you’ll have to suspend your disbelief a bit toward the middle, but I had a good time and didn’t feel ripped off by the outrageous ticket price.
defendant has no brains.
January 10th, 2010
I gotta say, it’s pretty true. He took her Pell Grant money to buy… well… just watch it!
Secret Chinese Enlightenment
January 5th, 2010
One of my all-time favorite parts of the video game Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines is an old Chinese man who offers to tell your fortune when you visit Chinatown. The guy’s a total caricature, but so are a lot of people in the game, and he’s pretty hilarious. The little guy goes, “Hey you! You want your fortune read? You give me five dollar, I give you ’secret chinese enlightenment.’ Only stupid person not want to know future!” Of course, you can’t help but give him the money, and each time you do, he tosses out a real gem of fortune telling.
The reason for this post is because I was recently reminiscing about my last playthrough and I tried Googling for a list of all the funny things he says. Alas, the internet failed me and I couldn’t find anything! My wife happened to be playing the game today, so I got her to let me write down the guy’s words as she fed him fivers. So here is my immortal contribution to the internet: a list of the guy’s fortunes.
- That guy you work with? Yeah, he take all credit for your idea!
- You see orange cat on Tuesday! Woah, that bad! Call doctor!
- One year from this day, you going to get mysterious package! DON’T OPEN! Music club will own your ass then!
- Here your lucky numbers. WRITE DOWN I not repeat! Here go: 11, 17, 25, 93, 11, and, uh 62.
- Next time you get on plane, change seat to exit row. This make sure you not sit next to big fatass!
- You going to go to fancy restaurant. You going to order snails. DON’T EAT THEM! That disgusting! Snail very dirty!
- Ahh, love will find you next week. Don’t stay in love too long; husband find you too!
- You going to get a visitor at your door next week. DON’T OPEN DOOR! It Jehovah witness! They so annoying!
What is this, nursery school?
December 7th, 2009
I’m a big fan of WordPress. It’s lightweight, super-flexible, and it has an awesome community that churns out plugins and themes to make setting up a website a cinch. This site itself is based on WordPress and I couldn’t be happier with it.
The WordPress people also let you have a blog as a subdomain of wordpress.com; e.g. you can register and post to mymomsfancypants.wordpress.com if you wanted. I’ve used these simple hosted blogs in the past and I still do. Like many hosted services, there are some restrictions, and by and large you can live with them. But I just ran into one that bugs me. A lot.
You see, the WordPress people are anal about security. Like, really anal about security. I can’t say I blame them because their servers are the ones storing your content end executing your code, but I bumped up against this tonight in a really frustrating way. You see, you can’t embed code in your website. Like, if you try to put the following in your post:
“<object width="400" height="225"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7970212&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1" /><embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7970212&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="400" height="225"></embed></object><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/7970212">Reel</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user1398023">Rafael Hernán Gamboa</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>”
then nothing will happen. In most civilized universes, the server will reach out and turn this into a video or something, but not in WordPress.com-land! Needless to say, this is so annoying that the WordPress people were bound to hear, shall we say, quite an earful. So they helpfully put in some hooks to let you use popular services, such as YouTube, so you can put things like “[Youtube="www.someYouTubeURL"]“.
This is fine if you want to put in a YouTube video, but what about Vimeo or iBBC or some other embeddable thing that WordPress hasn’t added in support for yet? Well, I’ll tell you what, You’re Screwed, with a capital Y and a capital S and make sure you don’t drop the soap.
I can understand the security motivations, but really, is this nursery school or something? You can’t embed video?! There are other hosted solutions that embed video, and I don’t see them collapsing under the weight of their pwnz0red servers! What a drag.
Animal rights
November 29th, 2009
Here’s something that’s been bugging me for a while: animal rights. More and more people are talking about animal rights in a casual sort of way without really thinking about what that would mean. I’ll just be up front and say it: Animals don’t have rights. Here’s why:
What is a right?
Ask a hundred people and you’ll get a hundred different stupid looks. Duh, rights let you do things, right? Actually, not exactly. That ability has always been there. Animals illustrate this very well; they literally have the capacity to do anything within their power. They can eat, drink, sleep, run, jump, kill, maim, invade, and stalk, sometimes on a daily basis! Nothing constrains an animal besides natural factors such as hunger, disease, and predation.
Having no rights is in fact a state of perfect anarchic freedom. You can do whatever you want, up to and including acts however savage and barbarous as you wish, and others can do the very same to you if they are able. The social order is determined by strength and ability to resist the predation of others. It is an animal existence.
But humans don’t do that stuff. That’s because we have rights, a human construction intended to restrain negative human behavior. For example, my right to life and property prevents you from murdering me or stealing my stuff without getting punished. The key is this: rights constrain potential malicious behavior by using the threat of justified retaliation by the wronged party or a so empowered third party (the government, police, etc). Censor me or search my bags without permission and you’ll get sued. Steal my stuff and you’ll get locked up. Attack me and you’ll get shot. etc.
Why can’t animals have them?
Animals can’t have rights because rights are (1) mutually agreed-upon societal constructions that are (2) understood by and enforceable against the bound parties. Not only are animals bereft of an empowered third party to enforce these hypothetical rights, but there isn’t even any type of mutual agreement that certain behavior is malicious and wrong in the first place! For example, humans believe that killing without provocation is wrong; animals don’t, and can’t, or else all the carnivores would starve.
This is because to an animal, might makes right; there really is no behavior that is “wrong” in the human sense of the word. The lion eats the gazelle because it’s hungry, and the gazelle drinks at whatever watering hole it wants because it’s thirsty. Were these animals to gain rights, then the lion would be infringing the gazelle’s right to life (and triggering the gazelle’s right to self-defense), and the gazelle would be infringing on some other animal’s property rights. How would the animals understand these things?
In the wild, only an animal with no rights can interact with another animal. Otherwise, for example, predator animals would have to be legally be punished for their victims’ right to life to mean anything. Similarly, if animals had a right to live lives free of cruelty, then if that right were to be enforceable against humans for factory-farming them (as many animal rights activists desire), then the right would have to be equally enforceable against other animals for forcing them to live lives full of fear where they can be brutally eaten alive at any time.
Animal behavior itself is incompatible with the idea of rights. The moment animals get rights, then other animals must be legally punished for violating those rights or else they’re meaningless. The take-home point is this:
Animals cannot have rights until other animals can be legally punished for infringing those rights. As such an idea is absurd in the extreme, we have to reject the notion that animals can have rights.
Black box URLs
November 28th, 2009
URL shorteners have been all the rage for the last few years now due to the rise of Twitter and other character-limited communications systems, where traditional URLs with their “http://www.” can’t help but waste space. But while these short URLs do indeed save space, their drawbacks were illustrated very personally when I friend of mine had a Facebook account hacked to post shortened URLs to virus and spam sites. The problem is that you can’t possibly know where a shortened URL will take you, nor are there any suspicious patterns that you would be able to pick up on. For example:
Normal URLs
Legit:
- www.google.com
- www.paypal.com
Fraud/phishing/virus/junk:
- http://cash4u2nite.ru
- http://188.221.3.88
Shortened URLs
Legit:
- http://bit.ly/14d7yE
- http://tinyurl.com/oex2e
Fraud/phishing/virus/junk:
- http://ow.ly/Dhdo
- http://tr.im/Fckc
See the problem? It’s impossible for even a seasoned internet-goer to tell which of the shortened URLs lead to unsafe websites. We’ve all gotten used to clicking on these anonymous links without having any idea where they’ll take us. And this is all in addition to the problem of link rot as the shortening services go belly-up once their backers discover there’s no money to be made in it. Just say no!
work-in-progress Ork trukk
November 16th, 2009
When Games Workshop came out with their new Ork Trukk kit I instantly fell in love. The old model was nigh-on ancient and far too small, being more than a decade old originating in a game where the Orks were the size of modern-day grots. It was really quite weedy and even back in 2002 it looked pretty dumb. But the new one was a total smash hit!
About a year ago one of my friends got me a new kit and it thought it was just soooo cool! I hurriedly assembled most of it and gazed at the detail and precision of the new model. But then I stopped about 75% through assembling it according to the directions. It would look just like everybody else’s trukk! That wouldn’t do; Ork vehicles were meant to be customized, converted, and made unique and personal. I guess I wasn’t in a very converty mood so I dejectedly sat it down and sort of forgot about it for a while.
After my last game I realized that it was really sad to be using this half-finished trukk that was just begging for some love. So I got back to work on it. Here’s where it’s at right now:
The rokkit mount is an experiment since I attached it with rare earth disc magnets
Besides tossing rivets and bolts everywhere, the biggest alteration still remaining is the wire mesh case I want to mostly enclose the back. I sort of want it to look a bit like the cage from McLeach’s Bushwhacker, of which you can actually see the original Disney 3D model right here! Oh, the internet!
Obviously the cage part will be more decorative then confining, as the Orks inside wouldn’t want to have any hindrances to them getting out to knock some heads.
Whaddaya think so far?
ROLL THE DICE! ROLL THE DICE! ROLL THE DICE! WHOOOOOOO!
November 15th, 2009
My friend over at ChameleonInsurrection has posted an extremely enlightening missive on the subject of Games Workshop stores (Games Workshop makes Warhammer 40K, for those not in the know). I’ve always felt weirded out in those stores, as if I were terribly out of place despite my earnest desire to purchase the offered products and socialize with other fans of the game. It’s like the employees are ashamed of their products, and try their best to inculcate that very sense of shame in their employees and customers. Go have a read, it’s pretty fascinating.
The last hippo you’d want to trust
November 13th, 2009
Back in college, I once discovered the BlueHippo company. They’re a firm that sells laptops to poor people with the enticing prospect of no-credit-check financing. But under the hood, they’re an incredibly sleazy, predatory company that makes their money based on their target market’s financial ignorance. Take, for example, the following ad from back in 2006, when I found it (I took a screenshot, and it’s obviously not around anymore):
See how many scummy things you can find in the ad! Wow, a shitty laptop for only 52 payments of $50; what could be better!? A couple of my friends and I were so outraged by this that we prank-called them a couple of times, just to see if they were really as unscrupulous as they seemed. It turns out they pretty much were, dodging questions and offering half-answers when asked about the pricing structure, and simply lying outright regarding the product itself. Don’t take my word for it; we actually recorded one of my friends! The resulting conversation is enlightening, in a sad sort of way:
Here are a few of the outrages revealed by this conversation:
- The sales rep allows the customer to believe that he will only be making 5 weeks of payments and pay only a total of $380, rather than the full lifetime price of $2730 (!!!).
- She lies about the length of the creditworthiness payment period: it’s actually 13 weeks, not 5.
- She lies about the free printer deal, though the website clearly features it on the laptop page.
- She lies about the computer’s specs: it has a 256K cache, not 256 Megabytes of RAM, and it has only a CD-ROM drive, not a CD-DVD combo drive.
- She lies about the included software, saying it comes with word, which it obviously doesn’t.
Thus it was with glee that I found an article on ArsTechnica today describing the FTC’s probe into BlueHippo’s affairs. They’ve discovered that BlueHippo raked in 15 million dollars and only shipped one PC. That’s right, only one PC. Based on the tactics their sales staff uses, I can believe it.
It sounds like the FTC is finally getting its act together to bring down the hammer, and I say it’s about time! My friends and I were shocked three years ago when we discovered that a business like this actually existed, and I’m still shocked today that it hasn’t been shut down yet!
On a somewhat related note, I’ll mention that I’m often asked how the poor will be protected from predatory scams like this in a Libertarian society. The answer is actually pretty close to what the FTC is already supposed to do: enforce anti-fraud laws. The sales rep my friend talked to over the phone flat-out lied to him, a potential purchaser. That should be illegal. Like, Federal-pound-me-in-the-ass-prison illegal. The functioning of a market economy relies on sellers’ and purchasers’ abilities to make informed decisions. When participants lie to each other, bad products get bought and sold; wealth is squandered; trust is lost; people feel cheated.
A more Libertarian society would recognize that the free flow of information is paramount to voluntary exchange and therefore harshly punish deception and fraud. BlueHippo’s business is a textbook definition of these abuses. The ArsTechnica article mentions some fees it has so far been forced to pay; a truly just restitution would see the company forced to return all the money it accumulated from its customers in a fraudulent fashion, and 100% of that money would go back to the victims, not the enforcement agency. This would reduce the company’s lifetime revenue to zero, and its profit to something negative, thus putting it deep into debt and almost certainly probably out of business. That sounds like a fair punishment to me, and it’s more than has actually happened in this case.
Look out for “The radical homosexual agenda!”
November 12th, 2009
Can anyone explain to me what this is? Whenever I read anything about gays and the political battles surrounding them, there are always a few dudes who come out of the woodwork and start yelling about, “THE RADICAL HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA!” I would love for anyone to explain to me just what this is or means, because I’ve known and am friends with a whole bunch of gay people, and none of them had an “agenda” beyond simply wanting to be recognized as fellow human beings, entitled to all the rights and privileges as any other one, regardless of what who they prefer to share their plumbing with.
Ultimately it usually comes down to the fact that there are a lot of people who are scared of gays and don’t relish the thought of living in a world where homosexuality is considered acceptable or (shudder) normal. But their mistake is in thinking that their perceived right to inhabit such a world trumps the actual right of the people in question to peacefully live their own lives free from government persecution and discrimination. This is what the civil rights movement was fought about: blacks were legally and socially second-class citizens, with the local governments complicit in their repression. Such repression can’t happen without a government allowing or at least turning a blind eye to it, and the keys to ending it were normalizing blacks in society, and having a bigger government force the smaller ones to acknowledge and protect black people’s freedom just like they did for white people.
And that’s really what this is all about: anti-gay people basically admit that they want the government to discriminate against gay people and treat them like second-class citizens and allow them to do so as well, in the same way that blacks and women were treated for much of the last century.
Sadly, the bigotry engendered by the belief that you have the right to live in a country whose government represses groups you disapprove of doesn’t end with the modern right; I find about as many examples of the left doing it too. One I’d like to draw attention to is (surprise!) the Brady Campaign’s Doug Pennington. Buried in his latest post is a telling sentence:
An aside: isn’t it ironic how some libertarians want government to stay out of their lives, yet have no problem with forcing other people to live with loaded, concealed weapons everywhere they turn? The grocery store; the park; the school; the airport. Apparently, we have the “freedom” to live with what these so-called libertarians tell us to live with. After all, they have the guns, right?
Try replacing the words “loaded, concealed weapons” with “gays” or “negroes”. Looks a lot more bigoted now, huh? The truth is, we have to live with a lot of things that we might find distasteful. The Bill of Rights in fact ensures it!
For example, the First Amendment forces us to live with inflammatory newspaper articles that insult our beliefs, and fringe religions that blaspheme against all that we consider holy; it does this because each individual’s freedom to believe, express, and worship what he wishes trumps everybody else’s sense of offense and umbrage against same. Similarly, the Second Amendment forces us to live with our neighbors’ right to own and carry weapons, and the Fourteenth Amendment forces us to accept black people and other racial minorities as legally equal to white people.
No government can force freedom onto anyone; it can only force bigots to recognize others’ existing freedoms. That’s the whole point of the Bill of Rights, and that was the genius behind the American form of government — the idea that the government would act as a guarantor of liberty rather than its chief infringer, as was the case under theocracy and monarchy. Our history is a rollercoaster ride of coming closer and backing away from that ideal, as exemplified by highs like the civil rights movement or the decriminalization of sodomy, and lows like the Japanese-American internment during World War II or the normalization of the income tax in 1913.
But let no one believe that any one political party has a monopoly on this bigotry. It was beloved Democrat FDR who interned the Japanese-Americans by executive order as much as it was was racist Republicans who opposed civil rights. In this vein, I’ll end with one of my favorite Reason.tv videos: