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:
Evolve!
November 10th, 2009
The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon
November 1st, 2009
Well, that was ten minutes of my life I’ll never get back, but somehow I don’t mind!
SPOOOOOOON!
Drown them in flames!
October 31st, 2009
I never got around to posting a picture of one of my favorite scratch-built Ork vehicles, my Skorcha Skidoo. This little demon can routinely murder dozens of Imperial Guardsmen and Tyranids with its beautiful flamey goodness. I actually finished it about a year ago, but you know what they say: if it isn’t on the internet, it doesn’t exist! So allow me to bring it into the world once and for all:
On Engineering and Law
October 31st, 2009
Sebastian is absolutely right:
I think law is something that comes rather easily to engineers, since it’s basically just [a] boolean logic system, but written in plain English. If (A || B || C) && !D && !E is true, you’re violating the statute. There is a system to it, and legal structures are less complicated than even simple microprocessors. Law also has obscure exceptions to generally given rules, which is something you also come across a lot in computer engineering. Computer engineers deal with bugs, just as judges must deal with poorly drafted legislation that yields absurd, clearly unintended results.
To a thought process that’s heavily oriented towards systems and logical structure, law provides, in many ways, much more interesting puzzles and conundrums. Unlike with circuits, where there’s just a right way and a wrong way to do things, law provides much more opportunity for philosophical exploration.
It’s certainly been true for me. I also think that one of the reasons that logical engineery people get frustrated with politicians easily is that unlike engineers, they often seem to have no interest in fixing the “bugs” in laws, and flawed laws often remain on the books for years or decades despite widespread knowledge of their existence. It’s the job of a good engineer to fix the bugs in his code or his spec, but the job of a politician entails so much wheeling-and-dealing and the need to please diverse constituencies that a lot of the kinks will never get ironed out. Imagine if corporate engineers were also their own managers — just think of how shoddy most products would be! That’s basically how politics works.
Interestingly enough, this is why early 20th-century social theorist and economist Thorstein Veblen believed that the ideal society would be run by engineers, creating what would be known as the the Technocracy movement. Veblen was sort of a crackpot, and despised athletes, priests, soldiers, and others who he viewed as merely predatorily looting what the creative engineers had produced. His ideas never made it very far because, as you can imagine, priests, athletes, and soldiers remain some of the most popular kinds of people.
Mini-review: Boxee
October 30th, 2009
I’m really digging Boxee, a free, open-source media center program. Basically, it’s a piece of software that turns your computer into a TV by aggregating online videos and such from places like YouTube, the Onion Online (which is hilarious, by the way), ComedyCentral.com, and other places that have lots of awesome free content. It also plays your own local videos, no matter what format they happen to have been encoded in. All you have to do it hook up the computer to a TV, and you’ve got a pretty compelling living room entertainment center.
I have it on my media center/gaming PC and it’s pretty wonderful. It loads at boot, so I only have to look at Windows XP’s ugly mug for a second or two before it opens. I have access to my ripped DVDs and quite a few intertubes worth of content, and the user interface is quite nice too. Alas, it has a pretty silly logo:
Well, it is open-source! [rimshot] In all seriousness, there are some quirks and things you have to do for yourself, such as figure out a way to control it from your couch. That was actually one of the biggest issues I had with it for a while. I would lug over my big ol’ 104-key keyboard, which sort of breaks you out of the illusion that you’re not actually sitting in front of a Windows box. Luckily, there’s a free Boxee app that basically turns your iPhone into a remote control! Problem solved.
Beyond that, I really only have only good things to say. It’s obviously not for your grandparents as it requires creating on online account and manually installing and configuring it, but anyone who can use a web browser and Word can accomplish it all easily enough. And did I mention it’s free?
Soon: Toshiba to be sued over excessive TV-watching causing poor academic performance
October 30th, 2009
Next up on the gravy-train of ridiculous comes an actual thing that actually happened and was actually brought about by actual people: baseball bat manufacturer Louisville Slugger has just lost a lawsuit brought by the mother of a boy who was killed in a tragic baseball accident. Their crime? Manufacturing aluminum baseball bats, which the grieving family argued “are dangerous because they cause the ball to travel faster than those hit off wooden bats.”
No lie.
No joke.
To quote the post I found this in:
I guess the jury believes that had warning labels been placed on the bats, Patch would have read the label, refused to play and be alive today.
(the comments over there are pretty great, too.)
Clearly we need to do this universally. Imagine now many lives would be saved if everything were labeled or banned! Like maybe this:
Or this. It’s for the children. Obviously.