Anything Else

Scott Adams writing about his fantasy political party. Quote:

As President, I would refer to myself as the Chief Flashlight. I would shine light on whatever the citizens needed to know to form their opinions. I’d order the government to publish on the Internet continuous debates on all important issues. And I’d let the proponents of each side manage their sides of the debate. I’d order a team of independent researchers to attach links to any factual claims so you citizens can see for yourselves who is trying to hoodwink you. Both sides would be free to make any claims they like. But the independent team would always point the reader to the facts. Over time, the compulsive liars would lose all credibility and be pushed aside by their own people.

As President, I would rarely take sides on the major issues. My job would be to bring the best arguments on all sides of every issue to the citizens and help them make up their own minds. My administration would make it a top priority to improve how the government communicates with its citizens. And that might require making the information more entertaining or at least easier to digest. As a general rule I would say that if the citizens don’t understand both sides of all important issues, I have failed as President. If the people need simple charts and graphs, I’ll provide them. If they need puppet shows, I’ll stick my hand in a tube sock and hide behind my desk. Whatever it takes.

Judiciary throughout the world is based on the basic premise that given same amount of knowledge any one will arrive at the same conclusion. Every single difference in opinion, and thus problem in this world, is just a failure in communication. Veda: He who is an idiot makes up his mind, smart ones try to know.

Google released Picasa for Linux today. Picasa is a very good image management software, available only for Windows until before this.

Google Earth for Linux is underway.

Why is this such an important news?

Microsoft considers Google one of their biggest threat, and their CEO has 'vowed to kill Google'. Google has been rather pro Microsoft in their software offerings till late, though they try their best to cater to their interests in browser market. Things got a little interesting after DOJ Rebuffs Complaints About IE 7 Search Box, and looks like Google has decided to go head on with Microsoft. First today Google announced partnership with Dell to bundle Google software with PCs. To add to it, Google has decided to do a psychological warfare with Microsoft by supporting Linux for a few of their applications. Linux users should not jump with joy though, as Google stands to gain very little by a gain in Linux users, and this gambit is almost purely for blackmail/extortion [both these applications must have been in the process of porting since some time, just that Google has decided to launch them now to drive shiver through Microsoft]. Also Google almost never announces that they are working on some application before launching it, Google Earth for Linux is their first pre-announcement. Google Earth Linux is supposed to be a rewrite using Qt etc, which might well has been done to add Mac support.

Microsoft has much to worry. Google worked very closely with CodeWeaver on Picasa port, offering them a large amount of software help, it would be a trivial matter for Google to just buy CodeWeaver and make it free [making my wish come true]. CodeWeaver lets you run a lot of Microsoft Windows application on Linux.

In other news, Rediff ran a review of OpenOffice today. They are pretty happy with it. Bad day to be in Redmond I guess.

In short, there is this (bloody?) thing called democracy. 61% of Indian population is deciding to give themselves unfair advantage. The question in life never is what is wrong or right, the question is what do people think is wrong or right. 61% think the 27% have failed them and hate them from their bottom of their hearts. You have to gain their confidence before you can get them to listen to you. Think people. Think how they think.

You can not reason someone out of from where they did not reason themselves in.

(But) You can make people friends.

Is India better off without reservations but people still hating us? Vengence may not be the best word, but it might not be the worst choice either to describe what is that we are dealing with here. I would any day let them "win" here and forget "history".

Rediff:

The pages of history are littered with the ruins of countries that were indifferent to erosion of the balance of power. Losses on the periphery where a country's interests appear marginal, never seem to merit a response or warrant a confrontation with the enemy. But small losses add up. Expansionist powers thrive on picking up loose geopolitical change. When it comes, it usually takes place under the worst possible circumstances for those on the defensive.'

--Former US President Richard M Nixon, quoted in my book India's Defence Policies and Strategic Thought, A Comparative Analysis, to highlight how Indian policies ignored the balance of power concept, and how India was inclined to marginalise its far flung peripheries.

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, oblivious to the crucial strategic significance of Aksai Chin (North Ladakh), gifted it away to China, a Himalayan blunder that India still rues. Nehru hid the fact of the Chinese annexation of Indian territory for nearly eight years, and later justified the loss by describing Aksai Chin as a desolate area where not a blade of grass grew.

Half a century later, the present government seems set to repeat history.

While we are busy fighting who would get bigger share of the cake.

Schneier says: .

Great op-ed in The New York Times on why the NSA's data mining efforts won't work, by Jonathan Farley, math professor at Harvard.

The simplest reason is that we're all connected. Not in the Haight-Ashbury/Timothy Leary/late-period Beatles kind of way, but in the sense of the Kevin Bacon game. The sociologist Stanley Milgram made this clear in the 1960's when he took pairs of people unknown to each other, separated by a continent, and asked one of the pair to send a package to the other -- but only by passing the package to a person he knew, who could then send the package only to someone he knew, and so on. On average, it took only six mailings -- the famous six degrees of separation -- for the package to reach its intended destination.

Looked at this way, President Bush is only a few steps away from Osama bin Laden (in the 1970's he ran a company partly financed by the American representative for one of the Qaeda leader's brothers). And terrorist hermits like the Unabomber are connected to only a very few people. So much for finding the guilty by association.

A second problem with the spy agency's apparent methodology lies in the way terrorist groups operate and what scientists call the "strength of weak ties." As the military scientist Robert Spulak has described it to me, you might not see your college roommate for 10 years, but if he were to call you up and ask to stay in your apartment, you'd let him. This is the principle under which sleeper cells operate: there is no communication for years. Thus for the most dangerous threats, the links between nodes that the agency is looking for simply might not exist.

(This, by him, is also worth reading.)

Savage Chickens: proving since Jan 2005 that you can be a cartoonist even if you almost can not draw.

Rashmi has another post on reservations. But she makes a mistake. [Please read that post before proceeding.] Her entire argument rests on numbers, and that too not even hers, they are by some TV interviewer:

The NSSO 1999, which is the most recent of the NSSO studies available, conclusively shows that the share of SCs, STs and OBCs in employment is exactly proportional to their share of the population.

[Which were probably quoted from this place.] The figures that compelled me to write my last post about reservations seems to say something different:
SC/ST represent 28% of the population, and represent (104.5/353.5)=29% of total labour, (4.5/36.3=)12.4% of educated labour and (1.4/12.9=)10.9% in good jobs. Corresponding figures for OBC(Hindus): 32%(27), 33.7%(26), 23.4%(58) and 18%(64). So yes, probably in terms of total labour, the percentages are equal, but only an ignorant will say that OBCs and SC/ST are represented properly in terms of employment.

Looks like the devils advocate does not know that the devil is in detail.

PS: Karan Thapar would have been kicked out of a real court for his clearly ambush defence tactic.

She is talking about thefword:

The Rape Article

So. Drunk girl does the bonkity-bonk with drunk guy at a party, then wakes up in the morning and cries rape. Guy says it was consensual. Girl doesn't really remember much of anything that happened that night. (I guess her entire case consists of "I'd never willingly sleep with that guy no matter how drunk I was - look how ugly!") Anyway, the judge dismisses the case, and the prosecutor is quoted as saying "drunken consent is still consent", and making remarks to the effect of, "women are adults, and must bear responsibility for their own actions". Meanwhile, the guy is getting back to his life, trying to come to terms with being the butt of his friends' jokes for ever and ever and evermore. ("I'll bet she wouldn't even remember you bonked her if she hadn't woken up naked next to you, eh, Jimmy boy?")

Ellery, the Modern Feminist, is pissed. Oh looky, the big MCP prosecutor guy with his curling moustache and offensive Italian suit (because Italians are all misogynists, of course). He's blaming the victim! (er, victim of what?) How about suggesting the men take responsibility, too, huh? How about we tell everyone never to drink too much, huh? The guy was equally to blame! (er, for what?) Where's the equal treatment?

The rest.

A very interesting post. Must read. Interesting Quote:

Reservation has taken a totally new meaning here, it is no longer (was it ever) about social justice... It is now about demanding as a birthright a cut of medical seats based on caste.

The parallel universe.

Name:Nyayapati Gautam

Location:Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

I am just another average 30+ chap with a view on everything around me. Politics, women, sports, work, travel, India and its place on the world stage - you name it and I have a point of view. And I would like to share it with as many people as possible.

Find some nice posts by him on The India Story.

Note: I am "upper caste" [as much as I hate this title] and any mention of "we" refers to them.

There is a huge furor going on in India these days over the newly propsed reservation in India. For visitors outside India, this issue is so intense that it lead to hundreads of students burning themselves in protest against it about 10 years ago. Namit has written some thing about it that you should read.

The people who burnt themselves and Namit is wrong. We should support reservations.


Here is why: 234 million out of 998 million Indians are the "forward" category that is not getting reservations, this is about 24%. If goventment decided to open 100 schools, 75 of which are in the area which covers 75 percent of the population, would it be unfair on the rest of the 25%? How is it different from reservation. 75% population deciding government should give them 75% share in all allotments it has say over, is only democratic.

Now the core issue: "lower caste" people are deprived. They are a lot in numbers. And they hate upper caste. And they hate Gandhi. This hate, which is what is being channeled has been conspeciously missing in all the whole debate. Politicians reconize this hatredness, they fuel it, and reap the benefits in votes. Politicans are not the cause, they are the affect.

We keep on saying education is what makes people think strainght, and yet never question our assumption that all those economically backward classes of society are making sound judgement about who is responsible for their misery. We think that they know that we are not responsible for their misery and that that they know their only problem is uneducation. They do not know that. We may take long to educate them in general, but we can educate them about the fact that we are not the reason of their misery much more easily. We can do that by ending this enviorenment of hate. We have to offer the olive branch of reservation, that alone will convince them that we are sincere.

A lot of people burnt themselves, because they mistenly fell for the "minority" reservation name that is used for it. People think that "minorities" are getting disprotionate reservation in schools. The problem is they are not "minority" despite being called so. This confusion is the main reason for the angst of "majority" hindus. We are equally "uneducated". We hate them for this reason. We hate them for being the reason for our percieved loss in opportunities.

This is a classic case of divide and rule. We hate them. They hate us. We fight over who would get bigger share of 100 seats when we combined should be fighting to get our deserved 1000 seats. Politicians are screwing us, not by alloting us smaller share, but by making us think counting shares is what the real issue is about.

Let us not ask who gets how much, lets ask if the total we are getting combined is enough? Does governemt need to spend more on education? Is it the funds that are stopping those extra schools or ineffeciency [and corruption] of fund allotment? Let us take the fight to them.

Lets take reservation as an opportunity to make friends.

You know when geeks think they’re multitasking in front of the computer? Heck, I often think I do. Realistically speaking I’m not... I only do one thing after another, no matter how many windows I have opened.

It’s like this: whenever I upload something to my server, or download a big file from somewhere, I’m switching to another task... say, photoshopping a picture. While theoretically this saves time (when you program too much, you hard-wire “optimization” into your brain!), I’ll mostly end up dabbling with the other task far longer than the download will take... so basically, I’m getting back to the old task after 30 minutes, even though the download only took 5 minutes.

At my last job (one big open room, a phone on every desk!), after a while I made it a rule to never do more than two tasks at the same time, no matter how smallish the third or fourth task would appear. ’Cause here’s what happens if you “multitask.” Say, you’re programming something on site A. Then the manager comes along and wants you to upload site B (maybe your team agreed on putting up a red flag on the desk if you’re busy, but your manager retains the right to overrule the flag with “ASAP” tasks).
Soon thereafter an Outlook alert pops up. Oh, it’s just one of those office joke mails – but if you don’t read them you’ll send around the same joke a month later, and everybody flames you. So you quickly glance through the mail, and then you notice the attachment doesn’t load properly. You end up walking over to your sysadmin, who has a problem with a script at that moment. So you help him with the script, but you don’t know the answer, so the two of you google for a bit. You find a page in the results which isn’t necessary what you were looking for but it seems interesting, so you... OK, you get the point.

Do you still remember the original task I was talking of? Right, site A... it didn’t progress at all for the last hour. And that upload for site B was finished since, well, you don’t really know, and you’re not even sure you uploaded the necessary 12 files, or just 11, because just when you started the upload, your manager came along.

No, this ain’t multitasking... that’s chaintasking. And it’s almost useless, though it may make us feel like we’re achieving more. What really happens is that we’re downsizing our attention frames – proud to have achieved 20 tasks that day, we might have only gotten around to do one or two properly.

On Google Blogscpoed.

While random readings I came across this gem:

The ps pipeline also contains a true grep gem, which was kindly sent to me by Hans Peter Verne. Notice that grep -v grep is no longer part of the pipeline; instead, it has been removed and grep "ssh-agent" has been changed to grep "[s]sh-agent". This single grep command ends up doing the same thing as grep ssh-agent | grep -v grep; can you figure out why?

Listing 10. Neat grep trick

mypids=`ps $psopts 2>/dev/null | grep "[s]sh-agent" | awk '{print $2}'` > /dev/null 2>&1

Stumped? If you've decided that a grep "ssh-agent" and grep "[s]sh-agent" should match the exact same lines of text, you are correct. So why do they generate different results when the output of ps is piped to them? Here's how it works: when you use grep "[s]sh-agent", you change how the grep command appears in the ps process list. By doing so, you prevent grep from matching itself, since the [s]sh-agent string doesn't match the [s]sh-agent regular expression. Isn't that brilliant? If you still don't get it, play around with grep a bit more and you'll get it soon enough.

My respect for him has increased. Link

Symptom:

amitu@red:~/work$ svn co  http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/ django_mr
svn: REPORT request failed on '/svn/!svn/vcc/default'
svn: REPORT of '/svn/!svn/vcc/default': 400 Bad Request (http://code.djangoproject.com)
amitu@red:~/work$

Reason: Very likely you are behind a transparent proxy.

Solution: Something like this? Try your luck.

The hookworm uses sharp "teeth" to attach itself to the gut

The journey of the worm into the human host is circuitous - from the feet, the parasite makes its way up via blood vessels to the lung, where it can move up into the throat, and then get swallowed down into the digestive system.

Here it uses sharp "teeth" to attach itself firmly to the gut wall.

On BBC