suboptimal information

Should it be legal to discriminate against honor killer families?

Honor killings are often carried out against family members perceived or suspected of having brought shame onto the family, usually by a sibling or previous generation relative.

While most certainly illegal, it should be fair in a big picture point of view to discriminate against the same class of shamed people if they or their kin carry out an honor killing. I may not care that some dude’s sister married a person of a lesser caste, but if his mother and brothers killed her over it, maybe I don’t want to risk giving him a job or renting him an apartmenet. Who knows what the risks are - I could be out a large investment in training if he’s later arrested for conspiracy in the original honor killing or involvement in some other honor killing of some other family member.

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The absurdity of an over-abundance of caution

Allen Lee is told to write anything, without consideration of appropriate or even inappropriate censorship, as part of a creative writing assignment. For his troubles he’s arrested for two counts of disturbing the peace, effectively expelled (the action taken isn’t expulsion, but the result is the same - he’s no longer going to that school, it’s a disciplinary action, and against his will), and has been released from his chosen future - the United States Marine Corps.

What would people - parents of students - do if the teacher had given them an assignment under the pretext of writing in a thought crime society where every possible thought crime contrary to the interests of the the greater good is prosecuted. What would they have done if the teacher instructed the students to write a paper under this premise and insisted that they not identify themselves, gave every student a copy of every essay, and then told them all that they would get a failing grade on the assignment unless they found a plausible neo-conservative, ultra fundamentalist, or otherwise extremist reason for prosecuting the writer of every essay.

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I may have to try this on my busted Roomba

My roomba lost a fight with a protest my cat made in the corner. The roomba now only goes backwards. I may have to try this fix for the roomba circle dance.

Don Imus

Someone attempting to spur an ethics debate about ethnic slurs and the measure of reasonable versus unreasonable response to their use - accepted or not - by participating audience and third parties after the fact seemed to me to have missed a key factor.  Firing someone in Don Imus’ position is completely unrelated to how offensive a particular comment was, the audience that was or was not offended by it, the outside parties that heard about it and took offense, or even cultural ambiguities that may surround a given slur that might make it inoffensive language when used in context between cooperating social groups.  Firing is a business decision. Continue reading Don Imus…

I think I want to build an RC car

I want to build a radio controlled car, or rather a truck, for an interesting robotics experiment. Self contained digital video recorders and wireless video cameras have progressed to the point that individually, their use on RC cars is relatively common as evidenced by a robust collection of bumper-view, hood-view, and zip-tied-to-the-roof view videos of RC cars tooling around in houses, parking lots, race tracks, dirt tracks, and populated streets complete with real vehicle traffic.

The questions this presents:

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And today, March 30th 2007, Macs….

Macs…

Continue reading And today, March 30th 2007, Macs…….

Hosting multiple wordpress instances

I set up three wordpress blogs (including this one) in the course of about twelve hours last weekend. It started out as an interest in setting up some sort of photoblog for my guinea pigs on their website (on whose webhosting this blog is vhosted on). A buddy suggested wordpress so I gave it a spin. One concern I had was to have a single software install if at all possible both to reduce disk usage (while not at all a significant cost factor on my hosting account, just on princple why waste disk space) and to eliminate having to cascade changes. So I set forth at trying to share a wordpress install on my hosting account.

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TMI about Tony Snow

I really didn’t need to know that much about Tony Snow’s personal health.  While I wish him the best recovery science and nature can provide, the media could have stopped at “cancer returns”.

Hey, I’ve seen this movie

Wasn’t this Jennifer 8, with Andy Garcia and Uma Thurman?

ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida (AP) — The Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind allowed felons to work on campus construction jobs during the past two years, according to interviews and documents.

Many of the workers were allowed on campus even though they had failed background checks, school employees complained.

The felons included a man convicted of domestic battery and selling cocaine; a man convicted of aggravated assault; and a man convicted of offenses including trafficking in hallucinogens, battery on his spouse and domestic violence, The St. Augustine Record reported Sunday.

Girdle… of *live* crocodiles… WTF?

How the hell does someone come up with this idea? I mean it’s not like they’re gonna sit still and cooperate while this woman was strapping them on. Sure, their snouts were tied shut, but they could still squirm.

JERUSALEM (AP) — A woman was caught with three crocodiles strapped to her waist at the Gaza-Egypt border crossing after guards noticed that she looked “strangely fat,” officials said.

The woman’s odd shape raised suspicions at the Rafah terminal in southern Gaza, and a body search by a female border guard turned up the animals, each about 50 centimeters (20 inches) long, concealed underneath her loose robe, according to Maria Telleria, spokeswoman for the European observers who run the crossing.

“The woman looked strangely fat. Even though she was veiled and covered, even with so many clothes on there was something strange,” Telleria said.
Continue reading Girdle… of *live* crocodiles… WTF?…