samuraipanda.com

Okay, so a 14-year old girl was hired to baby sit a 8-year old boy. They began playing “Truth-or-Dare”. At some point, she invites him to touch her breast. He does, and later brags about it to his mom. His mom calls the police. The police brought in the DA. The DA charged the BOY with lewdness on a minor. The article doesn’t say if the 14-year old girl was also charged, but the tone is that she wasn’t. The charges were later dropped. This distirbs me in a couple of ways:

1. The boy was charge with lewdness on a minor even though he was neary half the girls age.
2. That a game of “Truth-or-Dare” can get a kid charged with a crime.

The first goes to a double standard in my society. Girls are innocent; boys are not. If a man has sex with a female minor, he’s sent to jail. If a woman has sex with a male minor, until recently, nothing happened. The former was abuse while the latter was a right of passage. It’s a huge double standard. It is expecially bad when the victum in this case is the senior.

For the second, kids doing any sort of exploration with anything remotly sexual has become a criminal offense. While I don’t condone kids having sex, childhood is about exploring the world and sometimes that will involve touching a girls breast because she asked to. This has happened since the dawn of time and it is only because of this shame our society because we are a puritan group of people that would rather let kids play violent criminals then have anything to do with sexuality.

Ultimately it will come to this: people who look suspiscious will be attacked and possibly killed. That is the problem with profiling people. That is the problem with identifying a selection of people for separation based solely on how they look or dress. It doesn’t work and will ultimatly result in innocent being affected more then the guitly.

Media companies are scared. And rightfully so. In a world of evolving technology, countries with differing laws, and anonymity on the net, pirates can quickly and accurately duplicate any bit of media in a matter of hours. Case in point, the new Harry Potter book. Within a day, pirates had scanned the book, converted it to text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), proof-read it for accuracy, and posted it to the net. They did this as a collaborative effort via online conferences rooms called IRC. Some of them don’t even know each other. Couple this with an apparently “beautifully read” version of the new book having been made available online and you begin to understand that there is potentially 7 billion people willing to circumnavigate any copy protection available. And they are able to do it faster each day. It’s like trying to hold back the ocean with a cup. Eventually the media companies may need to give up on DRM as too expensive for too little return.

While I agree with the potential abandonment of DRN, I fear the future of media. Already, kids can download just about any song available for free. This sense of “freedom” can bestow a sense of entitlement. What used to be a belief that “I’m only one person downloading a song; I not hurting anyone” becomes a belief that “I should be able to get songs for free”. It’s a spoiled kid syndrome, with kids becoming adults who want something for nothing (not a bad concept in and of itself, just not very sustainable. Look at the .com era). If that happens, what will happen to the media companies? More importantly, what will become of the quality media they (sometimes) can produce?

Of course, maybe this is capitalism at it’s best. Maybe the recent spat of bad media (movie redux; carbon-copy music) needs to be forced out by free media. Maybe it will teach the Media Companies that just because you produce a work doesn’t entitle you to sell a million overpriced copies because you prey on the kids through bright lights and marketing pitches. Perhaps this desire to get something for nothing will turn into a desire for low-quality for nothing, high-quality for a fair price.

I don’t really have an opinion on the Rove-Plame hoopla. I just find the spin coming out amusing:

“If anyone in this administration was involved in it [the improper disclosure of an undercover CIA operative's identity], they would no longer be in this administration.” – Scott McClellan, September 29, 2003.

“I don’t know of anyone in my administration who has leaked. If somebody did leak classified information, I’d like to know it, and we’ll take the appropriate action. And this investigation is a good thing.” – president Bush, September 30, 2003.

“I would like this to end as quickly as possible so we know the facts and if someone committed a crime they will no longer work in my administration,” – president Bush, today.

Going from firing those involved to “appropriate action” for those involved to firing those who “commited a crime”. Spin, baby, spin.

Taken from andrewsullivan.com

I don’t get it. I’ve had a Mac Mini since they were released, subscribing to the hype that the Mac is more stable/better then a Windows XP box. But I’ve had all sorts of problems since the beginning. First it was the random lock up of Finder, bring the entire system to a crawl. Then it was the seemingly malicious deletion of tracks from iTunes. Today it’s the inability to burn a DVD with iDVD because iDVD locks up or ejects the DVD with a “burn errors” message. Couple this with lockups of other applications (DragThing, Firefox, etc.) and the luster of of the Mac has faded. Now it’s just a semi-functional pretty GUI that “just works” about half the time. I continue to use it because despite all of the problems, I want to learn more about the OS.

I’ve updated the site to WordPress 1.5. It’ll take me a while to integrate my changes back in.

The continuing philosophical split in the United States can be labeled not as Liberal and Conservative, but instead those who believe in the First Amendment and those who believe in the Second.

Those that believe in the Second Amendment, believe in being able to protect themselves from outside influences, with a government based on their religious beliefs, and the freedom to violently depose those they do not agree with might makes right, in fighting those who disagree. They believe in individual initative and survival of the fitness.

Those who believe in the First Amendment believe in freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and freedom of press. They believe in a diversity of opinion and religious expression. They believe in cooperation and support of the weaker.

I’m not sure what to think of the concept of “grown meat”, meat cells grown without the rest of the animal. It offers the ability to grow a food that looks, smells, and tastes like meat without killing an animal. There are some ethical issues that may need to be addressed such as is it vegetarian, but overall it may be a good thing for animals. Hmm, maybe I’ll be able to eat KFC once again…Mmmm, greasy “chicken” wings .