VAULT Rants – Page 3 – Survivor to Software

The Slow Death of Democracy

Old Europe is dying. For 200 years philosophers and thinkers have predicted the failure of Democracy. Not from the slow creeping encroachment of civil liberties, but because of the steady natural drift of progress socialism. Once a people learn that democracy can be use as a vehicle for wealth redistribution; the unstoppable decline of freedom will have already begun. While civil liberties are often taken away and returned based on the ebb and flow of a counties appetite for conflict; economic liberties (arguably the more important of the two freedoms), once taken away, are almost never returned.

Witness, France. Long thought to be a fountainhead of liberal progressive socialism. Where, whatever your state of being, the government can always be counted on to save you. The reality is entirely different however. Some places in France are experiencing unemployment levels equal to those of the United States DURING the great depression. The economy is in shambles and the almost universally recognized reason, the very government programs that the citizens have come to depend on. Within a decade or two, the economy of France will be so bad that the government will go totally bankrupt trying to pay for it all.

This problem is both well known and well understood. Regardless of the Utopian ideals of college professors and social activists; the reality is that there is simply a limit to what a government can be expected to do to help its citizens. At some point trust (and personal responsibility) must be places in the citizenry themselves. The USSR (and almost every communist country in the world) failed because of the realization, China has stayed a communist country because they identified and reformed (just) their economy in light of this realization Yet in France’s developed democracy; any reform (to fix the admittedly identified problem) is met with such hostility that their are riots in the streets.

Its a sad reality that the Presidents domestic spying and counter-terrorist programs (in the form of the Patriot Acts) are less likely to hurt American Democracy than his prescription drug package and the “No Child Left Behind” initiative.

KDE: Shared vs Open

Shared specifications and shared standards are an admirable goal as long as the “standards” are not acting as limitations to the advancement of a given technology. This was the problem that KDE ran into with the use of Corba. It was a open and shared standard used by KDE (and Gnome) in its early development. But we quickly discovered that it became a nightmare to manage/extend to the more advanced uses that we wanted to see KDE move towards. The decision was made (and lots of “shared standard” developers SCREAMED about the change) to switch to a custom KDE specification now known as KParts. History has shown that decision to use KParts was the correct one, as KDE would NOT have progressed to the level it has using Corba.

As long as the standard is good for KDE development and advances our ability to provide application solutions to users (and developers) then I am all for shared standards. But the moment those standards hold back KDE development in the interest of some “perceived” value from shared specifications. We can all agree on standards up until those standards have the net result of holding-back all of our development efforts equally.

Think of specifications as food for software. Good standards will help you (or your software project) grow strong and healthy. Bad standards will make your application bloated, lethargic, and will eventually be the cause of most of your application “sickness.” Standards are NOT more important than the applications (arguably they are part of the application, but a part is seldom more important than the whole.) Because they are NOT more important than the applications themselves, comments like this verge on being insulting.

The fact that KDE gets appreciated this much and that KDE is the market leader in UNIX and Linux desktops today is negligible compared to the extremely important effort to create a single specification of the free desktop environment.

Also, I think too many people get shared specifications confused with open specifications. KDE (and Gnome for that matter) will ALWAYS have open specifications because of the very nature of F/OSS. Open standards are very very important, shared standards are less important. One could argue that Microsoft DOC format is a shared standard because just about every office package in existence tries to write and save to it. That doesn’t make it an open standard.

Be not overcome of evil

I extend my prayers, along with the rest of the free world, to all of London today. Our hearts and thoughts are with you.

“When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love.”

–Martin Luther King Jr.

I am still alive, albeit with fewer rights.

Sorry for the drought of updates lately. I have been talking time off from “the wire” to spend time with my newly enlarge family. I will get back in the swing of things in the coming weeks.

The only real point of this post is to make a brief comment on the recent Supreme Court eminent domain decisions. This ruling effectively destroys any distinction between public and private use concerning property. The decision is easily the worst ruling the Supreme Court has issued since the Roe v. Wade ruling in the 1970’s. The ruling will have the effect of giving special interest groups power over individual property owners (wither those owners are people or businesses.)

If Wal-Mart wants to open a new store and some pesky home owners get in the way… hey, just get the local city council to take the property. If religious groups don’t like a particular business (say liquor store or “news stand”), a little political clout will remove anything that offends. If the city doesn’t like your business… your gone. Because you don’t actually own your property, you just have permission to buy it… for now. It will hurt business, private enterprise, and personal civil rights. It IS one of the very reasons we (as a country) revolted from the British. And by any reasonable interpretation, it violates the fifth amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

In the Declaration of Independence, the founding fathers originally intended to put “life, liberty, and property” but decided that property might not be broad enough. At a time when our essential liberties are already being chipped away at; it is disturbing to see that with one stroke, 5 judges in Washington D.C., can remove a third of our nations founding equation.

How about a 5 day waiting period

Libertarians, Conservatives, and Constitutionalists have long expected it to happen. College studients have been publically ridiculed for suggesting it was possible. It has been the argument primaire of every gun totin, redneck, card carrying NRA member. Yes, doctors in the UK are pushing for a ban on “long pointed knives“. Here is a quote:

The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.

They consulted 10 top chefs from around the UK, and found such knives have little practical value in the kitchen.

My question is; if the pen is really mightier than the sword, is it not more important (for the safety of the general public) to limit free speech than it is to limit the use of “long pointed knives?” Living in a free society was never meant to be a shield against danger, in many ways it is just the opposite. Living in a free society means we entrust those around us with the freedom to live their lives, and as such merit ourselves that same freedom. When someone, anyone, abuses that freedom it is our duty as a society to punish the person who did so. But if we, instead, take away the liberties of those who acted responsibly with their freedom; then the guilty have succeeded denying freedom to everyone and not just those they acted against. To somehow believe that guns, television, knives, and video games are the source of our problems does nothing more than to shift focus from that which is truly responsible.

A quick Rant

I realized today (by looking up something on a co-workers computer) the my website doesn’t look right on Internet Explorer. Now my site is standards compliant… too bad IE is not. Damn, half ass-ed, CSS implementation! Please, please, please folks; get a real web browser.

Why KDE

Flexbeta has a side by side review of K3b and NeroLinux. NeroLinux gets its ass handed to it by K3b. Checking out theDot’s comments on the story, one of the complains concerns K3b’s required integration with KDE.

sure, k3b needs 3rd party tools like cdrecord… but it would be nice to compile with qt-libs only instead with full kde-libs.

but that was not really the post that drives me nuts. This was a comment a little further down in the same thread:

if I look at opera, then I don’t think it can’t be done. for the kde-freaks everything looks the same from the theme side…
i have kde only installed because of k3b on my second machine. these are to many megabytes related for cd burning program with a gui.

So this person was running K3b (instead of one of the other half dozen Linux CD burning applications) and yet had the balls to tell the developers why they should have used a different tool-set than they choose to use. The specific example he sites is a great example of why KDE/Qt make for such a powerful desktop development environment. Opera has a dozen developers who a paid full-time to work on that web browser (and email suite.) KDE has 2/3 full time developers for Konqueror/Kontact. And KDE’s applications are actually BETTER.

Its my experience that the people who complain that xxx application stinks because it a) is linked to kde and not just Qt; or b) its linked to Qt and not gtk; have a problem that has nothing to do with Qt or kde. Did anyone read the comments from the article? The biggest complaint for K3b was that it wasn’t available on Windows. lol, like they don’t have enough CD burning software to choose from… If *nix had a couple dozen applications that were of the quality of K3b we would have lots more people switching… just to use OUR apps. The reality of the matter is that KDE is making that situation a reality faster than an other software “grouping” in the free software world. Why? Because the integration, flexibility, power, and ability to share functionality between applications means that we get great apps like K3b, Amarok, Kopete, and Kontact… faster than would be possible for any of these applications individually.

K3b went from basically not existing to being possibly the best CD burning software on ANY platform in a matter of a couple years. KDE (whither you like it or not) made that possible. And its time we start making sure that the rest of the free software world realizes it.

The End of an Era

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to subscribe to The National Geographic (TNG.) This desire became a reality when I married by wife Heather. Evidently her parents believe that its an important part of their duty to provide a window into the the architectural and historical origins of civilization. I applaud this effort, but mostly just because it provides me with a free subscription to a publication I have always been interested in. While my interest in TNG has change a great deal from the time I was in the third grade, looking to find uncensored images of young females from some unknown tribe of recently found nudists living on the exact opposite site of planet from my Catholic grade school; my respect for the magazine has not changed. That is, until recently.

Each month my (I say my because I find that I generally have a great deal more interest in the TNG than any other immediate member of my family) brown grocery bag covered periodical arrives at my door and I eagerly open it, peer at the cover, and flip through a the magazine that I will, no doubt, read cover to cover at my next available bathroom break. A couple months ago I ripped open the paper cover to discover a startling headline.. œWas Darwin Wrong? No, I am not kidding. TNG has placed the question of the origin of species in large bold print on the cover of their magazine. Obviously TNG would not have done so unless some startling new evidence was brought to light by a team of world renounced scientists that questioned the validity of Charles postulate. I skipped right over my usual reading routine and tore open to the page referenced by the aforementioned articled headline; and their in black and white was my answer… NO! The article when on to talk about evolution in animal species around the world.

Now I am being totally serious here. The National Geographic, a mainstay of international intelligence had printed up a œNational Enquirer style headline to inform me that the status quo had NOT change in our understanding of evolution. And they had done so to push a interesting (if not mediocre) article on evolution.

Now I wish I could say this was a single abnormality, but recently I have found that this same type of occurrence (although seldom quite as dramatic) is happening with startling regularity. For example, last months issue had a cover story that appeared on news stands but was not shipped as the default cover story to subscribers. I thought my TNG copy of œThe Great Gray Owl was a wonderful article, but was dumbstruck to find sitting on the new stand at Albertson’s, œTales from a Nazi Ghost Ship. I went home to find that, indeed, the œNazi Ghost Ship article was in my copy of TNG; but it was not so prominently displayed on the cover (being only in small white type at the bottom.) I read the articles pertaining to the œNazi Ghost Ship. The articles were wonderfully interesting, and spectacularly written; but had absolutely nothing to do with Ghosts. In fact the œon location photographers didn’t even see any skeletons because of their desire to be respectful to the remains of the sunken WWII ship. Evidently being sunk is cause enough for a ship to earn the title œghost ship. Funny how I had always assumed that ghost != ship.

I guess this really started back about a year ago. Some of you may remember that TNG came out with a œspecial (special meaning that it was not shipped to subscribers and thus could only be bought on news stands.) The œspecial was (and I-shit-you-not) a TNG swim suite issue! The inside articles and photography has swim suites from around the world, from dozens of different cultures. It was NOT a bad publication, definitely not worthy of being a œspecial, but not a bad magazine. However, the front cover of this no-nonsense, reliable, bastion of cultural integrity; was a VERY attractive, VERY California looking woman with three shells covering the three most important FCC locations. The œbathing suite btw was not a suite that was particularly common amongst any indigenous peoples subgroup anywhere in the world (nor could it even be purchased at the time), it was custom made for that particular photo shoot.

The point I am making is that I had always hoped that TNG was somehow immune to the sensationalism that seems to have overtaken our culture. A publication that you could always count on to be a beacon of consistency for cultural, architectural, and historical reference. For the last 100 years or so TNG has been exactly that. There was once a time where I was in awe of a magazine that was so accurate in its depictions of world cultures that it was willing to show nudity (during the 50’s and 60’s no less) if that was the standard for that culture. Now it wouldn’t be enough to present the reality of the culture; it would, undoubtedly, be prominently displayed. And we are all the less because of it.

Work Rant

On Tuesday I was called into my managers office. He informed me that someone, who evidently knew I had a blog, had informed him that I might be posting on work time. My boss then proceeded to visit this website and check out the time-stamps on the posts to determine if I had done so. Now, what really happened is that my boss most likely was reading my weblog (on work time) and happen to notice that I posted one entry in the morning, and one in the afternoon and thus determined that I could not have been posting on my lunch break.

Lets ignoring the fact that I ONLY post during breaks (as if lunch is the only break I get during a nine hour day.) And lets totally ignoring the fact that my long post are generally written on the bus on the way to work and then posted when I remember them sometime during the day. And lets skip over the fact that the single biggest obstacle to me getting work done during the day is getting called into meetings to discuss unrelated bull shit (if this place spent half as much time getting me new programmers as it did pulling me into offices to fuck with me during the day, I could have already rebuilt the entire application infrastructure.) No, we are going to ignore all of that and just pass out a big FUCK YOU to either my boss or the person who reported me to my boss.

Because of these developments I will no longer be posting anything during the work day. However (evil grin) I HAVE removed the timestamps from all of my posts, comments, search queries, etc.. etc.. etc.. and I have set up the system to post any waiting Drafts (unpublished articles that are already in the system) to the blog at random intervals during the day. And what is more interesting is that the pages will be rebuilt at random intervals (i.e. the published articles will not even appear on the pages until later the same day.) Evidently I am not the first blogger to have this problem because these tools were ready and waiting for me to install.

Why Iraq

I found a article by Haim Harari that was posted in “The Free Republic” (which has now been taken off-line.) The copy I have is from a cached Google page. But that article is only part of the reason for this post.

Lets talk candidly about Iraq. At least about my own views. I believe the United States operated on the best intelligence that it had at the time of the decision to invade Iraq. France, Germany, Russian, Great Britain, and even the U.N. believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD.) If (in some unknown alternative history) a dirty bomb had been set off in New York with its origins being traced back to Iraq, I am 100% sure that the same people who yell and scream at the United States for invading Iraq would be yelling and screaming that we had solid intelligence that Iraq had WMD and we did nothing. All of that said, I don’t give a dam about WMD; and never did.

For 12 years Iraq had been shooting at our troops, violating their ceasefire terms, and trying to get WMD. The Gulf War I surrender agreement gave the U.S. the right (under inter-nation law) to invade Iraq for any of the above listed violation. We should have finished the job the first time; that is the real mistake of the Iraqi war. But that is only the justification for freeing Iraq (the opportunity in legal speak), not the reason (i.e. not the motive.) The real motive, and the best reason, for being in Iraq is 9/11. No, I am not some patriotically binded rat following the piper of U.S. propaganda. I know that there was no connection between Saddam and Bin Laden. But I am not so short sighted to think that Saddam and Bin Laden had to be friends for their to be a unifying problem that connects these two individuals.

No, the issue that was brought to the forefront by the 9/11 attacks is the problem that stems from extremist Islamic/Arab terrorism. The Middle East is in many ways dysfunctional and the problems that arise from it are destructive to the civilized world. It is ideological ignorance to say we can somehow make œfriends with this part of the world. Bin Laden began his war on the U.S. because we had the audacity to save Saudi Arabia from Iraq. We give more money to the Palestinians than almost any other country in the world. Hell, we gave more money to Taliban controlled Afghanistan than anyone else, anywhere in the world. As long as the United States remains a free country we will always be seen, in the eyes of militant Islamic fundamentalists, as a bastion of evil and a direct representation of the failure of Islam.

I know of only two ways to solve this problem. The first it total eradication of either us or them. As long as the U.S. continues to exist (as the most powerful country in the world) we will be an insult to their beliefs and a target of their hatred. Getting rid of the U.S. will not stop their fighting . The Middle East has been in almost constant state of civil unrest for the last 400 years, long before either the U.S. or Israel existed. So, we can eradicate them. Nuke the Middle East (the innocent with the guilty) and terrorism will stop. That is option #1.

Option #2 is harder, and requires a great deal of work on our part. But the end result is better for the Islamic world (obviously) and, in the long run, better for us also. The only other option I know of is to FREE the Middle East. Free it from the tyranny of dictators and minority militant fundamentalists. The Middle East must become a democracy! Democracy will not remove terrorism from the world; just ask Timothy McVeigh and the IRA. What democracy does do is turn terrorism from an international problem to a intra-nation problem. If Islamic fundamentalism in the form of terrorism is really the actions of a minority (and not the majority) then trusting the people with their own future will ensure the safety of our people.

Now democracy generally has problems starting itself up. It takes a lot of work from its own citizens and (sometimes) a little bit of help from the outside. The United States would not be the democracy it is today without the help of the French during the American Revolution. The Japanese and Germans would not have the democracy they have today without the U.S. So the only way I see to get democracy in the Middle East is for some outside force to begin by implanting the seeds of democracy. Before the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions there was only two countries in that region that were democratic; Israel (not likely to inspire Arabs towards democracy) and Turkey.

Now we are back to Iraq. Regardless of how one feels about the Iraqi invasion, the results can hardly be ignored. There are now four (arguably four and a half) countries that have made direct movement towards democracy. Iraq has just had their election, Afghanistan completed a spectacularly successful election process late last year. The most dangerous fundamentalist country in the world (and probably responsible for the majority of inter national Islamic terrorism) is now surrounded by fledgling democracies. Public pressure to move towards a more democratic process in Iran (by its own people) has never been greater. Most international insiders are saying that Saudi Arabia will most like have some form of democratic reform after the U.S. military has left the area (not wanting to look like they were pressured to do so by the U.S.) Libya is has moved away from terrorism and is under pressure for democratic reform from within. Even the Palestinians have had an election voting in a leader promising to end terrorism and bring about true democratic reform. In an attempt to stop the tide Syria and Iran are pumping Iraq full of suicide bombers and militants. Democracy has a toe-hold in the Middle East and we can thank the U.S. for that.

Now I totally agree that torture is wrong, under supplying the military forces was wrong, not having a solid post-invasion plan was wrong, ignoring the Geneva Convention is wrong, and invading anther country, who we have no international legitimacy to do so, would be wrong. But invading Iraq was (and remains) the right thing to have done. We had motive, and opportunity; and we took advantage of that because was (and remains) the best way to stop international terrorism. Like it or not; without democracy in the Middle East, another 9/11 WILL happen! And we didn’t need WMD for 9/11 to be the worst attack on U.S. soil in our history.