Cuss Free Week

Cuss Free Week

It's nice to know that the California legislature has nothing more important to do. From the February 25, 2010 San Jose Mercury-News:

SACRAMENTO — Feeling a little salty, Californians? Better get it out of your system while you can.

Amid the ongoing — and occasionally tense — debate over how to clean up California's budget mess, lawmakers are trying to tidy something else, almost as unmanageable: our language. Thursday morning, the Assembly approved a ceremonial resolution turning the first week of March into "Cuss Free Week."

With the Senate expected to follow suit next week, all Californians will be asked to bite back on four-letter words and a few choice compound phrases. WT (bleep)?, you ask. Don't sweat: Police officers won't be waiting with soap. That's not the point.

Oh dear. I'm old enough to remember when the California legislature repealed the law that prohibited swearing in front of women and children--and thought that they were being hip and progressive for doing so.

Wow! The Population is Waking Up!

Wow! The Population is Waking Up!

From February 26, 2010 CNN:

Washington (CNN) – A majority of Americans think the federal government poses a threat to rights of Americans, according to a new national poll.

Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they think the federal government's become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. Forty-four percent of those polled disagree.

A Curious Origin for the Jury

A Curious Origin for the Jury

Germanic criminal codes had something called "compurgation," where a person accused of a crime could be found innocent if a group of "oathhelpers" (usually 12 or 25 men) were willing to swear an oath that the accused was innocent. If later it turned out to be that the accused was guilty, the oathhelpers were in danger of being punished for the crime. From Sir William Searle Holdsworth, A History of English Law: The Judicial System (1922), 1:305-6:

If a defendant on oath and in a set form of words* will deny the charge against him, and if he can get a certain number of other persons (compurgators) to back his denial by their oaths, he will win his case. If he cannot get the required number, or they do not swear in proper form, " the oath bursts," and he will lose. Though oaths were used in the Roman law of procedure, this institution of compurgation was not known to it. It was, however, common to the laws of many of the barbarian tribes who overran the Roman empire. Because it was so common and so widespread the church adopted it. Churchmen who could command the services of their fellow ecclesiastics as compurgators found it to be a system "admirably suited for their defence in an age of brute force."

According to the older formulas the compurgators took the same oath as their principal. They swore that he did not owe the debt, or that he was not guilty. And therefore they were liable to the penalties for perjury in just the same way as their principal. But, in the course of the twelfth century, it came to be thought that the compurgators should only be required to swear to their belief in the truth of their principal's assertions ; and to this opinion legal sanction was given by Innocent III. This was due to a wish to remove the temptation to commit perjury; but it destroyed much of the efficacy of this method of proof, because it prevented any effective punishment of a compurgator who swore falsely. Partly for this reason, partly because the revived study of the civil law was teaching men more modern ideas about procedure and evidence, compurgation about this period began to be looked on with disfavour. But it still had many centuries of life before it, and it was in the two succeeding centuries that precise rules were laid down by the common law as to the forms which must be used in carrying out this process. For instance, there does not seem to have been originally any certain rule as to the number of compurgators required. Three to six compurgators were generally thought sufficient in the manorial courts; and Fleta thought that their number should always be double that of the secta. It was not till 1342 that it was settled that the number must be twelve.

In the early days of the jury system, jurors were your peers who knew you, and would judge whether you could have done the crime based on their knowledge of your character. Today, of course, it is quite the opposite: no juror would be selected if he knew the defendant, because then his knowledge of the defendant's character would impair his ability to make a judgment of the facts.

Tax Policy & Collection Never Changes

Tax Policy & Collection Never Changes

Some aspects off tax policy and collection never seems to change. I'm preparing my lectures on the fall of the Roman Empire and its replacement with the Germanic kingdoms (often inaccurately called "the Dark Ages"). I knew that Diocletian was responsible for adopting maximum wage laws, and sometime thereafter, many jobs were made hereditary, because workers evaded these maximum wage laws by changing jobs. The textbook we are using also mentions that the tax burden increasingly fell on the lower classes, as the population declined, and the wealthy had themselves exempted. In looking for more detail on Roman tax policy and collection, I found the following quote from Arnold Hugh Martin Jones' The Later Roman Empire, 284-602: A Social Economic and Administrative Survey (1964), 1:457-8:

The technique of the canonicarii of the praetorian prefecture is vividly described by Valentian III. The produced 'alarming demands for numerous different taxes'; they put out 'a smoke screen of minute calculations involved in impenetrable obscurity'; they demanded 'receipts for a long series of past years, receipts which the plain man, confident that he owes nothing, does not think to preserve'.

Some things never change.

The End is Near!

The End is Near!

At least, of the Introduction to Personal Computers class that I teach. One more session, during which I will teach them the rudiments of IP addresses, net masks, DNS, how routers translate addresses, and then the final exam. Then I grade the final, enter their grades, and get a bit of my free time back!

The Corvette developed a bit of a leak at the rear differential, so I took it to the Chevrolet dealer. I was expecting this to cost several hundred dollars--but the estimate took my breath away. It would be either $485--or, if they couldn't get the differential off the transmission shaft without dropping the transmission--$1985. At that point, I found myself wondering if it was time to sell it. Unfortunately, you can't just keep adding oil to the rear differential--it's not like it is easy to access, and if it goes dry, it's a major problem.

However, it would be difficult to sell except at a greatly reduced price, because even if a buyer didn't ask me if it had any problems, only a fool would buy a car this expensive without an inspection first, and I haven't meant too many fools buying Corvettes. So I called around a bit, and I found an independent Corvette specialist who said that he could indeed remove the differential without dropping the transmission--and even if he did, his labor is only $55/hour, so it would be about $525 to replace the two leaking differential seals. (The seals, of course, are just a few dollars each--it's almost entirely labor.)

Anyway, the Corvette is in the shop until Wednesday. But I just for amusement looked to see what the used Corvette market is like--and I was surprised! There are some amazing deals, at least in some of the more depressed parts of the Northwest. A 2007 with 12,000 miles and the GM extended warranty out to 70,000 miles--for $34,900. Astonishing.

Nd Vwls!

Nd Vwls!

I am in one of those weird situations where I am trying to make sense of table names that have been disemvoweled--or almost completely disemvoweled. As an example, "ovrdrsns" might make some sense if I added some vowels. Somewhere, someone must have written a program for inserting likely vowels into disemvoweled words, keeping in mind that some consonantal dipthongs and tripthongs are common in English, so that "shll" would be re-emvoweled as shall, shell, shill, sholl, shull, shyll. Ditto for "mstwt" becomes mastwat, mastwet, mastwit, mastwot, mastwut, mastwyt. Because some vowel combinations are also common, you would get mastwait, mestwait, mistwait, mostwait, mustwait. (The last, of course, is the most common re-emvoweled combination.)

So, do you know of such a program? Or do I need to write it myself?

The Julio-Claudian Emperors

The Julio-Claudian Emperors

It has been 35 years since I took a Roman history class--and I know that I have forgotten a bit of what the Julio-Claudian emperors did, but I know that I didn't forget this much. While the theory that lead leached from pipes caused their bizarre behavior seems to be pretty well disproved, the explanation that lead leached from the pots in which grape juice was concentrated for fortifying wine poisoned them, and drove them insane, seems to be rising.

Suetonius's accounts of the misdeeds of these creeps are so shocking that you really want to believe that he is mistaken, repeating horrendous gossip. This account from Suetonius of Nero's dressing up as an animal and what he did while so dressed is so weird that I can't imagine anyone inventing it--something that so weirdly warped that today, you would have to go to San Francisco to find. And Suetonius also tells us of history's first same-sex marriage to Sporus--but so gross and barbarous that even San Franciscans might say, "Wait a minute, that's just wrong! (Did I say that?)"

But what will people of the year 4000 say when they read of the Holocaust, or the tortures of Saddam Hussein's government, or a myriad of other horrifying crimes?

That Linda McMahon Is Running For U.S. Senate?

That Linda McMahon Is Running For U.S. Senate?

I never connected the "McMahon" running for U.S. Senate in Connecticut with the family guilty of producing WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment, or whatever you call it). So it was a shock to see this piece from the February 16, 2010 Hartford Courant:

I do not want Linda McMahon representing the good state of Connecticut in the U.S. Senate. Her business, legal, money-making and successful, at its center, sells soft-core porn. Now, that's not to say there isn't a place for soft-core porn in the world. The hard-core stuff is a little too much for most people, so soft-core offers just enough titillation without causing a person to lose control. Some may even find WWE romantic.

I don't. I'm not a wrestling fan, obviously. I used to be when I was around 13 years old, about the age level WWE is aimed at. It was vastly different then. Dick the Bruiser and Vern Gagne were dominating. Women wrestlers put on a good show, but there was virtually no sex involved. It was all muscle, even for the girls. My friends came over on Saturday morning while I was baby-sitting my brother and we'd watch it on TV, but after a couple years, we grew out of it. By the time we were driving, the interest was gone.

...

But, since that time, WWE has descended into the darkest regions of human behavior, purely for exploitation. I don't know what the audiences look like now, but I've seen clips of what they're watching and I'd be embarrassed to take anyone in my family.

I've never actually watched WWE. The promos so off-puttingly low-brow that even if I were interested in wrestling, I would find have preferred staring at a blank wall instead. I would also have assumed that someone putting together trash like this would be a Democrat, rather like Jerry Springer. I guess that McMahon is running as a Republican shows what a big tent we really have.

I don't have any strong opinion about Rob Simmons, who is also trying to get the Republican nomination, but from visiting his campaign's web site, I think the contrast is pretty dramatic. Simmons is retired CIA operative--and to hear the left holler about him, he sounds closer to Jack Bauer than I would expect anyone running for office in Connecticut to be.

UPDATE: A reader suggested that I look into Linda McMahon's campaign contribution history. While it turns out that she has been contributing to Republicans over the years--she has also been contributing to a lot of Democrats, too. Like $2300 maximum legal contributions to the campaign of Rep. Rahm Emmanuel (D-IL). Yes, that Rahm Emmanuel. And the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ($10,000 in 2006, $5,000 in 2007). And individual Democrats running for Congress. Like most corporations, she gives to both sides in the hopes that no matter who wins, when it comes to getting favors from the government--she wins.

Toyotas Aren't The Only Stuck Accelerators

Toyotas Aren't The Only Stuck Accelerators

Alan Henderson's has T-shirts for sale with the slogan: "Recall Congress -- The Accelerator's Stuck" and a cute graphic here.

The Early Days of Disemvoweling

The Early Days of Disemvoweling

I mentioned "disemvoweling" recently; a reader points to some examples of such from the early days of PC development:

Even though Bud Tribble had to leave the Mac team in December 1981 in order to retain his standing in the M.D./Ph.D. program at the University of Washington, he decided that he could still do the initial implementation of the memory manager, as we were planning all along, hoping to finish it quickly after he moved back to Seattle, before classes started. He obtained a copy of the memory manager source from Tom Malloy, but he was in for a shock when he began to read the code.

The memory manager source lacked comments, which was disappointing, but the biggest obstacle was the names selected for variables and procedures: all the vowels were gone! Every identifier seemed to be an unpronounceable jumble of consonants, making it much harder to understand the code, since a variable's meaning was far from obvious. We wondered why the code was written in such an odd fashion. What happened to all of the vowels?

It turns out that Tom Malloy was greatly influenced by his mentor at Xerox, a strong-willed, eccentric programmer named Charles Simonyi. Charles was quite a character, holding many strong opinions about the best way to create software, developing and advocating a number of distinctive coding techniques, which Tom brought to the Lisa team. One of the most controversial techniques was a particular method of naming the identifiers used by a program, mandating that the beginning of each variable name be determined by the type of the variable.

However, most of the compilers in the early eighties restricted the length of variable names, usually to only 8 characters. Since the beginning of each name had to include the type, there weren't enough characters left over to use a meaningful name describing the purpose of the variable. But Charles had a sort of work-around, which was to leave out all of the vowels out of the name.

The lack of vowels made programs look like they were written in some inscrutable foreign language. Since Charles Simonyi was born and raised in Hungary (defecting to the west at age 17), his coding style came to be known as "Hungarian". Tom Malloy's memory manager was an outstanding specimen of Hungarian Pascal code, with the identifiers looking like they were chosen by Superman's enemy from the 5th dimension, Mr. Mxyzptlk.

Washington State Supreme Court Incorporates Second Amendment

Washington State Supreme Court Incorporates Second Amendment

Taking a jump on the U.S. Supreme Court, the Supreme Court of the State of Washington has held that the Second Amendment is incorporated against the states, in State v. Sieyes (Wash. 2010). And even better: they cited my book For the Defense of Themselves and the State!

The Obama Cheerleaders Are Busy

The Obama Cheerleaders Are Busy

A person we know who is a public school teacher sent us (and many others) some propaganda from Organizing For America that shows how the number of jobs lost each month has been falling since Obama took office. (Not unemployment, which has been rising, but the number of new jobs lost.) And from there, it goes onto how the stimulus bill stopped what could have been a much worse situation!

My response (to everyone on the distribution list):

Back on January 8, 2009, the Congressional Budget Office issued a report to Congress about the future of our economy. It's here.

On page 1 of that report, they explained that their predictions assumed “that current laws and policies regarding federal spending and taxation remain the same...” (meaning, if Congress did not pass the stimulus bill then being discussed.) On page 2? “CBO anticipates that the current recession, which started in December 2007, will last until the second half of 2009, making it the longest recession since World War II. (The longest such recessions otherwise, the 1973–1974 and 1981–1982 recessions, both lasted 16 months. If the current recession were to continue beyond midyear, it would last at least 19 months.)”

In short, the CBO's estimate was that if Congress did NOTHING, the recession would start to recede in the second half of 2009. Did the stimulus bill do any good? Hard to know for sure. But we do know that it did something that seemed impossible: made Bush and the last several Congresses look almost responsible in their budgets. You can see the results in the graph here, which shows both the White House estimates of deficits over the last and next few years, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates. Either way is profoundly disturbing.

Here's another source for deficit numbers that let's you pick various starting and ending years.
Obama, and more importantly, these last two Democratic Congresses, have, with some cooperation from Mr. "Compassionate Conservative" dug a hole that our grandchildren are going to be paying back--if they are lucky.

The Obama Administration claims, according to USA Today, to have saved one million jobs with the stimulus bill. That would mean that they spent $787 billion to save one million jobs--or $787,000 PER JOB SAVED. This is something to brag about? If they had given ME $787,000, I could have put about a few people to work for several years improving our property (building a garage, finishing paving the back driveway, paving the shared road into our subdivision, etc.), and had $600,000 left over. (And there are few people that really believe that the stimulus bill saved a million jobs.)

Your New Word For the Day

Your New Word For the Day

In some implementations of SQL (maybe all?), you have to make tables and column names unique in the first 18 characters. So how do you do this, by retaining some meaning to the words? You remove the vowels. This process I have christened "disemvoweling." It's not quite as messy as disemboweling.

UPDATE: Darn! Someone beat me to the punch!

Senior Java Developer In Need Of A Job?

Senior Java Developer In Need Of A Job?

Where I work is hiring. Okay, the pay isn't spectacular, but it's better than being out of work, the benefits are good, the working environment is only a bit inferior to a big private sector operation, the retirement plan is quite good, and my co-workers are very nice. There is a background check, and a drug test, but my guess is that most of my readers won't have a problem passing either.

UPDATE: I suppose this is a positive sign for the economy--my employer has been advertising this position for some time, and can't find any experienced Java developers. The nice thing is, you can be pretty sure that the State of Idaho isn't going out of business, no matter what foolishness happens in D.C., and the state's prison system is about as core of a state function as I can imagine.

Vivid Dreams

Vivid Dreams

I've had some remarkably vivid and memorable dreams of late. Two nights ago, perhaps influenced by the road work being done along I-84 through Boise, I dreamed that my wife and I were driving along I-15 near Barstow--but big trucks were dumping dirt on the road surface. At the same time, huge winds were making it hard to keep the Jaguar in lane. As we come up over a rise, we see someone riding a pig at full gallop in the lane ahead of us. As we pass the rider and pig, we can hear the pig indignantly squealing--because pigs hate being ridden at full gallop.

In last night's dream, I was a member of a bomber aircrew over World War II Italy, and our plane is hit (most anachronistically) by an air to air missile. We are putting on our parachutes and getting ready to jump--but while I'm not the first one out of the plane, many of the others aboard are taking their own sweet time to get ready to jump--and we're down to a few hundred feet, at most, above the ground. Are they hoping to find a flat spot to crash-land the plane?

Very odd dreams.

Decent Chinese Food in the Boise Area

Decent Chinese Food in the Boise Area

One of the great disappointments when we moved to Boise was the lack of good Chinese food. The range was from insipidly bland to barely good enough to bother going out to get. Thai food? There are a number of decent choices here. We're very partial to Sad Wa Dee, in Meridian. Indian food? Fewer choices, but Madhuban on State Street in Boise is quite good.

My daughter and son-in-law recently found a delightful surprise: House of Kim, in Nampa. While it isn't quite up to the Chinese restaurants we used to eat at in the Bay Area, it is close enough that I can justify going out for Chinese again! The hot and sour soup was intense, and the egg rolls probably would not be approved by my doctor for regular consumption! The only downside is that they serve Pepsi, not Coke--but who goes to a Chinese restaurant and orders a Coke, besides me? (I don't drink Pepsi because of a bad association with very bad flu, many years ago. Something about the flavor of Pepsi brings back bad memories.)

Nigerian Scammers

Nigerian Scammers

I received another one of those stupid Nigerian scammer emails:

Greetings,
My name is Sgt. Lee Johnson, a member of the U.S. ARMY USARPAC Medical Team, which was deployed to Iraq in the beginning of the war in Iraq. Please do visit the BBC website stated below to enable you have insight as to what I'm intending to share with you, believing that it would be of your desired interest one-way or the other.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2988455.stm
Also, could you get back to me having visited the above website to enable us discuss in a more clarifying manner to the best of your understanding. Please send your reply to this E-mail address: sgtlee1971@yahoo.com.hk
Thanks,

Sgt. Lee Johnson.

My response:

Just to make sure that you are who you claim you are, and not just one
of those Nigerian scammers, why don't you ship me 100,000 Euros from one
of those stashes?

That way I'll know that you are telling me the truth.

Another Global Warming Hearing Canceled

Another Global Warming Hearing Canceled

Yup! The snowstorm shut down D.C., so the global warming hearings had to be canceled.

Unfortunately, this really is a religion. To paraphrase Voltaire, global warming will cease to be a theory when the last environmentalist is eaten by a polar bear in Los Angeles.

New PajamasMedia Article

New PajamasMedia Article

On Citizens United and corporate free speech.

The Virtues of the Canadian Health Care System

The Virtues of the Canadian Health Care System

From February 2, 2010 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams is set to undergo heart surgery this week in the United States.

CBC News confirmed Monday that Williams, 60, left the province earlier in the day and will have surgery later in the week.

The premier's office provided few details, beyond confirming that he would have heart surgery and saying that it was not necessarily a routine procedure.

I could have sworn Michael Moore told us about how wonderful the Canadian health care system was, especially compared to the U.S. It makes you wonder what would happen if the U.S. health care system was Canadianized. Where would Canadian movers and shakers go for important medical care?

It rather reminds me of how Democrats screech and holler about the importance and value of public schools--but both Clinton and Obama put their children in a private school in D.C. I don't blame them for this--putting your children in public schools in D.C. might qualify as a form of child abuse. I just want them to stop pretending that parents who want more choices are mean-spirited, hypocrites, or snobs.

Time--I Wish I Had It

Time--I Wish I Had It

Three more weeks, and I will only be teaching two classes. Right now, between a full-time job, two sections of Western Civ, and Introduction to Personal Computers, it is like working 1 3/4 full-time jobs. Fortunately, this is a three day weekend, and I can catch up on my blogging! (Well, a little!)

Passing A Frame From Javascript to Applet

Passing A Frame From Javascript to Applet

I mentioned a few weeks back the frustration of trying to find a way to replace the Javascript confirm function with something a little less constricting. I have found the solution: it is possible to call an applet's public method from Javascript, and get a value back. The Javascript function is:

function window.confirmDialogYN(parent, prompt, title)
{    
     var reply = document.myApplet.confirmYN(prompt, title);
     return(reply);
}

The applet requires a public method that calls JOptionPane.showConfirmDialog--and with a little effort, you can produce a variety of methods in that applet to provide a wide range of modal dialog boxes. The reason is that there are hundreds of calls to Javascript confirm, many of which require some rather convoluted prompts to make sure the user clicks the correct button!

My remaining problem is that JOptionPane.showConfirmDialog pops up the modal dialog box in the middle of the screen--not necessarily the middle of the browser that invokes it. The reason is that I'm specifying null for the first parameter, the Component that is the parent. The reason is that I can't quite figure out what the correct way in Javascript to get the Frame that is the parent of the applet. I've tried Javascript's document, document.applet, window, document.window--without luck.

UPDATE: Of course, since there is no type checking in Javascript, there's nothing to tell you that the types don't match!

UPDATE 2: Stupid, stupid, stupid! All I needed was to pass this as the first parameter.

Demon Sheep Ad

Demon Sheep Ad

The comment over at YouTube: "Is this real?" captures it all. I don't have any strong opinion about Tom Campbell, having been away from the open ward that is California politics for too long. (Obviously, I hold Carly Fiorina in contempt, having worked at HP when the Empress was in charge.) But this demon sheep ad almost looks like a parody of the worst political attack ads! Especially the glowing eyes!

Due Process As Pandora's Box

Due Process As Pandora's Box

At PajamasMedia.