Final Fantasy XV could be an Action/RPG

So says the producer of Final Fantasy XIII-2. My first thought: Final Fantasy is truly dead. My second thought: that would be a huge improvement over Final Fantasy XIII. The latter's great failure was raising the automated play-style of Final Fantasy XII to 11 and at the same time requiring frenetic button-pushing. If it's going to require quick responses, 90% of which will be the repeatedly jam the select button, for heaven's sake let us control the character directly. Combining that with RPG menus really sucks.

I do hope, though, that they don't do this. Final Fantasy XV desperately needs to be a nod to tradition. XII and XIII went so far afield that each broke not only the Final Fantasy series, but the RPG genre itself in diametrically opposed ways (rather than going very outside the box, like Final Fantasy VIII and its innovative, and unfortunately extremely gameable, Junction system).

They need traditional JRPG gameplay, directly navigated airships, and really need to get Uematsu back in order to restore a sense of cohesion to the series as a whole. They need not go as far as Final Fantasy IX did (as great as it was) and give it an aimed-at-children feel. But they do need to bring things back into perspective.

Honestly I still think Final Fantasy X should have been the last main series Final Fantasy game. It was the last to be in the pure JRPG genre, the last to have Uematsu, and the last to have the almost indescribably Final Fantasy feel. XII should have been a spinoff brand (Final Fantasy Ivalice, or Final Fantasy - War of the Occuria, or something of that sort). XIII should have been a totally new series. I mean, really, Chrono Trigger could far more justifiably have been a branded Final Fantasy game; all you'd need to do was add in a Chocobo, a few Moogles, and a guy named cid and it would fit in perfectly. Matsueda was not only the only Square composer on the same level as Uematsu, but also totally compatible with him.

DRM actually does have one use

It does a good job of stopping casual copying between people who know each other. If my cousin bought a book on the Kindle, for example, and wants to share it with me, he or she won't be able to email me a copy due to copy protection. Unless that cousin is as savvy as I am and knows how to strip off the DRM (which is much easier than it looks, BTW). For the record, I only strip DRM for archival purposes. I am bloody well not going to pay multiple times for the same ebook just because I decided to move to a different platform. I also want security in case Amazon goes under or some yahoo decides to delete my account on a whim.

DRM does nothing to deter P2P copying since someone somewhere will know how to break the DRM, will upload it, and then the unprotected data will be passed on from torrent to torrent and network to network. And if the album, movie, or book isn't popular enough to spread like that, then it probably would have benefited from being distributed over P2P since it would raise its profile and produce word-of-mouth publicity that might eventually result in more legitimate purchases.

Victor Davis Hanson: Going Against the Grain Liberates Presidents

Surprisingly, I agree with this essay by Victor Davis Hanson virtually in its entirety. If a president does something that their own side is more inclined to criticize, they can act almost with impunity. The key, though, is to have given your own side enough red meat not to rebel when you do it. Bush learned the hard way with Harriet Miers that the base will sometimes rise up. That was, though, a combination of her being an obvious crony appointment and social conservatives being an advanced state of paranoia due to having slavishly devoted themselves to the GOP for thirty years and gotten little to show for it. That's why I knew she was toast when the speech in which she sounded sympathetic to Planned Parenthood v. Casey started circulating the Internet. Twenty-four hours later she was no longer the nominee.


Adding to that, in international matters the president doesn't really need to run anything by Congress unless they want to launch a full-scale ground invasion. War is one area where the Court tends to stay out of the fray as much as possible, probably because if it didn't it would probably get nobbled in one way or another. The War Powers Act is more honored in the breach than in the observance.

Thus it's entirely possible that Obama would bomb Iran. The fallout would be severe though. I suspect we'd end up with a ground war, since Iran could retaliate by blocking the straight of Hormuz causing economic catastrophy for the world. We'd probably need to wage full-scale war to clear it and keep it clear.

People who never look in the mirror

A couple of items. First, Republicans thinking they lost the Ohio union ballot because they are too noble to stoop to dirty tactics. Hah! Talk about delusional. Of course this is the publication that defended Saxby Chambliss's Bin Laden ad. The second item is this:

The cheaply partisan contemporary Left makes me miss the old explicitly Marxist Left, at least a little bit. As the Marxists knew, the key to maintaining a paranoid, fantasy-driven worldview is maintaining a narrative that while wildly implausible is internally consistent, just as in sci-fi or horror movies.

This applies equally to modern American Right. Paranoia is rampant, preventing any compromise whatsoever. Comprehensive immigration reform can never happen because "the other side will trick us: we'll get amnesty and no border security," bipartisan deficit reduction is impossible, because "the other side will trick us: we'll get tax hikes and no spending cuts," and even banning late-term abortions is impossible, because "the other side will trick us: the health exception will mean that women who stub their toe will be able to get late term abortions." In all cases, nothing can be done without Republican political domination. In the case of the budget, it becomes an immediate threat to the nation because they inexplicably insist on threatening apocalyptic shutdowns and defaults if they don't get what they want the way they want it.

This really is bad for the country. We need two sane political parties. Hopefully if Romney becomes president, he'll reign in the crazies like Bush did. Or if Cain gets nominated and then goes down in flames because of more sex scandals and because people don't want their taxes raised to give more tax breaks to the rich, it will have a salutory effect on the Republican psyche (like a parent's spanking of their child). Unlikely, I know: they'll find some way to blame a conspiracy of "liberal racists" or whatnot. Ultimately this is what happens to you when you only pay attention to sources specifically tailored to your political perspective, dismissing pretty much the entire mainstream media as a propaganda wing for the other side.

I should note that Democrats are every bit as capable as Republicans of dirty campaigning. I also note that they have their share of paranoid members, though I can't remember the last time the paranoids almost caused massive catastrophe like Republican paranoia nearly caused a default and might still cause a shutdown.

Lifehacker: Five Best RSS Newsreaders [Hive Five]

From Lifehacker:

Five Best RSS Newsreaders [Hive Five]:

Google's changes to Google Reader this week upset a lot of people, and it got us wondering how many of you still use Google Reader as your preferred RSS newsreader when there are so many other options. This week, we're going to highlight some of those other news readers, in case you're looking for alternatives. More »

The good news is that the alternatives sync with Google Reader. The problem with any non-cloud reader is that they will only download feeds while they're open, and don't have history going back forever. Feeds typically only have 10-30 items, which means that if you only download a feed once a day you're liable to miss things. The sheer power of Reader is the enormous database of RSS items it has. That's not easily replaceable.

Note: Feedly at least seems to not take advantage of Reader's database (if the API even allows that). Thus if you link it to Reader, you'll only get the ten most recent items on most things. Reader still is the best game in town despite the redesign (which I agree was not an improvement at all--too much whitespace; they really need information density settings like they have in Gmail).

Solitary confinement as a form of torture

Sarah Shourd, one of the hikers arrested by Iran for "espionage," describes being in solitary confinement for most of fourteen months. She ends:

It’s wonderful to begin my life again, and every day I feel more free, but I can’t help thinking about the thousands of others who are alone right now. I believe the excessive use of solitary confinement constitutes cruel and unusual punishment — that it is torture. The United Nations should proscribe this inhumane practice, and the United States should take the lead role in its eradication. 

The problem is that you have to qualify it with "excessive." I mean, what else do you do with a lifer who rapes, tortures, or murders other prisoners? There are two options (since adding time to their sentence is pointless): kill them or lock them up alone. Allowing them to continue to rape and torture their fellow prisoners is unacceptable. So is permitting criminal enterprises to form in prison and continue unabated.

I can absolutely believe that the US uses solitary confinement where it isn't warranted, though: we have the highest incarceration rate on the planet. Americans don't care how many people we put in jail, or what happens to them, as long as they're taken out of sight.

More shutdown danger, more yawns

The congressional Republicans have overplayed the shutdown card. It's hard to believe they're still trying to use that threat at all, let alone to undo Obamacare. Really, there's a very good chance the Supreme Court will strike it down and nothing will need to be done by them, and they will probably win the White House and the Senate next year if things don't improve and they both fail to nominate a loon and fail to obviously tank the economy through intransigence.

If they were going to go the shutdown route, they should have pulled the trigger back in Spring. Instead they punted, threatened to do far worse damage to the country with a default, chickened out at the last minute (not without drawing some Democratic blood, though), and now they want to go at it again? Frankly, the biggest selling point in a Romney presidency is that maybe he'd keep these psychos under control. Failing that, seeing the Republicans eat each other alive would be fun. I doubt Romney would roll over and let Republican inferiors in the House run the country for him.

Anyway, there won't be a shutdown. This is just apocalyptic posturing to please the Tea Party. Nothing to see here. Moving on...

Cain is Obama's best hope for reelection

The 9-9-9 proposal is a sure catastrophe in the general election if the Obama campaign has any competence at all. Raising taxes on 80% of Americans while simultaneously cutting them enormously on the richest Americans is a recipe for a landslide. Not to mention the GOP could kiss the elderly vote goodbye since 9-9-9 repeals Social Security's revenue source, the payroll tax.

New Google Reader

I just got the new Google Reader. As was to be expected, it reminds me of the old Windows Hi-Res theme. Not really my preference--I like some color--but I'll get used to it. Glad to see they kept the core of Reader unchanged, as expected. I didn't use the social features before and probably won't use the Google+ features now, so I'm left out of that particular bruhaha. I'm just glad to see that it's not going to get Buzzed. It's one of the most powerful web applications.

Now that we've got Google+ integration one way, how about adding RSS feeds to Plus to make it go both ways. I've been wanting to be able to subscribe to people and circles in Reader since the beginning.

I'm also irritated with the lack of themability. The new styles have much larger sticky portions, which is a problem with my ancient monitor and limited resolution. I'm finding myself having to use fullscreen to use Reader comfortably now. In addition, they still haven't added the simple feature of having the search default to the folder or feed you're viewing (as Gmail's search does). That's been annoying for a long time.

Political Paralysis on Taxes and Immigration

Imigration and the Federal budget are two problems that will never be solved. The current situation on both is unsustainable. The deficit is massive and will continue to spiral upwards and more and more Mexicans emigrate here every year illegally. There's a general consensus that both need to be fixed, but there's no way to accomplish a fix.

On immigration, both sides have interests pushing to maintain the status quo. Businesses like cheap labor that, in red states at least, have to live in fear of being discovered and sent back home. Democrats dream of someday turning those illegal immigrants into Democratic block voters (aided by nativist Republicans--the nativist uproar over Bush's comprehensive immigration reform led McCain to do very poorly among Hispanics). Beyond that, the anti-immigration crowd themselves killed said immigration reform during the Bush administration because they didn't trust that the border enforcement would actually happen. There was nothing you could give them that would appease them. Of course the problem is that getting rid of the many millions of illegal immigrants already here would not only be a massive undertaking, it would look like a pogrom at this scale. So nothing much was done.


Likewise conservatives refuse to compromise one iota on taxes, so any budget deal is impossible. We get repeated apocalyptic showdowns and the deficit remains enormous both in the short-term and in the long-term. It's unlikely anything much will be done. Many on the right have been complaining for years that the budget process includes a baseline that causes every part of the government to grow every year automatically. Does the right offer tax hikes in exchange for changing the baseline? Of course not. Tax hikes are from the Devil. Nothing, no matter how monumental, is a good enough trade to get them. Besides, they reason, no matter what they get in return, it will turn out to be a trick. Of course it stands to follow that whatever they extort from the Democrats by threatening to shut down the government or send the nation into default will also be a trick, so what's the point?

More Hanson and liberal faux-hypocrisy

I've noticed that his writings on National Review, even on the Corner, are better thought-out than on PJMedia.com. The latter seems to be a forum for emoting and tossing red meat, very stale red meat, to the hyper-conservative echo chamber there. Hence this piece on charges of hypocrisy against the left that no doubt everyone has heard about a million times. Note that most of it isn't even real hypocrisy. One can discuss whether carbon credits are genuine, but the concept of cleaning up after oneself by planting trees to soak up carbon to offset what you emit isn't invalid. It does put millionaires like Gore in an "easy for you to say" position, since most of us can't afford carbon credits, but then aren't the Republicans in the "easy for you to say" camp on almost everything?

Likewise there's no hypocrisy in wanting to tighten the tax code so that there's less avoidance while taking advantage what's legal now. It may undercut your moral authority a bit to not lead by example, but saying "I believe in gun control, but if everyone around me is packing heat you bet I'm going to do it too." It's living in the system you're in while trying to change it. Hypocrisy comes in when you do something like the Maryland politician who was found to have an unregistered gun when he himself voted for tougher gun registration laws, or when someone hides the fact that he's not leading by example. Besides, if Warren Buffet made his corporations fail to engage in legal tax sheltering, he'd be doing a disservice to his investors for not maximizing the value of their investment as the law would allow.

As for foundations, has Buffet actually come out against outlawing them? It's relevant because there are two reasons to have an inheritance tax: 1) to break up family dynasties and 2) to raise money for the government. Inherited wealth is what produces the idle rich which Hanson himself has so criticized. Bill Gates, by funneling his money into a charitable foundation, is fulfilling the first goal admirably. Every advocate of inheritance taxes should have no problem with that.

He almost has a point on Obama's war on terror policies. It's probably more a matter of growing in office, in a way many progressives see as being partly in a twisted way. Some of it is bowing to political reality combined with having to deal with an inherited problem. Guantanimo springs to mind: if people and state governments, aided and whipped into a frenzy by congress, are unwilling to allow trials for detainees, closing Guantanimo is impossible.

I'll grant the point about teachers in colleges. I've personally known teachers who were being exploited in that way. Considering how academia's internal politics are, I have no doubt the tenured class aren't too eager to bring equality and put themselves on the chopping block. Nor is it terribly difficult to see that liberals aren't inclined to attack academia and give more excuse for budget cuts, union-busting, tenure-busting, etc.

One more point of note: everyone in American politics protects their own. Accusing anyone of hypocrisy on that score may have some legitimacy, but it's almost like saying water is wet. Of course both sides make the accusations too, so I guess the best response is to yawn and shrug and move on.

Actually, waterboarding IS a dead issue

Why? Because Obama stopped doing it. At least officially, which is probably all that anyone can expect. The CIA has always been up to all sorts of illegal, amoral, and sometimes downright evil stuff. The Bush administration was only unusual in that they got stooges like John "No law or treaty can stop the government from crushing a child's testacles" Yoo to "make it legal" in the Palpatine sense. Even if all Obama did was push torture back into the shadows, that's still a victory for civilization.

"If we can blow them up, then we can do whatever we want to them"

That is the logic Victor Davis Hanson uses to declare waterboarding a "dead issue":

Waterboarding, which once sparked a liberal furor, is now a dead issue. How can anyone object to harshly interrogating a few known terrorists when routinely blowing apart more than 2,000 suspected ones — and anyone in their vicinity?

That's always been a stupid argument, no less so now that Dick Cheney has used it. Since we vaporized lots of Japanese women in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and boiled lots of Japanese women in Tokyo with napalm, does that mean it would've been okay for General MacArthur to force Japanese women to serve as "comfort women" for American soldiers? Of course not. Likewise blowing up enemies on the field has no moral bearing on whether it's legitimate to torture them in confinement, i.e., after they have been rendered non-threatening.

Hanson in general has gone to seed in the last few years. Most of the Right has moved on from the disastrous Bush administration, but Hanson must continue to defend them and the failed neocon enterprise. He despises the Obama administration but won't admit that the catastrophic failure of the Bush administration led to the Obama administration.

The other half of Google Reader Users

The World Is Surprisingly Angry About the End of Google Reader - Technology - The Atlantic Wire

This surprises me. I started using Google Reader early on when the social features were still limited. There was no liking or comments, for example. I never really got into the social Google Reader scene. Actually, I didn't even know there was one, as it managed to go under the radar until now. Because of that I was thrilled at the news of the redesign: it meant that Google Reader was not only sticking around, it was still being improved.

One thing I hate: fake third-party logins

Everyone's come across websites that allow you to sign in with Facebook, Twitter, or an OpenID provider. What I've recently come across is sites that purport to let you sign in with Facebook or Twitter, but don't really: once you've authorized them, they try to make you open an account with them. How obnoxious. The whole point in my trying to sign in with Twitter was so I don't have to create a frakking account with them! Digg and Cnet, I'm looking at you!

Update: Okay, I'm partially retracting my rant. Digg only makes you give them an email address and verify it and Cnet only makes you agree to a EULA and choose a username. Still, having to go through account-creation lite is annoying considering that you already did account creation with the third-party service.

Google Buzz, RIP

The latest product to fall is a doozy. I never used it myself (and neither did anyone else), but it used to be a big deal. As I said before, I just hope Google Reader doesn't follow. Of course Google must know that if they kill Reader, they'll get an unending torrent of hate from the commentariat who use it (even if there aren't that many people outside of them that do).

Update: They're revamping Google Reader and replacing its sharing features with Google+ integration. It looks like the basic functionality will remain largely the same, which is good. I never used the social features.

Romney's right, but supporting TARP might be a big mistake politically

Good for him, but he needs to be careful. TARP has always been unpopular. It is probably the key argument against direct democracy that things like that are always very unpopular. Without government action stop the dominoes falling leading to a massive run on the banks and the collapse of the entire financial system, we'd be in the second Great Depression now instead of the Great Recession.

Google+ failing?

It has lost 60% of its active userbase. I have to say that I'm not surprised by this one bit. In order to supplant a dominant product or service, your product or service doesn't need to be just as good or a little bit better. It needs to be a lot better (or significantly cheaper). Just look at the Zune: it never went anywhere precisely because Microsoft couldn't surpass the iPod and its ecosystem and refused to compete on price.

I have to say, for my part, that Google+ feels too much like stripped-down versions of Blogger and Google Reader merged. It just doesn't seem ideal for communicating with people in a non-Internetty way like Facebook is. For instance, sending a private message is a very clumsy process that isn't well-documented.

To be fair about Chrome's bookmarks...

The Windows version has joined the 21st century and now lets you drag a site over a folder on the bar, having it open the folder, and let you drop it in at the top (or wherever you want). It's only those of us on non-MS operating systems that have to suffer the IE4 bookmark system.

How misunderstood is direct messaging?

With the British coalition Energy Secretary pulling a non-sexual* Anthony Weiner and tweeting something he wanted to direct message, this question is relevant. It is extremely ironic that the Telegraph itself misunderstands how Twitter direct messaging (in a paragraph that's sure to be pulled):

It was not clear who the intended recipient was, although he would have only been able to send a Direct Message to one of the 87 people he follows, who include about 30 national journalists and several fellow MPs. 

No, that's not the way it works. You can only send direct messages to people who follow you. Whether you follow them is irrelevant. I've received DMs from people who never followed me, but I of course followed them. It makes sense when you look at following as a granting of trust, and you can only send people DMs if they trust you.

*He wanted to rubbish some unknown person but to do it from the shadows. This proves once again that Chris Huhne is a backbiting git.

Update: Sure enough, the paragraph has been corrected. It now reads:

It was not clear who the intended recipient was: he would have been able to send a Direct Message to any of his 7,616 followers.

Sarah Palin isn't running

Democrats breath a sigh of relief: we will definitely not be subjected to the catastrophe of a Palin presidency.

Country-club Republicans (the few that are still left) breath a sigh of relief: we will definitely not be subjected to the catastrophe of a Palin presidency.

Moderately smart conservative Republicans breath a sigh of relief: the GOP will not nominate a woman who would probably lose even to Obama.

The Religious Right is slightly saddened, but they like Bachmann better anyway.

So good news all around. Not surprising, though. Quitting in the middle of her gubernatorial term was a clear sign that she really wasn't up to it (which most of us knew from the 2008 campaign) and wasn't really interested in running.

I spoke too soon about Firefox 7

The memory leaks are still there, just improved. It still eventually takes over my (admittedly underpowered and outdated) system. I guess I'll take another look at Chrome, though I still prefer Firefox's superior extensions library, excellent bookmarking system, configurability, and the way it makes pinned tabs sticky.

Update: As if I'm really going to leave Firefox. No, I'm sticking with it. They did make a big improvement in the memory leaks so that I have to restart it maybe every two hours instead of every twenty minutes. I've stayed with Firefox this long through the last version or two with abysmal memory leaks, I'll certainly stay now. Especially since the Smooth Gestures developers proved themselves untrustworthy by making their extension spyware. Update: Now I'm not so sure. It definitely swells up, but when I recently tried switching to Chrome again I noted that Gmail and Google Reader (which I have as pinned tabs wherever I am) tend to swell up in memory usage over time in that browser, so that may be the source of the memory loss over time (especially since Chrome ends up using just as much memory as Firefox 7 overall). I also noticed that with Firefox 7 the memory loss has a ceiling, so it isn't really a leak.

The dark side of Wikileaks' anarchist shotgun approach to leaking

The Belarussian government is using the US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks to go after dissidents. I wonder how many will be caught in the Wikileaks cyber-blast radius when all is said and done.

Shocking: The Zune finally put down

This has been a long time coming. Microsoft's chief problem is that they competed head-to-head with the iPod price-wise without any compelling reason to choose their product over the dominant one and its ecosystem. The Zune was never far and away better in terms of features, was the same price, and lacked the value-add of the iPod coolness factor and dominant ecosystem. That made it a bad deal.

Zune's media ecosystem will live on in Xbox, which is legitimately successful (mainly due to the Wii not being a "real" console and the PS3 being a semi-flop), and on Windows Phone 7, which will have paid-for marketshare via the Nokia deal.

Chris Christie has some sense

He will not run for president this time around. His political inexperience can be fixed. I'm not sure his other problems can be.

Cheating Facts

After reading my earlier post on academic fraud, Peter emailed in this presentation on academic cheating. The figures are arresting, though I question how serious most of the cases are. I suspect that most of the plagiarism is failure to properly quote rather than passing off a whole paper made up of other people's work as one's own. The fact that watching the movie and writing a book report on that instead of the actual book is considered cheating by the graphic kinda confirms that it's extremely strict; I don't think that counts as cheating either, it's just a good way to get a bad grade. If the teacher can't tell you didn't read the book, then either the teacher or their assignment is at fault as much as the student. It's a bit dishonest, but I certainly don't think it should be punished beyond a bad grade.

Not surprising, though, that those with the most to lose and the highest pressure (i.e., the top grades) are the most likely to cheat. I wonder why they aren't getting caught; stuff cribbed from Wikipedia ought to be the first thing anti-plagiarism software detects.

I remember when I was taking an English Literature college class. I was astounded that most of my classmates were using Wikipedia as their primary source, something I never considered doing as I believed it was inappropriate (aside from the fact that the page could be complete bullshit at the time you read it due to bad luck, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and by the time your in high school you should be beyond depending on encyclopedias as a source for papers).

Graphic after the fold.

Half-term Gov. Christie might enter the race

Okay, first, his political experience beyond being a prosecutor is minimal. Second, he looks like he could be on the Sopranos. Third, he's got the New Jersey obnoxious thing going on. This is an absurd idea. Oh, and he likes to defund public libraries.

Governor Beverly Perdue of North Carolina is an idiot

She suggested suspending elections because of gridlock. Good grief! The official word is that she was not serious, though apparently she certainly sounded serious at the event. Way to give the Republicans ammunition, Bev. Obviously we can't simply suspend parts of the constitution, and there's no way to reinterpret the requirement for biennial elections. It's mundane, procedural, and highly specific.

If, on the other hand, you want to suggest extending the length of House terms, I'm very open to that. I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to, say, making the House term variable length with a maximum of four years with new elections to be called after at least one year upon the command of the president. In exchange, the president would give up the veto, thus eliminating another element of gridlock, while the presidential ability to call a snap election would replace it as a check on the legislative branch. That's the way it works in Fifth Republic France.

Or you could just make them four-year fixed terms. If you want to maintain the check on the executive that midterms provide, straddle them so that the House is only elected on the midterms. That's the way the Virginia Senate works. I'm not entirely sure that would help with gridlock, though.

Finally! Firefox 7 delivers!

From using it for about 20 minutes, I can say the memory usage is down and the memory holes appear to be fixed. I can actually read articles at The Economist without crashing my computer (previously it would just keep chewing up more and more memory). My Chrome temptations are now purged (though Smooth Gestures turning out to be spyware was a prohibitive impediment; no other mouse gestures extension for Chrome works right).

What happens when you hold a shutdown and nobody comes?

That's what the latest showdown on capitol hill feels like. I think the House GOP has played out its leverage, at least when it comes to the usage of brinksmanship to get what they want. Their mistake was to blink the first time around and then try again with the debt limit, where the damage to the economy would have been much greater. I'm sure the wealthy backbone of the GOP was screaming in Boehner's ear. He had to come to terms much less than the Tea Party wanted, but they'd already been psyched up. Actually, I suspect if Obama had any balls he could have given them almost nothing if not nothing given that.

Business as Usual in Russia

Putin returns. Did anyone not see this coming? Ah, "Managed Democracy." Though, to be fair, this isn't necessarily that bad of a thing for the rest of a world. The Yeltsin government was a royal mess, which is unacceptable when a massive stockpile of nuclear missiles is on hand. Just don't look into the guy's soul and see a true Christian, okay?

Final Fantasy XIII-2 actually looks like an improvement on the original

If that pans out, it'll be quite a change from Final Fantasy X-2, which failed miserably (see this post, third paragraph). Though, to be fair, Final Fantasy X was a much higher standard to meet (I'd still rank it the best of the lot).

I live in hope that there will be a) towns and b) a user-controllable airship. The lack of the former wrecked the flow of the game; RPGs aren't first-person shooters, there's supposed to be time to go around talking to people and getting a feel for the plot. In FFXIII it was just a rush of ultra-linear* dungeon-crawling with monotonous battles that required way too much button-mashing for their near-automatic mechanics followed by a cutscene followed more ultra-linear dungeon-crawling followed by a cutscene followed by more ultra-linear dungeon-crawling with monotonous battles followed by a cutscene... you get the idea. Come to think of it, if just strung the cutscenes together with new onces detailing the major battles, it would work better as a movie than a game.

The lack of an airship was just an unjustified breach of Final Fantasy tradition that further undermined the cohesion of the series. And in this game, unlike Final Fantasy XII, an airship would have actually been useful! Activating all the Cie'th teleport stones on Pulse is a huge pain in the ass! Getting an airship to fly between Orphan's Cradle, Edenhall, and Pulse instead of portals would have been easy as pie for the developers, would have made more sense, and would have been a boon to the players if it could drop you off at different points in Pulse. Or, God forbid, fly freely like in FF I-IX! And yes, you can do that in games without the ability to walk on an overworld map; see Secret of Mana I & II, or Lost Odyssey for that matter.

Back to the subject at hand, the trailers has gotten me looking forward to the game. Hopefully they'll improve the battle system. The plot looks more interesting than the original, though its hard to tell at this point (I'm sure one couldn't have predicted from the trailers that the heroes would do everything the gods Fal'cie wanted every step of the way while knowing they were doing it even to the point of killing Orphan and releasing a genocide only for said genocide to averted by a massive Deus ex Machina). Oh, and Kaias still reminds me of Cid Reines, though apparently he's unrelated. Also, his identity as a Time Agent Who Can Never Die sounds familiar.

*Final Fantasy X took linearity as far as it could go and pulled it off brilliantly. Final Fantasy XIII took it much further and didn't.

Revisiting Eureka's cancelation

Maybe it was the right time, after all. Allison and Jack have triggered Shipping Bed Death, after all. Oddly enough, everyone seems to be pairing off in this last half-season. After this, though, does Syfy even do science fiction anymore (Warehouse 13 is almost pure steampunk fantasy)?

*More* Facebook privacy problems

Go figure. Facebook seems to simply ooze information about you wherever you walk. It reminds me of my carpet after the hot water heater exploded a few days ago (it is finally dry now).

And here I was excited for a few minutes

There's going to be a new Suikoden game! Unfortunately, it looks very much like it's not going to be a Suikoden game, but a Suikoden Tierkreis game; in other words, no True Runes, no recurring characters, no familiar countries, and no Suikoden mythology (beyond the stars of destiny, and the multiverse concept suggested in passing in the main titles, but that's hardly original). In other words, it's not worth buying a PSP for me to play it.

But, I'm told on the linked thread, it really doesn't matter because virtually no one localizes games for the PSP anymore (which may or may not be due to piracy). I really can't see what they're thinking. Going back to Sony would have made a certain amount of sense if they were going to go back to the main Suikoden universe. It makes no sense at all if they're sticking with the Tierkreis multiverse, since it cuts off the Nintendo DS-owning Tierkreis fanbase. Is there some sort of franchise-wrecking fever going around in Japanese video game companies (cf. what's going on with Square-Enix and Final Fantasy)?

Bicameralism and the Direct Election of Senators

I've usually rolled my eyes and dismissed calls to repeal the 17th Amendment and go back to state legislatures electing the U.S. Senate. I mean, considering that it's supporters are neo-Confederates and other cranks that want to turn the clock back to the 19th century (at least), and it is a move to make the government less democratic, it seems like a terrible idea. But just now it occurred to me that there's a strong argument in favor of doing that.

Bicameralism isn't that odd. What is odd is having two houses with equal powers and equal democratic legitimacy. That has led to all sorts of problems in our country. There's a genuine advantage to having the Senate lack the democratic legitimacy of the House. It would also mean that the Senators wouldn't be afraid of being primaried by Tea Party loons if they cut deals or rolled over. I doubt you'd see the sort of universal obstructionism you saw during Obama's first two years. Heck, I doubt the Democrats would have gone to such lengths to keep Bush's Federal judges from being confirmed.

Perhaps Obama's greatest asset...

is that his opposition is freaking bug nuts. See the comments over at the Wall Street Journal article on congress going through the latest ceremonial dance to implement the bizarre multi-step debt ceiling increase. Note the enormous amount of hate directed at Boehner, McConnell, and even Cantor. When you keep poking the beehive of crazy with a stick, don't be surprised if a bunch of the crazy bees turn around and sting you rather than sole focusing on the person you sicced them on.

Update: After I wrote this, I got the inkling that this particular article was linked to by Matt Drudge. Of course I was right (the link is below the picture of Harry Reid on the right-hand side). People who read the Drudge report and feel the need to comment on the linked articles are invariably the most unhinged people you'll find in America today.

Gmail Offline Returns, Chrome Only

This really isn't a big deal anyway, since Gmail provides both POP3 and IMAP access. If you need offline email, chances are you're already using one of those. Still, it is nice to be able to stick with the web interface in all situations, I suppose.

Firefox appears to finally be dealing with memory holes

The memory holes that Firefox is plagues with are the only thing that makes me consider switching to Chrome, which I have so far been highly reluctant to do (read other posts in the Browser Wars category to see why). Fortunately, that is supposed to change with the next release. Here's hoping it pans out.

Update: Or not. The fairly early beta they have out doesn't appreciably fix the memory problem as far as I can tell and is even slower than Firefox 6. Trying it did have one salutary effect: it made Firefox 6 seem fast instead of sluggish. Hopefully this will change as the development process continues. Hopefully.

Update 2: Fed up with the sluggishness of Firefox, and seeing little reason to hope in the new release, I seriously considered switching to Chrome today. Then I found out that Smooth Gestures, the only mouse gestures extension that really works on Chrome for Linux, has been taken down as spyware. I guess I'll stick with slow old Firefox for the time being. At least until the original author releases his fork of the project, anyway.

Update 3: Apparently the creator of Smooth Gestures intends to make his fork a paid browser extension. Assuming it doesn't have a free basic functionality mode, that does it for me. I am not going to pay for a browser extension, especially not one that produces functionality that should be universally available. I wonder why it isn't simply built in to Chrome and Firefox. An Opera patent issue?

Attention plus5CHA.com, ExeuntMagazine, YakuzaLounge, and other readers (Update: Resolved)

Due to unknown causes plus5CHA.com and at least two other websites are forwarding to my site. This is not my doing nor do I have any control over it. After reading that @geeksdreamgirl had contacted Dreamhost (my webhost and apparently hers as well), I did so as well. Hopefully this will all be resolved soon. If you are a webmaster for one of the forwarding domains, I encourage you to contact Dreamhost and ask them to fix this as I have done. All the domains I have detected forwarding to mine have been Dreamhost hosted judging by their public Whois records.

Update: It appears to be getting sorted out now. I can access plus5CHA.com without getting redirected here.

Update 2: All other sites no longer redirecting. If you're still getting this page when you tried to go to a different site (such as those mentioned here), clear your browser cache (tip via @geeksdreamgirl).

Most (83%) Google+ users are inactive?

That's not really surprising, is it? In addition to being par for the course with just about everything, Google+ is particularly susceptible to inactive users for one reason: the invitation scheme. People's curiosity is naturally accentuated when something has a limited membership. It becomes something elite, and so naturally we want to find out what's so special about it. Then we get an invite, log on, and most of us find that it's nothing special (yet!) and log off.

No one happy with 9/11 anniversary plans

What a shocker. Considering how badly they screwed up the 9/11 memorial, it is little wonder they can't handle the anniversary. If I had my way, I would have had them rebuild the Twin Towers exactly as they were before with a low-key memorial on the ground floor. That would have been the ultimate defiance.

What was that judge thinking?

He struck down the individual mandate but left the rest of Obamacare intact, which presumably means the pre-existing conditions coverage requirement. How on earth is that severable from the individual mandate? No one would have voted for it if the individual mandate didn't solve the problem it created of people freeloading on the insurance system by buying insurance when they get sick and dropping it as soon as they get better.

Mitt's Vanishing Strategy

This New York Times Op-Ed says he's going to have to show up if he plans on winning. That's obviously true, but obviously Romney's keeping a low profile so he doesn't have to either embrace the crazy (poisoning his general election prospects) or call it out (poisoning his primary prospects). The problem for him is that this will only work for so long. If he's hoping that there'll be an upsurge in sanity in the GOP ranks, he's likely to be disappointed.

Syfy cancels Eureka

Damn. The good news is that they haven't decided to kill the upcoming Season 7 5. It's bloody odd not only to order a new season so far ahead, but to cancel the show so far ahead. It's even odder to announce it this soon. In any event, this marks the death of one of the last bits of Syfy's previous Sci-Fi identity (even if it was light humorous scifi).

I actually think the super committee is a good idea

This HuffPo writer clearly doesn't. Considering that it may be the only way to get things done in our current political dysfunction, and it is not in fact a third house of the legislature, it may be necessary. On accountability, it's a toss-up as to whether the amendment process contributes to it or takes it away. Given that all sorts of cruft makes it into law through such amendments and no one knows where it came from, and all sorts of laws are killed by making their would-be supporters vote against them via poison pills, this might be a plus for accountability. Besides, when we're talking about accountability in the House, we're talking about accountability to Tea Party wackos that want to push the country into lasting default ("No debt ceiling increase, period!"). We'd be better off with less of that sort of accountability.

Internet Access, Negative Rights, and This Week in Law

I was watching the current live stream of This Week in Law and have to take issue with the purely negative view of human rights that guest Timothy Sandefur expressed. His argument against positive rights was that if you have a right to healthcare or food, for example, then nature violates your rights every day. That is a really bad argument, since nature will and does violate your "right to be left alone" all the time. It will even violate your right not to be killed for food if you let it (e.g., if you go into the mountains and run into a hungry mountain lion).

That said, I don't even think that the Right to Internet Access need be a positive right, at least not in the sense of the government making sure you got it. If there were true competition and if corporations didn't coordinate their sales decisions with one another, there'd be no need for government to do anything about Internet access. If one ISP kicked you off, you'd just go to another one. But if the ISP that kicks you off is the only game in town, or if they blackball you so that no other ISP will sell to you, then your negative right to procure Internet access is being violated. This is not the termination of an individual business relationship. It is essentially the removal of of the ability to get a utility essential for having a modern mode of living. As such, there's a strong argument that it should be under the purview of the courts to make sure that there's reasonable due process and your offense justifies the negative impact losing all access to the Internet will have on your life.

Scientists are worried about Planet of the Apes in real life

There's a simple solution: set the bar at which humanized apes can sue, or have suits brought on their behalf, in the courts very low. I guarantee you that will dissuade teaching people from teaching apes to talk.

Obamacare and errors by Obama lead to our current situation

If Obama had not lost the Massachusetts Senate race, largely because of Obamacare, he would have kept his filibuster-proof majority. Even failing that, he could have used the budget reconciliation process to get both an extension of the middle class tax cuts he wanted and a debt-ceiling increase if he hadn't had to quickly use up that year's reconciliation bill to get Obamacare passed. Even failing that he could have either let all the Bush tax cuts expire (taking a political hit) and made the Republicans waffle between re-enactment of a trillion dollar+ tax bill and credible deficit panic or used the renewal of the tax cuts to extort a debt-limit increase from the GOP. Failing all that, we have a political economic catastrophe on our hands.

Some of the Defaulters are changing their position

Instead of insisting on default, they've switched to making demands far more ludicrous than the House Republicans. Namely, that congress pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the constitution. Now even if it didn't include an absurdity such as an arbitrary predefined maximum size of government, it would still be a disaster. All the ones I've seen included a clause allowing you to get around the balanced budget requirement by having a supermajority of both houses (three-fifths, in the versions I read). They also had a provision for wartime, with varying definitions.

The first would effectively make the Federal Government like California used to be: a government that could only pass budgets by supermajority. California is a notoriously ungovernable mess. The filibuster as it is now used is bad enough. We don't need more power without responsibility in our government.

The second would either be meaningless, if it were strict (such as only when a formal declaration of war is in effect) or it would create perverse incentives for going to war. Invading other countries would actually make it easier to set domestic policy. And I don't think for a minute that Republicans would vote for one that didn't have a very broad wartime exception. Can you imagine the last ten years if such an amendment were in effect?

This is just another example of trying to automate government. It's a horrible idea, and fortunately does not have a snowball's chance of hell in passing. I have no doubt it polls well, but then so does going into default. This is why we do not have direct democracy.

Update: Now Boehner is making support for a Balanced Budget Amendment in a debt-ceiling increase bill a condition. This is pure insanity. Fortunately it looks like his version of the condition has no teeth: it isn't making sending it to the states a precondition for passage. Still, the idea that not only that the House Republicans are willing to use the economy and the nation's creditworthiness as a hostage, but they are prepared to use that sort of hostage-taking to try to change the constitution is very alarming.

Mitch McConnell's Debt Ceiling Plan is Hilarious

But it might just prove to be successful. Instead of cleanly upping the debt limit, it creates a series of almost completely symbolic song and dance routines for Obama to go through to enact the increase. McConnell knows he and Boehner can't screw the rich superbase of the GOP, and the rest of the country (and the world), by forcing us into default and ruining our credit, so he's proposing a Pontius Pilate routine whereby the GOP washes its hands of the debt limit. Somehow I doubt the fanatics that they've encouraged and created will buy it.

If this "procedure" doesn't come with any strings attached, i.e., it doesn't require spending cuts to be passed with it, I think the Democrats should jump on it. The time window for the first "resolution of disapproval" will have to be very short, or there will have to be a small increase in the debt limit that happens automatically, though.

What balancing the budget immediately with no tax hikes would mean

While I don't share the author's point of view, this rundown is actually very useful. He seems to be under a misapprehension, though: Obama can't actually cut spending on his own. He doesn't have an ex post facto line item veto. What he can do is decide who is going to get stiffed when there isn't enough money to go around. Actually balancing the budget would require congress, so we would still be in a state of default (though not sovereign debt default, unless Obama chooses not to pay the interest on accumulated debt) if the debt ceiling isn't raised in the next three weeks.

His workup does show, though, why balancing the budget with no new revenue is politically impossible at the moment. His own proposal is absurd, and the Republicans would find it unacceptable because of the massive defense cuts. But abolishing all social spending (including food stamps and all other nutritional assistance)? Good grief. Also his abolition of the Department of Education was predicated on the notion that this was a "gift" from Jimmy Carter we can do without. Actually, believe it or not, the United States government spent money on education before Jimmy Carter. But it was handled by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Jimmy merely spun Education out into its own department (and greatly increased the spending levels).

"He did everything but address the problem he was elected to fix"

If Obama loses next year, that would be a fitting epitaph for his administration. He was elected to fix the economy yet wasted his two years of real power, with huge majorities, going after other priorities, especially futzing around with healthcare (which singlehandedly blew the better part of a year and said huge majorities, his filibuster-proof Senate majority before that, not to mention his single reconciliation bill for 2010, which could have been used to avoid the government shutdown showdown and the current debt-ceiling debacle). Now he finds himself with no ability to do anything, having to fight to keep the Republican House from blowing the brains out of the economy. This article illustrates the problem quite chillingly.

There is every probability that he will lose, unless the GOP nominates a total Tea Party nutbag like Bachmann. This is a prospect I don't relish, especially with the Republicans holding the House and in a good position to take the Senate.

I suspect Warren Buffet's view is shared by rich Republicans too

They just aren't speaking out publicly. I am sure, though, that John Boehner is well aware that he'll be in it deep if he screws them by taking this game of chicken over the cliff. That's why I firmly believe a deal will be reached. The threat is half bargaining position and half kabuki theater for the Tea Party, who really are insane. In the GOP, if it comes down to what the fanatical masses want and what the wealthy want (or when it comes down to what anyone wants and what the wealthy want), always bet on the wealthy winning the day.

Money quotes from Buffett:

"We raised the debt ceiling seven times during the Bush Administration," Buffett told CNBC on Thursday. Now, the Republican-controlled Congress is "trying to use the incentive now that we're going to blow your brains out, America, in terms of your debt worthiness over time."

and

In May, Buffett stated at a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder's meeting that if the Congress failed to raise the debt ceiling, it would constitute "the most asinine act" in the nation's history, reports Reuters.

He also explains why prioritized payments, i.e., a managed default, would be of little help economically:

Some experts, like former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, have floated the idea of the Treasury paying some obligations while not paying others. This, Buffett says, is ludicrous.

"If you don't send out social security checks, I would hate to think about the credit meeting at S&P and Moody's the next morning," Buffett told CNBC. "If you're not paying millions and millions and millions of people that range in age from 65 on up, money you promised them, you're not a AAA." A triple-A credit rating is the highest possible rating that can be received.

Prioritized payments do, however, eviscerate the little merit there is to the left-wing fantasy of Obama simply declaring the debt limit unconstitutional and ignoring it. Not that it matters: borrowing money is the sole prerogative of congress. The debt limit is merely the current term of the congressional borrowing action.

 

Those talking about ignoring the debt limit have it backwards

The debt ceiling isn't something imposed by congress on the executive. It is constitutionally the power of Congress, not the executive, to borrow money. The debt ceiling is the terms of the authorization that congress gives the Treasury to sell bonds. If you repealed all laws concerning the debt ceiling, the result would not be that the Treasury could sell as many bonds as it wanted or needed to. The result would be that it couldn't sell them at all.

The debt ceiling and the "Constitutional option"

Many on the left have developed a fantasy whereby President Obama resolves the debt-ceiling standoff, which they right see as a result of outrageous political hostage-taking by the Republicans, by decreeing it unconstitutional and issuing bonds anyway. Politically, this is impossible. Obama can't very well make an executive power-grab under a novel constitutional theory when a plurality oppose raising the debt ceiling at all (it's insane, but it's true). Besides, very well-known progressive constitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe argues very persuasively that the "constitutional option" is bunk. One reason he doesn't mention is that we have enough tax revenue to finance our debts, so we won't default in the literal sense unless Tim Geithner chooses to. Not paying people will still prove to be a disaster, though.

This constitutional option is no more constitutional the Republicans' plans during the Bush administration to declare the filibuster of judges unconstitutional. In this climate, it is very likely that articles of impeachment would be drawn up if Obama were idiotic enough to do that. They might even have a non-zero chance of success.

Then there's the other kind of Holy Warrior

Take this op-ed author in the New York Times who seems to suggest that churches ought to be forced to perform same-sex marriages lest life-long discrimination by religious organizations continue. That's the sort of friend to the cause of gay rights that should make one prefer one's enemies. If you make it illegal to not perform same-sex marriages, Churches won't comply. They can't, since they believe that God forbids it, and if they're not there to do God's will, what the heck are they there for? Actually, if they started performing gay marriages because the state ordered them too, I'd have much less respect for them.

What do you do then? You either let them ignore the law or you start a full-scale persecution. The latter is probably the only thing that could reverse the trend towards gay equality in America at this point. What's next? Banning people expressing moral disapproval of homosexuality (however wrong-headed they may be)?

One other thing: this sort of attitude actually gives religious people a legitimate reason to oppose gay marriage (presuming their doctrine's were true in the first place, which they do). If you ask them, "What business is it of yours if I get married or not?" they can quite understandably say, "If we stand by and let you gays get married, then soon you'll be forcing us to abandon our doctrines under penalty of law."

Things are so bad...

That President Romney with a Republican congress and a closely divided Senate is one of the least bad scenarios, actually. At least Romney is reasonably intelligent, sane, and totally unprincipled (which is a good thing in the context of the radicalized GOP today). Heaven help us if Palin, or worse Bachmann, gets elected on Obama's failures. Fortunately, the primogeniture principle still exists in the Republican party, whereby the loser of the last nomination gets the nomination this time around, and the GOP has a prejudice against identity politics. The latter is a marked difference from the Democratic Party, where Hillary Clinton's campaign meant no white male, no matter how qualified, could compete against her.

Obama's Counterfactual Problem

The Atlantic makes the observation that Obama is running on counterfactuals, i.e., how much worse things would have been without him. The problem with that is first of all, as the Atlantic points out, that counterfactuals make lame arguments. The other problem with that, which they don't delve into, is that the counterfactuals also weigh against him. As I pointed out in an earlier post, the case can be made the liberalism would have been better off if McCain had squeaked through with no coattails.

Facing a heavily Democratic House and Senate, he'd not be able to accomplish much in the way of Right Wing policy and it might have moderated the GOP overall. If anything, 2010 would have made the Congress more Democratic. The economy would suck worse, as whatever stimulus got through would probably (though not certainly) be less adequate, but McCain would have taken the blame (running against the Bush-McCain economy would be political hold) As things stand, we have a crazy GOP House which is forcing through draconian cuts at gunpoint, even threatening to abolish Medicare and replace it with a private insurance voucher scheme. Obama is in real danger of taking all the blame for the Great Recession, making Bush a faint memory. We're also in real danger of getting a Republican President+Congress when we haven't even begun to heal from the disastrous Bush years. We could've had 20 years of Democratic hegemony again after the fall of John McCain.

Maybe the problem is that Obama really wasn't experienced enough. He couldn't effectively get his agenda through Congress and ended up blowing everything on a healthcare plan that most of the country dislikes and will probably either be repealed or struck down by the Supreme Court. Both the crises with the GOP House this year were eminently preventable. If he had gotten Congress to pass a budget last year (which could have been done even over filibustering if he hadn't lost the MA Senate seat over healthcare or he hadn't blown the Budget Reconciliation in the Senate on ramming through Obamacare), there would have been no shutdown showdown. And we wouldn't be under debt of default if he'd taken the sensible position of making an increase in the debt limit an absolute condition of extending the Bush taxcuts (arguing that a decrease in expected revenue requires and increase in borrowing authority).

The Religious Right fails utterly again

New York just democratically enacted gay marriage, the first large state to do so. This is likely the tip of the iceberg and further indication that gay marriage nationwide is only a matter of time. It looks again like the Religious Right has utterly failed in their goals, just like on abortion (we tend to have more liberal abortion laws than Europe, where there is very little controversy over abortion rights).

If they'd been willing to accept Civil Unions in the early 2000s, that may have led to a compromise position. It probably wouldn't have lasted long-term, both because of the pace of societal evolution and because of our countries unique experience with "separate but equal" schemes, at least not unless a constitutional amendment were passed banning gay marriage and establishing nationwide civil unions in one go. It's too late for any compromise now, though. They turned it into a Holy War and lost.

The net result of the Holy Culture Wars is electing Republican presidents who then (fortunately) do uncommonly close to nothing on the Culture Wars issues (only enough to save face and get the polarized liberal groups to condemn them as neanderthals), but do manage to give enormous tax breaks to the rich, make things much cozier for corporations, and make the US more belligerent. Funny how that works out. Nothing will change, though. The Religious Right won't accept defeat or acknowlege that society is moving past them.

The Palin soap opera just took a disturbing turn

Bristol Palin's account losing her virginity sounds like date rape. Assuming she's not exaggerating, that's terrible. I don't blame those that point out that she has a huge motivation to minimize her own responsibility (blaming it all on the boy is typical for extremely religious girls who stray and it would give her an excuse to Mom not to marry her child's father, not to mention her abstinence advocacy career...), but the author of the piece is right that we can't let ourselves fall into automatic suspicion of rape victims. Nor should we automatically assume the men they accuse are guilty without trial. She didn't accuse him of date-rape, just made it sound like it, so there won't be any trial and so we'll never know whether it's the straight up truth or not.

What's interests me more is the authors editorializing about rape and the media on the second page:

This year, for example, the House of Representatives was forced to drop language from an anti-abortion bill that would allow only victims of “forcible rape” to access federal funds for abortion after activists pointed out that all rape is “forcible.” The latest trend in misnaming sexual assault is calling some rape “gray rape,” as if being assaulted weren’t a black-and-white issue.

I get what she, and the activists she quotes, mean when they say that all rape is "forcible," but I think the category is necessary. On the one hand you have rape that is committed through the use or threat of physical violence. That's a black and white issue. On the other hand you have rape that is sexual activity with the subjective consent of both parties but where one party is not legally capable of giving consent (because they're too young, too intoxicated, etc.). That most definitely does produce gray areas at the margins. Or is the boy who just turned 18 who has sex with his girlfriend a week before she turns sixteen on the wrong side of the state line the same as the guy who forcible rapes a woman in the park? Only a moron would say so. The fact that statutory rape laws vary so widely proves that it isn't a black and white issue.

 

Will the Democrats look back and wish McCain had won?

It's a reasonable question, given the direction things are going. Obama has been a disappointment in many ways, and what's worse the nation has lurched seriously to the Right in response to lack of success in generating a strong economic recovery and his unpopular healthcare plan (which, ironically, is probably the most right-wing way of doing universal healthcare possible, originally devised by Republicans and first instituted by Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney). Now that the House is controlled by Republicans again, and crazy ones at that who are threatening to let the country go into default if their demands aren't met, which means no further stimulus is possible. The already totally inadequate recovery is sputtering, which means there's a very serious possibility that Republicans will sweep the 2012 elections--assuming Obama can't ride their delusional decision to push Paul Ryan's abolish-Medicare-and-replace-it-with-Obamacare plan all the way to reelection. It also assumes they don't give themselves another serious self-inflicted wound, such as nominated a lunatic (hello, Michele Bachman) and the Tea Party doesn't run it's own candidate (if, for example, Romney gets it, which Republican nomination history suggests he will).

There's a serious argument that McCain, hamstrung by a heavily Democratic congress, would have been the better way to go. Assuming he didn't do anything nuts, and didn't drop dead leaving Sarah Palin in charge, the practical results probably wouldn't have been that different from what we've actually gotten from Obama. We wouldn't have Obamacare, but that's quite unpopular anyway and might end up being repealed in 2013 before it is fully implemented. Also, the bad economy would have reinforced the Bush legacy and might have led to 20 years of Democratic hegemony, as happened during the Great Depression. Instead, it's putting the same people who caused the collapse back in power.

This isn't the first time that Democrats have won an election they'd have been better off losing. I doubt any liberal thinks their cause was advanced by Jimmy Carter winning the White House. Quite the opposite, dramatically so in fact. One can even make the argument that liberalism would have been better off if George H.W. Bush had gotten a second term (heck, the fact that it would've made George W. Bush much less likely to be president alone makes that idea very attractive).

I just discovered Instapaper

I first thought it was no different than using a bookmark. I was wrong. It is way better, at least if you have a mobile device of some sort. Even with just a wifi Kindle 3 I find this service amazing. I highly recommend it.

This is encouraging, though it is ultimately symbolic

Ethanol is an absurd boondoggle that does precious little except make gas and food more expensive. It takes almost as much energy to produce as it gives when burned and we need to eat corn. Corn growers love it because it jacks up the price, but other than that it's a plague on our country and does practically nothing to combat global warming or solve our energy problems.

If you really want useful ethanol, eliminate sugar tariffs and get it from there. The energy gain from sugar ethanol puts corn ethanol to shame and sugar is not a staple crop.

If Romney gets the Republican nomination, this will have to show up in attack ads

"I'm also unemployed." Being too rich to need a real job and retiring early from the governor's mansion so you can run for president doesn't really qualify as unemployed in any normal person's book. Throw in a bit about his support for making the Bush tax cuts, including the cuts in dividend taxation that he no doubt profits from significantly, and you've got political gold.

Nintendo's Wii U won't play DVDs or Blu-Rays

This isn't surprising, considering that their consoles have never been standard-media friendly. They've also consistently been a generation behind in storage capacity, though that was only really a problem with the Nintendo 64 since it opted out of the optical storage revolution and single-handedly took Nintendo from being the undisputed champion of the video game world to being an also-ran surviving solely on it's own first party franchises (which were and are extremely popular).

Nintendo's always been paranoid about piracy. That's one reason why they chose to keep cartridges in the Nintendo 64, killing their massive third-party support, and that's why they opted for funky proprietary optical solutions in the Gamecube and Wii.

The scare thing about the Republican strategy on debt...

which is to vote for ever more extreme measures that don't have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming law is that it might actually convince people that they're serious about reducing the deficit. Of course whenever they're really in power they run up enormous deficits (see Reagan, Bush II, and to a lesser extent Bush I).

I particularly enjoyed the congressman who brought up abortion when the Democrats were pointing out how their stupid amendment would affect children. No doubt they'd do that to defend themselves if they were proposing that the children of parents who defaulted be sold into slavery to pay their creditors. The sad thing is, I think a lot of religious people would probably buy it then too. I've spent enough time on conservative religious blogs to know that nothing else matters to them. No matter what the Republicans do, many will never fail to vote for them and most of the rest will never consider voting Democrat.

Update: Okay, I've got the text of the amendment. It's basically the same idiotic supermajority requirement (with three-fifths instead of two-thirds) for tax increases and (practically) for budgets that California has (or had, they got rid of the budget part last year, thank goodness). It doesn't apply to times of war, so it's basically a dead letter since we're always at war nowadays. That makes it even dumber.

DRM for ebooks will probably be the last to go

Music DRM is already dead because it never made sense in the first place. Every work of music was and is available in a DRM-free lossless digital format called the compact disc. Music also never had a history of copy-protection. Video still has DRM, but that's because the content holders are out of touch with reality. DVDs may be DRMed, but the DRM is useless and effortlessly cracked by even a novice with an outdated computer. Video does have a long history of copy protection though, going back to Macrovision for VHS (Macrovision is still around in DVDs, but it's much better to copy DVDs digitally than by hooking a DVD player up to a DVD recorder).

Books are a whole different animal. Paper books aren't copy protected, but copying them requires a multi-stage process. The first part, scanning them, is either very labor-intensive or requires very expensive equipment. The second part, OCR, requires expensive software if you want good quality image-to-text conversion. The final part, proof-reading, is also labor-intensive. Even some publishers aren't bothering with that. The Victorian Internet, a great little book about the history of the telegraph, is one such example. It is full of blatantly obvious OCR errors in the Kindle edition. I've been meaning to complain about that, actually.

So I don't expect publishers to offer DRM-free ebooks any time soon. I suspect it will take DRM-stripping of Kindle/Nook/Etc. ebooks to become truly pervasive before it's even considered. It will also require book piracy to reach the level of music piracy.

Stallman thinks we should boycott ebooks

I don't agree with that, but I do think that DRM in general is damaging and mainly punishes people who don't pirate. All DRM can be cracked or worked around, through the analog hole if nothing else, and if there's sufficient interest in a artistic or literary work, it will become generally available on the Internet with or without DRM.

The only place where DRM makes a real difference is in less-popular works, since it increases the barrier to pirate and they might not reach the heightened threshold. Popular works will already surpass that barrier; no amount of DRM will change that. It is debatable, I suppose, whether the higher exposure easy piracy provides to lesser-known works ends up making up for the readers who don't pay.

I don't think that legalizing file-sharing and instituting a quasi-communist author-compensation scheme is the answer (enact an Internet tax and have it paid to the artists based on the cube root of their popularity on p2p, BitTorrent, etc.). I do, however, think a new model is required for the new technology.

The paywall seems to be working for the New York Times

The article-writer's snarky attitude aside, this is an interesting development. I wasn't expecting this to be positive for them any more than anyone else, at least not until I saw how porous the paywall really was. That, I think, is the key to its success: most people will never see the paywall since they barely ever read the Times except for Twitter, Facebook, and blog links, which don't trigger the paywall. The "digerati" themselves are savvy enough to set nytimes.com cookies to be session-only so their article quota resets every time they restart their web browser. I strongly suspect if they locked down the paywall and made it water-tight things would be different.

It is worth noting, though, that the biggest benefit of the paywall is to encourage more print subscriptions. One reason is that the print version comes with digital access. I guess that's okay, but it does feel like promoting obsolete technology because they haven't figured out how to make as much money on the new technology. I don't think it really is, but it feels that way.

The take-home for this is that the New York Times has hit on a winning formula for general interest newspaper paywalls. Let's hope they don't change it.

It certainly does seem like the Libya no-fly zone is illegal

It is inexplicable that the Obama administration hasn't come to Congress for authorization. If they refused to give it, or if they tried to hold it hostage, it would be almost as big a political gift to Obama as the Medicare abolition plan.

It just goes to show: presidents usually work to increase executive power. They will almost NEVER decrease it, especially when doing so is controversial. Alas, I doubt the Republican House will do anything serious to curtail executive power. They are, as ever, too invested in having it when they get back into the White House and they are full of full-fledged militarists.

Rand Paul advocates jailing attendees of radical rallies

This is quite incredible. He specifically referred to "someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government" as being someone who "should be deported or put in prison." Even putting aside his own flirtation with such rhetoric, as referenced at the end of the linked post, tons of his and his father's supporters would be open to prison-terms if "attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government" were to be made a crime. I guess it goes without saying that he only intended this to be applied to non-Christians.

OpenOffice.org to be handed over to Apache

I suspect this will lead to option number 2 of my predictions of OpenOffice's future being the case. Assuming the two projects don't find a way to run in parallel (with improvements of one being implemented in the other and vice-versa) or compete with each other until both flounder. The latter seems unlikely, because I have a hard time seeing anything else taking OpenOffice/LibreOffice's particular niche. Commercial software certainly can't, and I don't think Google Docs really fits in that space either. Aside from change-tracking and collaboration (which are phenomenal), Google Docs is too primative currently and doesn't work offline anymore (though that's expected to change sometime in the future).

Does this count as biased headline-writing or a pig-in-a-poke?

Daily Telegraph headline:

Hay Festival 2011: ex-CIA man claims Barack Obama 'doesn't have a clue'

The real story: it's Michael Scheuer restating that no Western leaders have a clue and that we could largely end the terrorist threat by dumping Israel and the House of Saud and pulling out of Afghanistan. Naturally I thought reading the headline that I'd get some right-wing attack on Obama for not torturing enough prisoners or something. Instead I got a left-wing attack on the United States and Britain.

So, is this bias on the part of the headline writer trying to spin this into an anti-Obama story? Or is it the headline writer trying to trick right-wing readers into exposing themselves to a point of view they'd usually roundly ignore?

The Daily Telegraph is a conservative paper, but it is a British conservative paper. I guess anti-Obama Tories might be anti-militaristic too. It was Labour that was gungho for Iraq, after all.

One thing Wolfram Alpha is great for...

is doing calculations with big numbers. Unlike Google, which always only gives you an exponentiated number,Wolfram Alpha gives you the real number too (and writes it out for you in English!). Much more useful for those of us who aren't math majors.

Most Americans more worried about deficit than default

That means that most Americans are either ignorant (whatever they may say) or very short-sighted or both. The consequences of letting the deficit spending continue unchecked this year can be fixed next year. Interest rates are at rock bottom, so the deficit isn't a huge problem...yet. On the other hand, if we default this year, we can't just fix it. It'll make financing our debt (which is currently five percent of our Federal budget) much more expensive and will drive up interest rates in general.

I doubt it will come to that. I still believe that the big money at the top of the GOP pyramid has more power than the foot soldiery at the bottom. Boehner isn't going to screw them over and Obama certainly doesn't want a default going into reelection. A deal will certainly be reached, but it may end up coming down to the wire. Again.

One of the defects of our political culture is that it simultaneously gives, at times, the out-of-power party the motivation and the ability to screw things up. The President usually gets the blame when things go badly. Great Britain, on the other hand, has no such problem. When a party's in government it has to take responsibility and when it isn't it can't do anything.

The Secret Service has a Twitter account?

Wow. I had no idea. Cutting him off from the official account seems appropriate. I do hope that the Right doesn't press this issue and try to get the poor guy fired, though. That would be ridiculous.

Square Enix post a large loss

There were some pretty insightful comments on the Slashdot article, actually. I don't agree with what some have said that they haven't released any good games since the merger (Final Fantasy XII was fantastic--fully worthy of the Final Fantasy brand even though it didn't feel like a Final Fantasy game), but they are right on the money with these:

They need to kill FFXIV (Score:2)

by _xeno_ (155264) on Friday May 13, @04:11AM (#36115856) Homepage Journal

Who knows exactly how much FFXIV is costing them in development costs and server costs, but that ship has sailed. There's no point sinking money into something that will never turn a profit.

It's been seven months now. The improvements the game has made are minor at best. (The two biggest are that leveling combat classes is now possible, and that the market place works. Not well, mind you, but it works.) If you ask anyone playing whether or not you should, they'll tell you flat-out it isn't worth it.

This is not the sign of a game on the road to profitability. With every week that goes by, the ability to earn new players goes down.

Once they've stopped throwing money at a failed game, then they can start worrying about creating new games that people actually want to play.

But first, they've got to stop the bleeding.

I always thought that making MMOs part of the main series was a bad decision. Releasing one that clearly wasn't close to ready was a truly idiotic one. More's the pity, because they actually got Nobuo Uematsu to come back to do the score for that game.

So what? They could make that any time they want (Score:1)

by XahXhaX (730306) on Friday May 13, @04:04AM (#36115844)

They've been sitting on remaking FF7 for years. $150 million would probably be covered by just the initial release if they were to produce an updated version with modern tech.

Not that I care either way--I hated that game and pay less attention to Square with each year. But they _could_ do it any time if they only wanted to.

Final Fantasy VII still has a massive fanbase. I'm one of the rare people who actually thought Final Fantasy VIII was better than VII, but even I would be enthusiastic for a VII remake on the PS3 a la the demo they released a few years back. Besides, of all the Final Fantasy games, VII seems most in need of a remake. It was their first foray into 3D graphics and the results did not age well at all.

UK newspapers are famous for headline's being deceptive

Actually, I've seen many that have only the most tenuous connection (if even that) to either the story or reality itself. This one isn't bad, but it's still misleading:

Tories 'demand and like' spending cuts, says Clegg

What he actually said was that some Tory voters might demand and like the spending cuts. If that statement is enough to strain the coalition further, that unquestionably true statement, then the government will likely fall within the year (and the fixed-term parliament bill won't save it: votes of no confidence remain, only there will be a 14 day grace period for a new government to be formed before an election is triggered. That government must have a majority willing to vote confidence in it). British Conservatives aren't the anti-government fanatics today's Republicans are (or pretend to be), but I'm sure a sizable portion of their staunch supporters are "shrink the government" types who would want to cut the government even if it possessed a magic tree that grew money for free without any taxation.

Wow. An episode of FLOSS Weekly that's interesting!

Usually they just talk about some random incredibly-niche open source project that almost no one even in the open source world is interested in with someone involved in the project. This time they don't have a guest and so (glory of glories!) they're actually just chatting about current events in the open source world, including products I use or am actually interested in using. Amazing.

Ugh. Microsoft to buy Skype

I wonder how long it will take them to kill the Linux version. And quite possibly ruin the product. At least there are alternatives.

Ubuntu aims for 200m users. Good luck with that

If tablet PCs take off, then they might be decently positioned to do that since that's what Unity seems designed for (as many Slashdotters have pointed out). That's incredibly unlikely to happen. Tablet PCs have been around for a long, long time and went nowhere. The iPad is successful because it isn't a tablet PC; it's a tablet, period, in other words a giant smart phone running a modified smart phone OS on an ARM chip. Does anyone really want to run Ubuntu, a desktop OS, on an ARM-based tablet? Doubtful.

The death of GNOME 2 and the move to Unity is really making me really resent KDE's permanent obtuseness when it comes to drag 'n' drop (i.e., forcing the user to choose what to do with a file every blasted time instead of moving it if its within a filesystem like all sane UIs do). I guess I'll give XFCE a try when I'm forced for upgrade my current system.

First a swingstate, now a bellwether: are they nuts?

Virginia as a bellwether of Obama's reelection chances? You've got to be kidding me. Obama was only the second Democrat to carry Virginia in over fifty years. Unlike California's switch to solid blue with the 1992 election, this was a fluke. Maybe if Obama has a small landslide reelection he'll take Virginia too mainly  on the strength of black turnout, but otherwise it's going Republican in 2012 whether Obama gets reelected or not.

Two Ways to Get RSS feeds for Twitter Timelines

It is really a shame that Twitter removed the ability to subscribe to an individual users timeline RSS feed on the page (either through a button on the page or through metadata that produces the RSS icon in the address bar). Here's a pessimistic blog post on what this forebodes for the future of RSS. The good thing is that the feeds still work and there are fairly painless ways to find them:

1. Use "Add a Subscription" in Google Reader and paste in the old-style address of the user's profile page. To get the old-style url, just remove the slash-shebang (/#!) from the current url (e.g., http://twitter.com/#!/isaachummel becomes http://twitter.com/isaachummel).


2. Search for the person's twitter handle in Google Reader. The feed should appear even if no one has ever subscribed to it (way to go Google Reader!). To find the feed search feature in Google Reader, select Browse for Stuff and then click on search at the top of the page. Or just click this link.


3. Follow this blog post's instructions.

 

Anti-evolution proposal makes mockery of science

It is only one guy's submission, so maybe it's not time to get too excited (yet), but this is still stunning:

One submission has come from a company called International Databases, LLC. It's a one-man operation run by Stephen Sample, who says he has a degree in evolutionary biology and taught at the high school and junior college levels for 15 years.

The material he submitted consists of eight modules dealing with current issues in biology and ecology. Most are well within the mainstream scientific consensus. But there are two that deal with the origin of life. Those sections say the "null hypothesis" is that there had to be some intelligent agency behind the appearance of living things. It is up to the scientists proposing a naturalistic explanation to prove their case.

That makes a mockery of the scientific method (and half-way decent theology too). The null hypothesis is not "a wizard did it" (I'm not mocking religion here: he said the intelligence is not necessarily God). If that had been the baseline, modern western civilization would not have come into being (and you wouldn't have a computer or electronic device to read this on). The null hypothesis is simply that that theory is not true.

Tim Pawlenty has proven not to be a serious candidate

I think he just shot his presidential campaign squarely in the head by appearing in this circus. Not a single one of them were ever serious contenders for the 2012 election (I'd never even heard of Herman Cain before). You know you shouldn't have agreed to attend a debate when heroin and hookers become the focus of press attention.

To the Paulites: look, I like Ron Paul as much as the next guy (well, as much as the next guy who thinks he's crackpot, but the kind of crackpot that every legislative body ought to have a few of!), but he's about as likely to be president or even be nominated as Dennis Kucinich.

Ah, the joys of instant news

I thought this headline was peculiar:



 

This sort of thing used to happen a lot in the print world too, though. It still does from time to time, of course. Fortunately, now it can be fixed instantly. When I clicked through, the headline was normal.