The Ice Cream Koan: Solved

A new koan:

If you have some ice cream, I will give it to you.

If you have no ice cream, I will take it away from you.

It is an ice cream koan.

I am pleased to report that, in typical Zen manner, the solution came to me when I was not looking for it. And the solution is typically Zen, being the same for both parts:

I will give you ice cream.

For the former, I am giving you the ice cream which is already yours.

For the latter, what you actually have is no-ice-cream, that is, an absence of ice cream. By giving you ice cream, I am taking away your no-ice-cream, removing your absence of ice cream.

I have solved the ice cream koan.

Either Way, the Victim

Unthinking victimhood in Ann Arbor:

Kristoff Wennersten figured his prom proposal had to be one-of-a-kind if it would have any chance of being accepted.

But the Huron High School senior never imagined it would result in a suspension for himself and 12 of his varsity lacrosse teammates, whom he recruited to help spell out the message at a school soccer match via their derrieres.

The players displayed the question, "Will You Go To The Prom With Me? Yes or No?" on their posteriors while mooning Huron senior Carolyn Campbell at a game.

All 13 players were suspended for a undetermined number of games and ordered to complete 20 hours of community service.

Okay, so the lacrosse team mooned a girl, and got suspensions for it. Do they need strong justice in this case? Well, only because they mooned a girl, according to their athletic director:

"Inappropriate is inappropriate," Huron athletic director Dottie Davis said Monday after meeting with lacrosse varsity players and their parents. "It disrespects women, and that's the clear message we need to have the students understand - what may be fun to them isn't necessarily fun to everyone else." [emphasis added]

Except that the "woman" in question clearly wasn't offended or disrespected, as she herself indicates in the next paragraph:

Campbell, who accepted the prom invitation by patting the lower back of the player displaying the word 'Yes,' described Wennersten's method as "cute" and said she wasn't upset by the manner in which she was asked.

If the situation were turned around, and it were the girls' lacrosse team mooning a guy, I suspect Dottie Davis would still find a way to blame the male-dominance franchise for it.

Memory Eternal

With the saints give rest, O Christ, to the souls of Thy handmaid Bonnie Magdalene, where there is neither sickness, nor sorrow, nor sighing, but life everlasting.

Ten Years and Counting

Ten years ago this month (April 1, 1998, to be precise), I got hit with the Chernobyl virus. It wiped out my hard drive's partition table and boot blocks, leaving me with the computing equivalent of a cement block on my desk.

I had been experimenting with Slackware Linux, even getting to the point of having a dual-boot system via AUTOEXEC.BAT and the LOADLIN.EXE Linux loader. But when the partition table got zapped, I made a draconian decision:

NO MORE MICROSOFT WINDOWS FOR ME!

I had seen enough of Linux to be impressed, from the pure 32-bit environment to the system's stability in the face of program naughtiness. Microsoft couldn't make any such claim in Windows 95.  I knew that, with such credentials and effort behind Linux, it wasn't going away anytime soon.

The next day, I re-installed Slackware Linux, but this time on my entire hard drive. No Microsoft Windows. None! No safety net, no fancy GUI to hide all the registry options, no programmer in Redmond telling me what I wasn't allowed to do. I had "cast off the bow-lines" and bravely sailed into new waters.

The first few days were tough. I had to re-configure my X server (this was before XFree86 supported monitor detection) and get my Internet dial-up to work again. Then I fired up the Lynx browser and re-downloaded the latest Netscape browser for Linux. Being in the countryside, the best dial-up I could get was 28.8Kbps, and that was on a good day. It usually connected at 26.4Kbps. Either way, the Netscape download still took well over 2 hours.

Since that day, I've seen Linux get better, with:

• full multi-processing
• clustering
• running fully from a live CD (first on Knoppix)
• support for myriad architectures, from the tiny Chumby to the hulking IBM S/390
• an incredibly short average window between bug detection and fix
• expanded run-time configuration via sysfs
• an ever-growing list of filesystem choices and options
• virtualization and hypervisor support (such as User-mode Linux, Xen, and QEMU)
• vast improvements in GUI choices (although these are not specific to Linux)

Two years later, I had done so much with Linux (even ran a web server through dial-up, just because I could), that Mom asked me to build her a Linux system for Christmas. I actually tried to talk her out of it, but when she pointed out the support would be easier with fewer crashes and BSOD's than Windows, well, she convinced me. I put some old parts together, put Mandrake Linux 6 (now Mandriva) on it, and taught her as much Linux as I could during Christmas vacation. She's gone through a few hardware upgrades, and switched to Fedora 8, but she's still using Linux.

Two weeks ago today, I set Dad up with a Linux system. Mom had turned off his laptop to clean it, not knowing that the shutdown would be the laptop's last. So I donated my IBM Thinkpad 660X to the cause, setting it up to boot automatically into XFCE and launch Gnome's Aisleriot solitaire program. It's the only thing he does on the laptop, but for the man who made sure I had food and clothes growing up, I'm glad to help provide his entertainment. And I'm happy to use Linux to do it.

My brother is the only one not using Linux, because his cell phone model is explicitly not supported for anything except Windows and MacOS. Still, he tries to be careful about his web surfing, so he uses the Opera web browser and the Privoxy web firewall.

I'm A Liss Packer!

Actually, it's "Lisp hacker," thanks to funky English phonetics. And I'm not really a hacker in Lisp, but more of a script kiddie (def. 2).

My parents recently got two replacement computers, Mom on her desktop and Dad for his Solitaire machine. Both are running Linux with the GNOME desktop. However, Mom's system is Fedora 8, while Dad's is Slackware 12.0. They both like to play the Klondike version of Solitaire, but the rules weren't to their liking. Specifically, they wanted one-card deals and no limits on re-deals.

The Solitaire rules for AisleRiot are stored as Scheme files in the directory $SHARE/share/gnome-games/aisleriot/games/klondike.scm. Well, Scheme is a dialect of Lisp, and I have a couple books on Lisp...

Their games now work as desired, but the fixes were different between the two machines. Having a modicum of exposure to Lisp made it a lot easier.

The Right Kind of Victim

The Los Angeles Times has apologized for a false accusation against P.Diddy. He was not involved in the murder of Tupac Shakur.

So why hasn't CBS apologized to President Bush for the forged "memos from the Texas Air National Guard"?

Oh, right, he's a capitalist white guy who believes in law and order.

Isn't This Banned As Torture?

If denying bodily functions, or using them as humiliation, is considered torture, then this teacher has some answering to do:

Orange County Public Schools is investigating claims that a student was forced to use a lunchbox as a toilet in front of his class at Meadowbrook Middle School.

The teacher will not be coming to school. She will be relieved of her duty with pay as the school district investigates, officials said.

"If you gotta go, you gotta go," student Quonterious Thomas told Eyewitness News in an interview Monday.

Thomas, 13, says his language arts teacher, Jameeka Chambers, gave him two options when he had to go to the bathroom at Meadowbrook Middle School in Orange County. She said he could wait until the end of class or use her lunchbox in the back of the classroom.

The sixth grader said he used her lunchbox.

"If I had waited any longer, I would have peed on myself and that would have been even more embarrassing," Thomas said, adding that his entire class of 19 students and his teacher watched.

(All emphasis added.)

Sure, the mother has questions, like "how could this happen?", but I'd like to know how this teacher's apparently unstable perception of reality went unnoticed by her mentors and bosses.

This is her first year on the job and her record is clean.

No, her record is nil. "One ice patch doth not a winter make," and less than one year on the job does not make a clean record.

A Useful Paraphrase

Some things never change over time, and human nature is one of them. To illustrate, let me paraphrase 1 Corinthians 1:22-24:

For rednecks require a sign, and geeks seek after wisdom: But we preach Christ crucified, unto rednecks a stumblingblock, and unto geeks foolishness; But unto them which are called, both rednecks and geeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.

Why Not Software Patents?

Why should patent protections not be available for computer software?

At its core (pun intended), computer memory is just a bunch of transistor-switches. Imagine needing permission from a patent holder, just to turn on all the lights in the building, or to turn lights on and off to make the letters "L O V E" on a skyscraper. Really, it's accomplished with just switches. There may be a patent on the switches themselves, but you are allowed to configure them for any effect you desire.

So it should be with software. The hardware probably has a thousand patents covering its various inventions, but what code and data you load into it (setting the transistor-switches) should be up to you, as well as any resulting effects. If those "resulting effects" includes playing a DVD, then so be it, but the term can be applied to just about any computer program.

(Again, thanks to "the Batman" for spurring this line of thought.)

Incompetent Fools, the Lot of Them

I am up waaaaaay too late doing this, but it just chaps my a$%: Hillary plays the "think of the children!" card, B. Hussein Obama tries to claim that Iraq posed no threat.

How many times must I repeat myself? Iraq was every bit the threat Afghanistan was. From CNN's own archives, February 13, 1999:

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden, who openly supports Iraq against the Western powers.

The plain fact is, Saddam Hussein had no interest in being a civilized player on the world stage, and actually desired to be an uncivilized player. To that end, he was willing to play host to al-Qaeda's well-heeled head (and to hell with his own people subjects) in order to antagonize the West, especially the United States, after such a humiliating rout from Kuwait.

Further, Hillary's husband knew the danger Iraq posed:

"If Saddam can cripple the weapons inspections system and get away with it, he would conclude the international community, led by the United States, has simply lost its will," said Clinton. "He would surmise that he has free rein to rebuild his arsenal of destruction."

For B. Hussein Obama to claim that Iraq posed no threat is worse than ignorance of history. It is paving the way for the next terrorist attack on the United States.

Hillary knows that her proximity to history, coupled with her "representation" of the state most victimized on 9/11, makes withdrawal from Iraq politically very dangerous to her campaign. So she turns to the fear-mongering appeal to "think of the children!" She wants the United Nations village, not the parents, to raise the children, remember? The children's parents don't matter to her... except on Election Day.

These two are so incompetent in their campaigning, I wouldn't trust them to close the door in winter, let alone protect the freest people in history.