Recently in Politics Category

In a recent article, Wired covered a case where the ACLU is suing a Pennsylvania prosecutor who in turn was pressing child porn charges against three teens who photographed themselves in a series of suggestive poses (and in one girl's case, with exposed breasts) and distributed those images to friends at school. What bothers me far more than the prosecutor's claims, which will likely never go anywhere, was the comments posted to the article. Almost all of them were some form of outrage that these girls were being treated as sex offenders for having taken pictures of their own bodies. However, one of them was the following:

"How can anyone think that the ACLU is right in this case? I'm not an advocate of government involvement in most cases, but these kids have no idea what they are doing when they take these pictures and distribute them at 13 years old. Guess, what - pixels don't forget."

Ignoring the fact that the very phrase "have no idea what they are doing," should be a clear indicator of how the law should treat them, I feel that this comment and the people who might make similar comments deserve more than a one-off comment. There are many reasons that this doesn't really make any sense, here.

1. No one is saying that these girls were behaving responsibly
2. No one is saying that we should encourage such behavior
3. The girls involved will almost certainly have to deal with some degree of ongoing fallout from this case (at the very least, they'll probably put up with a lot of off-color teasing and humiliation at school)
4. This case is entirely about the inappropriate use of child porn laws being used to brand a young person as a child pornographer for making and distributing photographs of themselves to their friends.

But to claim that we should destroy the hopes and dreams of a minor (and that's what being branded as a child pornographer will do) for giving their friends a picture of themselves in a provocative pose or even while naked or partially naked, is entirely disproportionate. If the goal is to teach an important life lesson, then you confiscate their phone for a year and charge them with public indecency.

There are two reasons you don't charge them with child pornography. The first is detailed above. The second reason is that doing so dilutes the moral condemnation of real child pornography, which creates an environment which fosters physical and sexual abuse of minors, human trafficking and other severe and horrible social ills that have no parallels in this case.

If we forget that, we lose our way, and run the risk of hurting the children that we sought to protect.

I was reading about this week's drop in the market and couldn't help thinking that this is the time people are going to remember in 10 years. They're going to look back and say, "why didn't I buy stocks when the market tanked?" This is it. We're not at the end of the road. There will be one or two more rounds of bloodletting as companies jockey for position in the race to recover first, but we've reached the point where analysts are starting to talk about the future again. The credit market is licking its wounds. The Fed is changing its policies on future outlooks. Congress has even decided to finally take a swing at the ball (probably too late to have a meaningful consequence, but good for confidence).

There will probably not be another time like this for a decade or two in terms of the value of cash invested in the market. My first reaction to the declines in late 2008 was to increase my 401k contributions to the maximum that I could afford. What are you doing to prepare for the upswing?

Laura DiDio, a former CNN on-camera personality and a central figure in the paranormal investigation of the house that was the basis for the movie The Amityville Horror, eventually went on to work in market research for The Yankee Group and later spun off her own research group called ITIC. She was in a swirl of controversy during the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit when SCO was alledging that IBM had injected proprietary UNIX code into the Linux operating system. DiDio not only supported SCO strongly, but also spent a good deal of time publishing surveys and making comments to the press suggesting that Linux was the more costly server platform as compared to Windows due to the "total cost of ownership" (TCO). Microsoft, in turn, based much of their TCO-oriented marketing and PR around these findings.

Today, her ITIC company is producing results that show that Microsoft is a leader in the virtualization market and that any gap between Microsoft and VMware is vanishing while also suggesting that corporate users are "surprisingly satisfied" with Windows Vista.

The world of market research and the "recent surveys indicated" marketing phenomenon  have really gotten out of control in the past 10 years. Now, most companies' marketing departments don't deal in the real perception of their products, but in the perception that can be crafted by paying for the right kinds of surveys. Of course, if you just go to someone and say, "I need research that says X, and I'm willing to pay Y amount for it," that's likely to come back to you later. Instead, you float ideas on what your marketing team "neads to know," and and market research organizations perform "independant research" which you then buy. It's the same result. You pay someone to come up with the data you wanted, but it looks cleaner to the casual observer.

DiDio is a master at this kind of stats-for-hire research, which is, I imagine, why she's formed her own company.

For further reading:

• Laura DiDio on Wikipedia
• A recent ITIC survey finds that Microsoft is gaining major ground in virtualization vs. VMware and Windows Vista's bad rep is "undeserved"
• A 2004 piece where DiDio explains the why continued growth of the Firefox browser is unlikely
  

As you probably know, a man was shot and killed a man outside of San Francisco at the Fruitvale station on the BART (commuter rail) by the transportation police. The man was named Oscar Grant III, and his crime appears to have been being drunk and disorderly and involved in a fight. He was hadcuffed at the time, and face down on the cement walkway.

Rumors are flying about the incident. Some people are saying that he was shot because the officer in question thought the gun was his taser. One report suggests that his mental state is in question. Now, over 100 protesters have been arrested in riots that followed.

I just want to get one thing off my chest about this: cops are people. That means that, like any group of people, while some are wonderful human beings and some are evil bastards, most of them fall in the middle. I don't know if this cop was the kind of scum that would knowingly shoot an unarmed man in the back while pinned down or if this was a tragic mistake, but what bothers me is that so many people immediately move to paint all police with the same brush.

Cops are people with jobs. Their jobs are a bit less pleasant than most people's, and that obviously takes its toll, but overall they're just people. To suggest that they're all sadistic power-mongers is just as bad as suggesting that they can never do wrong. Let's make sure that this boy's family gets the help they need to get through this, and that the officers responsible are investigated and delt with appropriately, but let's not make the mistake of thinking that our lives would be better off without someone to call when there's an accident or someone breaks into your home.

The debate over medical marijuana rages on, and one of the most amusing entries into the fray was recently covered in a Wired article about a Google Maps mashup of medical marijuana and Starbucks locations in the San Francisco area. I'm in the Bay Area this week for work, so I found it particularly funny that such a map was published by the government (no, I'm not even going to the city proper, so scoring weed form a Federally endorsed location isn't on my agenda, but the sheer humor value of it says that most of these places will likely see a boom in "walk in" business).

So, what did the Drug Czar (silliest title ever) have to say about publishing a map that was so obviously doomed to be a target of ridicule? Oddly enough, the response was a sort of position paper against medical marijuana, not any kind of drug enforcement stance. That is, the paper cited instances of abuse of medical marijuana initiatives as a means of making a broad political point about the alleged motivations of those pushing for medical marijuana laws.

Today we add a footnote to the impressive catalog of roleplaying game satire. First, there was The Head of Vecna. Then there was The Gazebo. Now, we have I'm A Bard (nominally "Adventuring Party Politics: The Campaign is Getting Ugly"). This brilliant bit of humor was cranked out by Hedgehog on his somehedgehog Live Journal. It sets the 2008 Presidental campaign players as roleplayers in a heated argument. The truly shocking element is that it's not even political. It's just downright funny. Bravo; that's one smart Hedgehog!

The fact that some nutjobs (wingnuts is, I believe the current term, though I think that unfairly tarnishes the right wing) attend McCain/Palin rallies isn't news, nor should it be. However, the news and blogging services seem to be enthralled with the idea that  you can interview a dozen people outside of a rally and find at least 2-4 who will say something they shouldn't have. You might even get lucky and find someone who will say something deeply offensive.

Is that what we've come down to? Really? Let's think twice and admit that when the Daily Show did it, it was funny because they're not actually a news show, but when the mainstream media does it or the blogging community beats it into the ground, it begins to smell like the proverbial 3-day-old fish. Please, let's get back to discussing the state of the nation and the need (discussed in depth by both of the leading Presidential candidates) for change.

I was browsing Conservapedia today in the hopes of finding some tidbits of useful information. I've long held that strongly biased sources such as Conservapedia have one thing going for them: a willingness to dig deeply into the things that most interest them, regardless of the popularity of such subjects. Instead I found some truly disturbing things.

This essay about Dungeons & Dragons first appeared on my wiki in May of 2006, but in the wake of roleplayer-turned killer, Robert Hull Marko, I thought some preventative measures were in order. Here's what you need to know about D&D, and by extension, roleplaying in general, if you want to have an intelligent discussion about the impact it has on its players. Now, in the case of Marko, it's a bit different. He is a veteran of Iraq, and obviously any discussion of his exposure to the tame violence of a game as compared with that of a war is rather absurd. Still, here's the facts followed by a few of my conclusions.

Is D&D evil? It's a provocative question, and in some people's minds it doesn't matter what your answer is. Any product that you can even ask the question about is suspect. This article is a rebuttal to what I feel is a terrible campaign of misinformation against one of the best tools in a parent's toolbox in their attempt to raise a healthy, well adjusted teen: Dungeons & Dragons (among other role-playing games).

"This scheme was not intended to permit illegal voting ... employees of ACORN were not performing the work that they were being paid for, and to some extent, ACORN is a victim of employee theft." Dan Satterberg via FactCheck.org

When a Republican prosecutor says this about an organization, the Republican candidate for President would be well advised to not then turn around and report in a nationally televised debate that this group has tried to perpetrate, "one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy." McCain knows he'll be called on this. He knows that he's going negative with patently incorrect facts on national TV. He knows, and it would seem he doesn't care. Why? Because all of the research shows that going negative works, regardless of accuracy. I really want to see the American voters prove that research dead-wrong in 2008.