14 Sep 2006
Wiccan sign allowed on soldier's plaque

Good on Nevada! Now the VA needs to get it's shit together and recognize that not all soldiers are members of a "recognized" religion, and indeed that the whole concept of "recognized religion" is anathema to the American ideal.

AP - The widow of a soldier killed in Afghanistan won state approval Wednesday to place a Wiccan religious symbol on his memorial plaque, something the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs had refused.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

12:06 /Asatru | 1 comment | permanent link

Youth can't do without phones, alcohol, drugs

Note what's classified as a drug. While technically correct, this use of the term implies equivalence, and gets you used to thinking that "cigarettes = pot = heroin". Tobacco is well on it's way to Schedule A.

But I seriously doubt that cell phones will be joining it anytime soon, no matter how "addictive" they really can be.

Three studies published today show that young people seem to be drinking too much, smoking tobacco and using mobile phones a great deal. Obviously they can only afford to do this thanks to the fact that all their music is stolen these days.

(link) [The Register]

12:04 /Politics | 2 comments | permanent link

Cuba slams 'morally decadent' US

Whoa! Excuse me? When the Pope made similar hypocritical comments the other day, it was noted here, so I can't let this go by without comment.

Here's the "President" (for life) of a country that routinely jails and tortures and sometimes kills dissidents, is "legally" a one party state jail and that hasn't had anything even resembling free and fair elections in nearly 70 years. And he's calling the US "morally decadent".

I guess "moral decadence" must be pretty attractive, because so many of his citizens would like to give it a whirl! And many of them die trying...

Now, of course I'm not saying that we're perfect, not by any means. But let's keep a sense of perspective here - not even the nasty, obnoxious and Constitution-gutting Bush Administration has started snatching people off the street in the middle of the night and executing them. Nor has any American government run the country as the personal fief of the Leader. When we do those things, if we do those things, we can be "castro-gated" as "morally decadent". Until then, Fidel, I suggest that you remove that log that's sticking out of your head before pointing out the splinters in our eye...

Cuba's vice-president calls the US a "morally decadent empire" at the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Havana.

(link) [BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]

09:02 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Why Johnny Can't Code

Now this is an interesting article. Indeed, I encountered the tail end of this in my last years as a developer, when I was managing the R&D department. You have no idea how many people out there that call themselves developers have only ever used one modern, RAD language system (usually Visual C++ or Visual BASIC) and simply can't grasp the whole concept of writing all the code themselves. And they usually didn't even get the fact that they were loading libraries to do the nifty tricks - most of them thought that BitBlt was a feature of C++!

Now, I love my Builder and Delphi environments, and can really be pretty incredibly productive in them. But even they hide such things as the main program entry point, and they stack so many libraries so deep that unless you're familiar with what's going on under the hood you have no idea how the programs you write actually work.

Which is OK for an old geezer like me - I do understand what's going on under the hood. But as this article so succinctly points out, a lot of todays kids (and tomorrows developers) don't even know that there is a hood!

And that's going to be a problem.

Salon has an article named 'Why Johnny Can't Code', an interesting examination of the dearth of line programming languages available today. At first I wanted to read this and say aha, here's a simple line oriented language that's available through open source, but after reading the article I couldn't find any. And being an old fart, I remember the days spent with edlin and basic."

(link) [Slashdot]

08:42 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link