the whole kaboodle

graphrisc: imagine a very lazy cat, enlarge the cat, increase the lazyness and paint the cat black, you got my cat

Think of your home’s security. Anyone with a sledgehammer can break into your home, regardless of the quality of your deadbolts. That’s what happened to those Linux servers. But in the Windows world we get a bunch of houses with hollow veneer front door with a brass flip latch for a lock, and no back door at all, just a wide open portal.

Even with a steel door and twenty deadbolts, eardrum destroying alarm, and a pair of Rottweilers, you could still get broken into. But that’s no reason to encourage the burglars with cardboard doors and a lawn sign that says ‘if it’s not too much trouble, could you please not break into my home tonight’.

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Freedom is a problem because it allows people to act in manners contradictory to human welfare.

Privacy is a problem because it means society cannot hold a person accountable for his wrongdoings.

Conversely:

Totalitarianism is a problem because it allows people to act in manners contradictory to human welfare.

Lack of Privacy is a problem because it means the wrongdoings of society may be used to justify punishing an individual for his/her differences of opinion.

American readers, you may not know there is a fizzy kind of lemonade that does not contain anything remotely lemon-like, and that is what you will get if you order lemonade. And you will sit, horrified, looking at the glass and say, ‘but I didn’t order Sprite’ and wonder what kind of mad people live here. Also, there will be no ice in the glass, and this will disturb you. You’ll probably leave an absurdly low tip as a result, not realising that because no one in the UK leaves a tip at all, your implied insult will actually be taken as overexuberant tourist generosity. I know, because you were sitting next to me Friday afternoon at a cafe when it happened. I was the one wearing the floppy hat, reading.

Last Sunday I played Ursuppe (”the primordial soup”), wherein you play some amoebas that have to eat each other’s excrement, while purchasing genes with which to improve your survival rate. A fun, if rather odd, game.

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Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.

21:51  * ajps lanuches his "me" polling company
21:51 <ajps> Opinions on anything, at a low low price.
21:51 <ajps> lanuche, sound like a verb.
21:51 <ajps> deriv. Old French, perhaps.

Those who are unfamiliar with the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

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Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still human.

The upshot is that while teenagers in the U.S. have about as much sexual activity as teenagers in Canada or Europe, Americans girls are four times as likely as German girls to become pregnant, almost five times as likely as French girls to have a baby, and more than seven times as likely as Dutch girls to have an abortion. Young Americans are five times as likely to have H.I.V. as young Germans, and teenagers’ gonorrhea rate is 70 times higher in the U.S. than in the Netherlands or France.

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