So it turns out getting my computer to hunt down every flac music file in my collection and encode an ogg version of it takes just under four seconds to type, and just over four days to run. It doesn't slow down basic web surfing at all. I used to think typing on the command line was something one tried to get away from in computers.

On something of a whim, Tuesday, I drove up to the capitol and sat in on the hearing for HB 288, to allow cohabitating unmarried adults to become foster and adoptive parents. It got shot down, of course. Whaddaya expect? I didn't speak for the audience participation bit, though maybe I should have. I noticed the speakers from organizations opposing the bill tried to bring in statistics on the allegedly greater volatility of gay relationships. Speakers for the bill generally tried to argue against these numbers, but I think they missed a valuable moral point in doing so.
It actually matters not at all how much more or less likely homosexual couples are to break up, or have abusive relations, or take drugs than heterosexual couples. (The speakers against were actually very vague on just how much more or less.) Suppose tomorrow someone published a clear statistical study showing left-handed people were more likely than right-handed people to suffer from mental illness. Or ethnic Italians more likely than ethnic Albanians to divorce. Or that Mormons were more likely than Baptists to let their kids have too much ice cream and too little exercise. No one would actually believe that therefore these demographic categories should be entirely cut off from adopting children, even if the differences were quite large. The DCFS has a whole vetting process in place specifically to evaluate these things on a per-family basis. (And however effective or ineffective it is, it's likely to be just as effective or ineffective for all demographic groups.) An essential moral principle of America's progressive values is that you don't restrict someone based on their broader demographic category. I regret not saying anything then (not having articulated this paragraph entirely on the fly during the open mic period.) I'll probably rework this into an LTE and a too-little-too late email to the State Representatives on that committee.

In other news, today I've started biking to work again. Had to dial the speed down a bit for my lazy delinquent legs. It's several hours later now and I'm not aching or tired from it. Hopefully I'll get back into some approximation of shape.

musikopi

So my current project is putting my music collection conveniently on my computer in FLAC format, since I picked up a hard drive that can hold that much a couple months ago. (Really, I consider myself fairly computer-savvy, but unlike many people interested in computers, I've mostly made do with hardware that was top of the line back in the final days of Windows 98.) I've been at it a couple weeks now, off and on, and I'm in the middle of 'E.' (I think 'D,' 'M,' and 'S' might make up nearly half my collection.) I find that, actually having the songs a mouse-click away, I've been listening more than when they're in a batch of CDs. Although Exact Audio Copy is still considered the best available ripping program, I've been using one called Rubyripper instead. EAC can work in Linux under WINE, but it and WINE look like Windows programs and I find their appearance jarring. Plus WINE makes for some processing overhead. An audiophile site I found says Rubyripper is nearly as good and I've taken to it. Like most Linux graphical programs, it's a frontend for a command line program. In this case cdparanoia. It's a bit slow going. It works by ripping each track multiple times (two by default, I set it to three), breaking it into chunks about 1/75th of a second long and comparing the chunks from different rips. It assumes anything that matches your preferred number of times is good, then makes additional rips for anything that couldn't match (I have it set to require four matches for anything that didn't work out in the initial three rips.) It's not a quick "rip some songs to put on the iPod before class" program, but for archiving it's pretty good. The only problems I've encountered are on CDs with hidden tracks (that is, audio information in the pregap.) For those (two so far) I have broken out EAC. It seems to struggle with them, too, but it does manage to rip them.

Speaking of copying music, a few weeks back I was playing pool when a really great bluesy rock song came on. I don't know how common my attitudes are but I can't treat music as only a background thing. If it's there it ought to be an occasional part of the conversation, so I commented on it, and then went up to the bar to ask what it was (something I actually do quite a bit at places that have music playing in the background.) The guy told me it was Janis Ian. So after some web searching I've downloaded some tracks off her website, where I also came across this great article against the recording industry's approach to copyright and digital restrictions. Do check it out (although I'm probably late to the party on this one.)

liketechnothrillers?

How about a real-life technothriller story with secret codes, international intrigue, and factionalism and personality conflicts in the face of a devastating global threat? It has 1337 haxxors, and a non-government, not-for-profit, adhocratic organization working for good. And the ending ominously warns, "it's not over yet."

From the pages of Wired

h8enoughforya

(Since the topic doesn't seem to be disappearing from the news...)

I say let the enemies of freedom have their short-lived victory in California. The last time it came to a vote, their side had sixty-something percent, this time they had fifty-something percent. In a few years gay marriage will come to popular vote again and they will lose.

Look for social conservatives to become more and more obviously desperate as they look around and realize that their whole philosophy is dead in the water if people born after 1970 take a liking to this whole democracy thing.

thecommunitynuke

Here's something they can stick in that huge pit in Sugarhouse.

http://www.dailytech.com/Miniature+Nuclear+Reactors+to+be+on+Sale+Within+5+Years/article13389.htm

? ...fail?

Hmm... interesting... Blogger seems to be a few minutes ahead of TribTalk.

timestampandvote

Just another little thing I want published and timestamped here before it's uploaded to a forum controlled by someone else:

It is especially imperative in a free society that the election process be totally open. The basic balloting process where everyone writes their choice down, the votes are counted and the totals announced is very open. Anyone can understand how it works, and think of any possible places where it might run into problems, and suggest ways to deal with those problems.

Closed-source voting machines are inimical to a free society. Their inner workings are secrets known only to their "owners." Any accidental or deliberate problems in their operation are concealed from the people.

All democratic processes should be open, therefore if electronic voting machines are used, every aspect of their design and programming must be open. The law should require that only voting machines based on public domain hardware and software may be used (or at the very least they must be under an open license such as CC or GPL).

And this law should be retroactive. All hardware specs and software code associated with any machine ever used in a legal election should be ordered to be released into the public domain or at least an open license.

And if the government instead colludes with these corporations to keep the voting machines secret, then any citizen in a position to do so is morally justified and perhaps even morally obligated to "pirate" the hardware designs and software code and release them to the public.

The Limits of Power

Excellent Bill Moyers interview on PBS. Link is to part one. Part two is another link on the page.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09262008/watch.html

todaysheadspace

My lengthy contribution to the discussion of this piece in the Tribune:

A lot of anarchist and libertarian socialists criticized Marx, and Lenin all the more, for creating a dictatorship of the bureaucracy. Republicans don't know what socialism is, but neither do liberals. The socialist spectrum is as or more diverse than the conventional American political party divides.

Bringing up Linux as a claim against socialism is interesting, because the OS must be understood in the context of Software Libre. While under the lens of capitalism, all the developers retain ownership of their code contributions, the open source licenses mean they have effectively ceded that ownership to the masses. FLOSS forms a whole information economy that works according to one of the basic premises of socialism --collective ownership of the means of production. What's interesting is that capitalistic businesses have voluntarily subsumed themselves to this system, operating on services in an environment where copyleft licenses have blurred the idea of property. So you have capitalist subsystems in a socialist node created out of capitalist law. Software Libre works in the capitalist world, often outperforming proprietary models, and embodies the best ideals of bottom-up socialism.

The whole internet runs on open source. It's often referred to as the LAMP stack (linux, apache, mysql, perl/php/python). I like to speculate that as science and technology improve, manufacturing is going to become cheaper and easier until it's effectively a home industry. Information will be the only thing of trade value, and that information will be open source. It will be socialism by default.

I believe in markets, but I believe most in the marketplace of ideas. That means free exchange, not making ideas into commodities. The sciences and arts must be open source. Information wants to be free.