Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog

Julian Sanchez has an article in Reason called The True Spirit of Xmas: How 4/5 of the country became an oppressed minority about the people who see every attempt at tolerance as an attack on Christianity. It’s worth reading, both to see why these people are wrong and to get ammunition for arguments against them.

Given a set of RDF triples, there must be a way to present the data in them. Of course, one can write a program to extract the data, but a DSL is likely to be more efficient. A very good DSL for transforming and presenting XML already exists, XSLT. Its output format is XML, which is what I want. Its input is represented as trees, which are very similar to RDF’s graphs. Thus, I think the RDF presentation language should be built as extensions to XSLT. In particular, I want to design a set of extensions to XPath that will massage an RDF graph into a tree-ish structure that XSLT can understand. I call these extensions RDFPath.

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Howard Dean has clearly been reading George Lakoff. He gave a speech at George Washington University which lays out his vision for the future of the Democratic Party. He’s clearly tired of people trying to push the party right. Instead, he wants the Democratic Party to start framing the debate. It’s worth reading.

Apparently, the U.S. has been eliminating those who count civilian deaths in Iraq. I can understand why American generals would want to hide the number of civilian casualties: large numbers of dead innocents enrages the Iraqi resistance and erodes support for the war at home. They see the suppression as justified because what casualties there are are unavoidable (and they do deserve credit for keeping this number as low as it is), and because the rest of the world just doesn’t understand the realities of war. But they’re wrong.

The world has a right to know what’s going on in Iraq. If we have to lie to justify the war, the war is not justified. Now, the mere existence of civilian casualties does not unjustify the war. World War II had millions of civilian casualties, and nobody considers it unjustified. But they can certainly contribute to the feeling that a war simply isn’t worth it. If the Iraq War has reached this point, the world deserves to know.

However, even if their end is justified, nothing justifies the means they’re using. Nothing justifies targeting civilians. Killing journalists is bad enough. Invading hospitals and bombing clinics is appalling.

By using these tactics, the United States continues to sacrifice its moral authority.

[spotter=Danny Ayers]

Well, I’ve started a blog to replace the old one on LiveJournal. Several of my old posts have migrated over here. This blog runs on WordPress, a free blogging platform. I’m still working out some kinks, so if you see anything that seems wrong or broken, please tell me.

I had two requests, now just one:

• I’m looking for a good title as Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog is a little boring. Suggestions in the comments for this post please.
• rakksi was kind enough to make a feed at jyasskin. Unfortunately, it got the wrong time stamp for all of the posts I’ve moved over there, so they’re all at the top of my friends page right now. You may want to wait a bit before adding the new feed to your friends list.

From Neil Gaiman’s blog: http://www.theliteracysite.com/. Go give books to poor children.

Yet the shills are more welcome than ever in the nation’s television newsrooms. That’s because the big networks have chosen to be fair instead of objective. The reason for their choice? Being fair is easier. Rather than digging up facts and seeking out expert analysis, the newshounds can call in a couple of shills from either side of an issue to shout at each other. Doing it that way saves a whole lot of time and hard work. What’s more, the anchors don’t ever need to think about the issues for themselves.

Daniel Altman on October 13th

Daniel Altman (incidentally, the author of Neoconomy: George Bush’s Revolutionary Gamble With America’s Future) agrees with Jon Stewart’s point on Crossfire and has given it a name: fair versus objective. This lets us see that Fox’s tagline, Fair and Balanced, is actually correct. They are fair and balanced, presenting someone from each side of an issue to respond to issues framed in a clearly non-objective manner.

Recently, Microsoft asked me if I would be interested in considering [them] for Full Time opportunities. This is the reply I sent back:

I probably ought to say that I am interested in Microsoft for a full time job and that I’d love to fly up to Seattle on your expense account and then string you along for weeks, using your offer to bargain with other potential employers. But I’m not that dishonest. Instead, I’ll simply admit that, while Microsoft may be a very nice place to work, it’s simply on the wrong side of too many issues I care about (patents, open source, competition), and until Microsoft becomes a better participant in the software ecosystem, I can’t work there.

I’m putting this text in the Public Domain. That means you can copy it, modify it, or do anything else you like with it.

I realize that not everyone feels as strongly as I do about Microsoft. But if you do, when Microsoft comes asking to hire you, I’d appreciate it if you also sent them a response in this spirit. Maybe if enough of us do it, they’ll finally change their ways.

To all you English teachers out there.

Every person I’ve talked to while writing this essay seems to have felt the same about English classes– that the whole process seemed pointless. But none of us had the balls at the time to hypothesize that it was, in fact, all a mistake. We all thought there was just something we weren’t getting.

The Age of the Essay by Paul Graham

I haven’t really been thinking about OSS licenses any more lately, but my thoughts seem to have gelled recently.

I think wasted energy is wrong, probably in a moral sense. If anyone puts an effort toward doing something that could have been accomplished more easily, something is wrong with the world. (Caveats: I don’t mean to imply that things like raking sand gardens are wrong: their purpose is not to make pretty patterns in sand. Also, wasted effort isn’t a huge evil; certainly smaller than avoidable pain or death.) Now, if I want to accomplish something with software (and I frequently do), and someone else has already done the same thing, I’m wasting energy if I write it again. Similarly, if I write a library, and someone wants to do the same thing, I am morally wronging them if I deny them the use of it.

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I just received an email from an aunt asking that I sign this petition. It asks the United Nations to adopt an Anti-Semitism Resolution that basically says, We’ve already adopted all these resolutions prohibiting intolerance based on religion. They apply extra specially to Jews. Sounds pretty redundant to me. Possibly counter-productive: why are hate crimes against Jews worse than hate crimes against other groups? I have seen reports of rising anti-semitism, but I haven’t seen any that say that law enforcement has been reluctant to prosecute those who commit anti-semitic crimes. That says to me that governments aren’t doing anything wrong, and the UN doesn’t need to get involved.

Instead, maybe we need to look at some root causes. And get a thicker skin. Criticizing Israel is not anti-semitism. Even comparing Sharon to Hitler isn’t anti-semitic. (Sure, it’s anti-Sharon.) It’s pretty standard fare to compare war criminals to Nazis.

Saying that all Jews are evil because of Israel’s crimes is anti-semitic, but this over-generalization is in good company. How many Jews have you heard saying that Arabs can’t be trusted or are violent because they’ve seen some suicide bombers on the news? The World Jewish Congress’s motto doesn’t help: All Jews are responsible for one another. Well then, they admitted it. I’m responsible for Sharon’s and Israel’s war crimes. Can we really be surprised when some street thug decides to punish me for them?

That’s Digital Restrictions/Rights Management for the uncultured among you. Cory Doctorow of the EFF gave this presentation to Microsoft, of all companies. It’s the best argument against DRM that I’ve seen. And it’s public domain, so go ahead and copy it or pieces of it into your own rants.

The CSS Zen Garden is an illustration of how much can be done with just CSS. The HTML on the site is identical for all of the designs; only the CSS changes. Some of the designs are surprisingly pretty, so go visit even if you’re not a web designer.

I even hear that mnemonic looks different in IE and Mozilla/Opera/Safari.

The New Yorker has an article on how and why the abuses at Abu Ghraib happened. The chain of responsibility leads all the way to Rumsfeld. <http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040524fa_fact> I’m not hopeful that these particular abuses are an impeachable offense for Bush, but they could lead to significant restrictions on black ops.

And then, another reaction.

Edit: Another very interesting article: <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28340-2004May14?language=printer> If it asks you to register, please comment and I’ll try to fix it.

What are you supposed to do with all those credit card offers you receive in the mail? Tear them in half and throw them away, you say? No! Why should you go to the trouble (and use the trash can space) to throw away this paper that you didn’t want in the first place? Let the credit card company throw it away instead:

1. Tear off the actual application that they want you to send back, tear it in half, and throw it away yourself, just to make sure that they don’t accidentally sign you up.
2. Pack all the extra stuff that they sent with it into the No postage necessary if mailed in the US envelope, lick it, and put it in your mailbox.

You pay nothing; they pay the postage, plus some fee for privilege of throwing away the trash they sent you. If you’re feeling particularly nasty, you can also include any other junk mail you have lying around to make the envelope heavier. If we all do this, perhaps they’ll figure out that we don’t want their offers.

Spread the meme!

Leftist rag proclaims end of American Dream through drop in social mobility! Read it all at http://www.businessweek.com/@@SV5bKocQnzhS3BUA/magazine/content/03_48/b3860067_mz021.htm.

(You may have to register. If you don’t want to, it’s reprinted at http://reclaimdemocracy.org/weekly_2003/american_dream_death.html)

Edit December 5, 2004

More evidence that the dream is dying can be found at the Rockridge Institute: By 2003, the income and benefits sufficient to reach the [American] Dream for an average family of four in the U.S. reached $46,500, … [but] half of all men who worked full-time and full year earned less than $40,668.

Wow, it’s been a whole year. One year ago today, around 11 million people around the world protested against the planned war against Iraq.

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Mistyping the groklaw URL got me to a blog that mentioned http://www.magnatune.com/. Wow. They’re an online music store that gives you an unlimited noncommercial license to the music they sell. You can listen to a 128-kbit MP3 stream of any of their songs for free, and you can buy an album at a time to get a CD-quality download for the price you pick between $5 and $18. For some info on what other people liked, look at the best selling and highest valued albums.