Dripping Rubies - Home

Protectionism and Buying American

2008-08-24T09:26:00Z

I have recently been reading Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, and in Chapter 11, Section 2, I found an interesting analysis of tariffs and how they actually hurt everyone except the special interest producer. In his hypothetical example, the consumers pay more for the products, there is less export of American currency to foreign countries, and therefore less export from America, and he even goes on in the following sections about wages decreasing as an effect of tariffs.

This has made me rethink “buying American,” which seems to be a big movement in today’s society. If it is more expensive for me to buy from an American company, and I do it anyway, along with tens of thousands of other consumers, what are the actual effects? That company doesn’t go out of business, yet some foreign company with cheaper equivalent products may, or at least it will lose profits, resulting in the increased unemployment in that country and a decrease in buying power of that country, affecting American exports. If the option to buy the alternative is lost, the cost of the product to consumers increases, hurting working families in America. The employees of the American company will keep their jobs instead of moving to other industries, which is seen as the motivation behind the choice to buy American. But, the unseen result is that there is less American money in the pockets of the foreigners, money that has no purpose other than to be spent in America. Therefore, by buying American, you are helping that single company at the expense of the minuscule loss to every American company that exports its products outside the country. In reality, it doesn’t really matter if you buy American or not, since that money will probably not spend long in foreign circulation before it is re-used to buy American out of necessity. The power of electronic circulation of currency these days is incredible.

Hypothetically, if I buy my Honda Civic instead of a Chevy Volt, what’s the difference? When I purchase the Honda new, I am putting a few thousand dollars in the pockets of a Japanese company. Dollars don’t work over there, so they need to change them into something else. They have a few options:

They can convert it into Japanese Yen, whose exchange rate today is 1 yen per 0.009101 U.S. dollars by selling the currency to an American entity. This simply decreases the American holdings of the foreign currency, and injects the money right back into America.
They can convert it into Japanese Yen by selling it to another foreign country on a currency exchange, or by selling it domestically to a currency trader. This probably happens to some extent, but it just represents one more extremely fast electronic hop through the global investing ether.
They can convert it into holdings in a US company, bonds, commodities, homes, or other US-based securities. This helps our economy, allowing our companies to function, maintaining American employment directly.
They can loan it back to US entities and collect interest in dollars, which have to go through this process again (yes, I realize that bonds fit here, but I feel they fit better in the previous bullet). Eventually, these all have to end up back in the pockets of Americans, and even lift the burden of risk from all American lenders. If these loans are defaulted upon, it was simply a bad investment by the foreign investor, whose product and money we have now!
Finally, they can simply buy American. Our exporters will benefit greatly by the increased spending, and will buy products being produced in America for lower prices than they can be found in Japan, necessarily adding to the efficiency of operation of the world market (otherwise, the exporters would go out of business).

Note also that investing in foreign currency is a gamble. It is definitely possible that a foreigner may sell us a Honda Civic today for $10,000, and 6 months from now inflation of the money supply (the M3 that the Fed doesn’t publish anymore, not the CPI, which is open to interpretation) will drive the purchasing power of those dollars lower, meaning by buying that car, we actually cheated the manufacturer out of some amount of buying power. Therefore, if the car company wants to continue being profitable, it cannot keep its holdings in American currency for more than the short term, meaning it has to offload it, the most logical place being back to America, or to a Japanese currency trader, who will do the same.

All in all, I would almost encourage buying foreign to get rid of these worthless pieces of paper as quickly as possible. Let the foreigners deal with our ruined currency.

Road Rage with Handguns

2008-08-18T04:42:00Z

One of the things I’m always hearing is how if you are allowed to have a gun in your car, road rage will involve a lot more shootings. I’ve never really believed it, and I decided to see how much the Google News Archives show for this type of story. There are around 40,000 stories that contain “road rage gun,” some of which can be seen here. I saw some interesting trends:

There are three incidents on the linked page in Australia, surprisingly, even though they have very strict handgun control. Even fake guns were involved…
There was one in Toronto, also strict on handgun ownership
Many states in the US are represented, including Maryland, Georgia, and Florida
Quite a few are road rage incidents involving off-duty or retired police officers or Federal marshalls!!

There was a study that showed that “people who carry guns in their car are more likely to have road rage.” It’s a pretty far stretch since the percentages are 23% of people with guns vs. 16% of people without them. I don’t think this is a good conclusion. Until someone can show me that road rage deaths in Texas or Alaska or Florida increased when carry laws were loosened, I won’t believe these urban legends I keep hearing. And, if they’re not urban legends, please please cite your source - at least the publication.

I find the last one really shocking. Many of these people are trained very well in firearm use and safety. I would really like to be able to break it down by state using the Google archive search, but I can’t find that. If anyone knows where I can find statistics on police reports per state for road rage incidents involving handguns, especially time series data, let me know.

As We Go Marching First Edition

2008-08-17T22:45:00Z

I ordered a first edition (1944 Doubleday) of John T. Flynn’s As We Go Marching, which is an interesting book I’m half-way through. I found a curious letter inside from one Andrew W. Wilson…

The full text reads as follows:

Editor,
The Fresno Bee
Fresno, California

Dear Sir:

President Truman today has issued a report written by a group of prominent Americans supporting a program of Compulsory Military Training, although the prefer to use a more acceptable term, Universal Training. To the extent that this report is represented to be a non-partisan statement, it is a fraud on the American people.

Two members of the commission are educators, President Compton of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and President Dodds of Princeton University. These are two of a very few prominent educators who support peacetime conscription. The much larger group who oppose it were not represented.

The Protestant clergyman in the group is another exception to the general rule. It can be said with considerable accuracy that this man is the only Protestant clergyman in the country who supports peacetime conscription.

These examples are enough to show that this report was not written by a group of unbiased men, but by a hand picked group known to support a program of peacetime military training. The report is, then, nothing but a summary of the personal opinions of men already known to be in favor of the program and not an independently arrived at report of impartial men.

Sincerely yours,

Andrew W. Wilson

Sounds like we could have been a lot more like Switzerland, with that training. Here’s an excerpt of a speech Truman made regarding his plans for Universal Training:

So long as democracy is threatened in the world, and during the period in which the free nations of Europe are regaining their strength, this country must remain strong in order to give support to those countries of Europe whose freedom is endangered. Universal training is the best means of building up a large pool of trained civilians who could be called upon in times of emergency. The presence, within this country, of a strong, well-trained group of our young men would be of great importance in preventing future conflicts. The adoption of universal training by this nation at this time would serve notice on the world that our pleas for peace were not mere idle words, but that we had the strength to back up our will for peace.

Even after we adopt universal training, however, it will take a substantial period of time before the pool of trained reserves can be developed. In the meantime our armed forces lack the necessary men to maintain their authorized strength. Voluntary enlistments have been dropping, and each month we fall further under our authorized strength. This is why we must have a selective service law.

Our armed forces have to be kept up at the authorized level if we are to meet, our international responsibilities and maintain a minimum force in the continental United States. Selective service would be used only as an interim measure until the solid foundation of universal training can be established.

Source

So, watch out for the calls to eliminate the selective service in favor of Universal Training. Here’s more pictures of my beautiful book:

My Review of The Melting Pot

2008-08-16T03:33:00Z

So, I went to the Melting Pot restaurant today. I was anticipating it last night, so I had a look at the menu. I noticed it was going to be extremely expensive, and I knew it was fondue, so I thought it would be a ripoff. It turns out that it isn’t all that bad, but it’s still overpriced. You start with pots of cheese with bread, apples, and vegetables to dip. Then you move to salad, which is pretty good - I had the Caesar, which had real anchovie flavor! Next, they bring out new pots of broth for you to boil potatoes, salmon, 2 kinds of beef, shrimp, and chicken in. The helpings are actually pretty massive - the 6 of us had 3 plates of meat, and we didn’t finish all of it. You cook the meat in the broth for 1.5 to 2 minutes for most of it, and the chicken for longer. Then, you pull it out and have it with a variety of sauces, ranging from yellow curry sauce to horseradish ranch to bleu cheese. It was pretty fun. Finally, you top it off with some chocolate fondue for dessert, including pound cake, rice crispy treats, strawberries, and cheesecake. All in all, if you want to drop about $50/person on novelty, it’s not bad. But, I still recommend Tersiguel’s in Ellicott City for the same price much more.

Putting Non-YouTube Videos in MxTube

2008-08-07T06:49:00Z

So, you have your Jailbroken iPod Touch or iPhone with 2.0 firmware running OpenSSH, and you have MxTube 1.5 or better, of course. What if you want one of those pesky videos that YouTube deletes all the time, like Paris Hilton For President? Or maybe you want a full movie on your iPod without having to sync to iTunes since you’re stuck in Linux Land. Well, here’s how:

Download the video

This can be done lots of ways, but somehow obtain a version of the video that ffmpeg can read. It can be just about any format. Let’s assume that we get a file called paris.flv.

Convert the video


 ffmpeg -i paris.flv -b 500000 -s 176x144 -ac 1 -ab 64000 paris-high.mp4

This will make a nice movie for us to play. Let’s put it on the iPod:


scp paris-high.mp4 root@ipod:/var/mobile/Media/MxTube/

Make the Thumbnail

We need to grab a frame from the middle of the movie. Let’s use mplayer for that!


mplayer -vo jpeg -frames 1 -ss 30 paris.flv

This will make a file called 00000001.jpg. Let’s put that in the right spot:


scp 00000001.jpg root@ipod:/var/mobile/Media/MxTube/paris.thm

Add the video to the Library

Edit /var/mobile/Library/MxTube/VideoLibrary.plist on the iPod. Make a new dict entry in the list like so:


        <dict>
                <key>author</key>
                <string>hank</string>
                <key>duration</key>
                <string>01:50</string>
                <key>high</key>
                <string>/var/mobile/Media/MxTube/paris-high.mp4</string>
                <key>id</key>
                <string>64ad536a6dQ</string>
                <key>thumbnail</key>
                <string>/var/mobile/Media/MxTube/paris.thm</string>
                <key>title</key>
                <string>Paris for President</string>
        </dict>

Just fill in the right filenames for the thumbnail and movie like you used above. Also, change the author to yourself or the original director, and the duration accordingly. Keep the id something random. Also, you can change the display title as the last option there.

Other Pro Tips

Keep in mind that if you want to be able to delete the movie from the interface, you need to change the ownership on all the files to mobile:mobile using chown.

Results!

Well, it totally works, with sound even.

Good luck!

Putting Images on the iPod Touch from Linux

2008-08-06T05:37:00Z

Idea

I wanted to put images on my iPod Touch without using iTunes since, as most of us know, there is no good way to use it from Linux. It turns out there is a magic directory on the iPod Touch where it saves images from Safari. I simply looked at how it saved them, and applied it on my box here at home.

Requirements

Jailbroken iPod Touch (I used WinPWN), with OpenSSH installed and working (the root password is alpine)
Firmware 2.0 (Though, 1.x may work, I just haven’t tried it)
A Linux box with a bash shell
Cool images
convert and mogrify from ImageMagick installed

Method

These instructions might work for the iPhone as well. YMMV

All of your images must be in the format IMG_XXXX.YYY where XXXX is a number < 9999, and YYY is either JPG or THM (THM is a thumbnail). To rename our files, I use a simple trick I outlined in my last post:


EII=4; for i in *.jpg; do ls $i; \
NEWNAME=IMG_00`printf "%02d" $EII`.JPG; \
echo Renaming $i to $NEWNAME; \
mv $i $NEWNAME; EII=`expr $EII + 1`; done

That will rename all the JPEG files in order from 4 to, in my case, 62. Now, I have to make the thumbnails:


for i in `ls *.JPG | cut -d '.' -f 1`; do \
convert $i.JPG -resize 75x75! $i.THM; \
done

The 75x75! part makes sure they are exactly those dimensions. You end up with something like the following:


IMG_0004.JPG  IMG_0016.JPG  IMG_0028.JPG  IMG_0040.JPG  IMG_0052.JPG
IMG_0004.THM  IMG_0016.THM  IMG_0028.THM  IMG_0040.THM  IMG_0052.THM
IMG_0005.JPG  IMG_0017.JPG  IMG_0029.JPG  IMG_0041.JPG  IMG_0053.JPG
....

Now, note that the iPod can only display images under 100KB (to my knowledge). If your high-res image is too large, it will just display the magnified 75x75, which is really ugly. So, make sure all your images fit that description, and if they don’t, mogrify -resize them until they do (or take other measures as necessary). I used this:


mogrify -resize 400x *.JPG

All my images turned out to be between 30 and 90 KB. This also keeps the aspect ratio, unlike the 75x75!.

Now, SSH into your iPod (if you can’t do this yet, google it). You should have the following file:


/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/.MISC/Info.plist

Open this file in vi, and observe the plist>dict>integer part of the hierarchy:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>LastFileGroupNumber-100</key>
        <integer>62</integer>
</dict>
</plist>

So, I put 62 in there since the last image I have is numbered 0062. It’s a very simple idea. Now, just load them onto the iPod:


scp IMG_00* root@ipod:/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/100APPLE/

Let’s have a look from the iPod console!


HanksTouch:/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/100APPLE root# ls
IMG_0002.JPG  IMG_0014.THM  IMG_0027.JPG  IMG_0039.THM  IMG_0052.JPG
IMG_0002.THM  IMG_0015.JPG  IMG_0027.THM  IMG_0040.JPG  IMG_0052.THM

Beautiful. Now, to test it…

Renaming Files Sequentially with BASH

2008-08-06T04:34:00Z

I made a cool one-liner in bash today that renames files sequentially. Here’s an example that takes all the JPEGs in a directory and renames them in order:


EII=4; for i in *.jpg; do ls $i; \
NEWNAME=IMG_00`printf "%02d" $EII`.JPG; \
echo Renaming $i to $NEWNAME; \
mv $i $NEWNAME; EII=`expr $EII + 1`; done

Pretty cool, huh? This is in relation to my next post. Keep watch…

OSCON Sessions, Day 2

2008-07-25T13:44:00Z

Oh man, what a day.

I attended quite a few talks, grabbed a lot of swag, and entered a few contests. I ended up buying the Arduino Starter Kit from MAKE so I can do some awesome embedded Ruby like I saw at FOSCON. It looks really fun - I can’t wait to try it out.

The talks I attended were half-way decent, but I learned a lot more on the first day.

Hadoop and EC2

A good overview of how one can use Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services to cheaply process and store data on a pretty large scale. The New York Times digitized hundreds of years of articles in a single day using these services and some awesome C++ code.

Open standards in cloud computing

This ended up being a marketing talk. I don’t know what it had to do with cloud computing, and I didn’t stick around to find out.

Ruby 1.9: What to Expect

An awesome overview of all the new stuff in Ruby 1.9 given by Sam Ruby. I had no idea they were changing so much, and this was a good dive with code examples into that. There was some discussion among everyone in the middle on whether for loops should work like .each blocks with regards to scope. I happen to disagree with what ended up being the popular thought on this subject. Most were advocating that a for loop constitutes a block, and that scope variables and iterators should be localized inside of it. This is contrary to almost every language, which I brought up using the example of C. Yet, when you iterate with .each, you immediately define a block and a scoped iterator, which, if it has a conflicting name with the outside world, it doesn’t matter since that’s out of scope. The only thing this changes is the value of a variable outside after the loop finishes. I think leaving the ability to modify a variable external to the loop is very convenient - in summary, leave it how you’ve done it in Ruby 1.9 already.

Ubuntu on the Go: Subnotebook and MID technologies

This was an interesting session on where Canonical is taking mobile technology, and what the community can do to help. They seem to have a pretty neat subnotebook coming out soon.

Python, C++, and SWIG

This could have been one of the best talks, but the speed at which it was given and the lack of enthusiasm in the presentation left most of us either bored or unfulfilled at the end of the talk. He spent the first half explaining what Python and C++ were, then he got to what SWIG is. The end was a quick dive into an extremely complicated bunch of files that didn’t help very much. In the future, it would be helpful to go to a SWIG talk that details how to make a simple Python extension with SWIG. I may have to throw that one together myself…

I also attended the tail end of Designing Political Web Apps for MoveOn.org, but I didn’t take any notes.

We ended up going to dinner at Widmer Brothers, which was pretty awesome. I had the Pork Schnitzel, a very tender piece of meat if I do say so myself, along with 2 Full Nelson IPAs. Afterwards, we caught the bus from the convention center to BeerForge and the SourceForge Community Choice Awards party. Beerforge was a blast. I ended up talking to Jean-Baptiste Kempf, one of the developers of VLC, for hours - a truly great guy. I learned a lot about France and the French people, but also about VLC. Apparently, you can use VLC from the command line much like mplayer, which I did not know. Yet, he explained that they removed Directshow support from VLC in Linux in favor of open source alternatives, which in part I can understand. Yet, the only codec available that is able to smoothly play 1080p h264 video is closed source (CoreAVC), and until the ffmpeg avc codec catches up, I’ll have to continue using mplayer. When I can play everything back smoothly with VLC, I may consider switching.

The beer at BeerForge was pretty good - I had the IPA. SourceForge had some sort of mixed drink which wasn’t too great. All in all, a good day, but now I’m dehydrated…

OSCON Sessions, Day 1

2008-07-24T08:08:00Z

I went to 5 sessions today, and I was pleasantly surprised by most of them.

CouchDB

CouchDB is a distributed non-relational database written in Erlang. It is unique in that its main query interface is simply HTTP REST, and for every UPDATE, it simply creates a new version of the row. Additionally, you can request the entire history of a row very simply.

Hypertable

An open-source implementation of Google’s bigtable. Hypertable uses novel methods such as Bloom filters to significantly decrease query times, as well as smart messaging to distribute a database across many nodes. It is also non-relational.

Creating and supporting Free Software in Africa

A group of CS professors hailing from Africa have gotten together to create a community that fosters creativity and innovation from people in Africa. People in first-world countries can participate by acting as mentors, or directly contribute to the projects involved. Chisimba is an open-source MVC framework for rapid application development. I am very interested in contributing to this project.

LucidDB

I thought going in that this would be somehow in the same ballpark as Hypertable and CouchDB, but I was disappointed. Basically, they are using compression and some fairly neat indexing to speed up traditional database queries. The main problem is that they only have a Java API, which completely turned me off after 30 minutes. Before that, it seemed like they were getting some pretty promising results. If they add some more APIs in the future, this may be another one to take a look at.

A History of Failure

An awesome talk by Paul Fenwick from Australia, generally detailing failures in computer science and engineering going back into the 20th century and even back to Roman times. This was a wonderful presentation - he’s a really good speaker - and it poked a lot of fun at New Zealand.

All in all, I must say that this OSCON is much better than last year’s at least according to what I was looking for in the sessions. The exhibit hall is also very good this year - I’m pretty loaded down with swag at the moment.

I know someone who would have gotten a kick out of Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces…Made Easy! had they been here. He needs to come next year (you know who you are..)

Tonight, I also attended FOSCON 4: Cooking with Ruby. This was a spectacular event hosted by Cubespace. I have to say that the live coding competition was a great spectacle, and held everyone’s attention for hours. It was an epic battle between Symfony, Rails, Smalltalk/Seaside, and Drupal. The rankings ended up being the following:

Rails
Drupal
Symfony
Smalltalk/Seaside

The presentations were good as well for the most part (notes here). AND THEY HAD BEER! I had some of the best keg beer imaginable - I thought it would be crap like you usually get out of a keg, but this was real quality Northwestern hopped pale ale. My cup says Bridgeport Ales, so I’ll have to investigate. If anyone knows the exact beer that was available in the left-side keg tonight, I’d appreciate a comment. I also met some cool people, some of which are all into XMPP and ejabberd. I may have to check all of that out now…

OSCON 2008 Tutorials: A perspective

2008-07-22T18:10:00Z

I’ve been at OSCON 2008, and I’ve been keeping pretty good notes on the tutorials I’ve attended. GitHub has a great feature if you take notes in rdoc, making nice HTML when it’s viewed online. Here’s some links to my notes:

Pro PostgreSQL

This talk was alright, but it wasn’t really tailored for people who hadn’t used Postgres extensively. Yet, I’m sure the notes will come in handy in the future.

Introduction to Django

This was an awesome talk. He went through designing an actual working application using Django. It turns out to be incredibly easy to quickly create a really cool application. I need to research this because it looks to me to be better than Rails.

Ubiquitous Multithreading

This talk was alright if you wanted to get an idea about the challenges of multi-threading and how Intel’s TBB solves some of them. It was interesting, and I learned a few things, but it would have been a better session than a tutorial (LONG!)

Doctor Horrible Is Awesome

2008-07-19T02:40:00Z

You have to watch it. Trust me, and trust NPH.

Pradipta's Rolodex Epic Conclusion

2008-07-18T23:05:00Z

If you don’t already know about Pradipta’s Rolodex, read up here

Here’s the epic apology email from THE MAN HIMSELF!:

Hi All, First of all I just wanted to say I apologize for the emails I sent. As of today I promise to stop the Email marketing campaigns. And I do believe it was a very…very..stupid mistake, this is the result of working late. Also, I am deeply amazed of how talented you guys are. I mean seriously all this happened in less than 24 hours. I hope this mishap would create a benefit for all of us. I understand this is fun for a lot of you, however, people are getting angry so if we could keep everything under the google groups that would be most appreciated. http://groups.google.com/group/pradiptas-rolodex?hl=en If anyone wants to contact me feel free to contact this new email pradipta416@gmail.com. Humbly Sorry, Pradipta (Max) Archiputra P.S: this time I used BCC. :)

Ayn Rand's Robin Hood

2008-07-11T05:24:00Z

Ayn Rand brings up an interesting point about Robin Hood in Atlas Shrugged. She argues that Robin Hood is remembered for robbing from the rich and giving to the poor based on need, and that this is not the correct way to think about the tale. Robin Hood indeed did rob from the rich and gave to the poor, but not because the poor simply needed money, but because the money had been stolen from them by the rulers. This is a subtle, but extremely good point. Robin Hood was simply giving people back their property, which they earned, that was stolen using overbearing taxation. In fact, theoretically, he should have been robbing from the ruling class and giving to all taxpayers the same amount they paid in taxes, assuming a progressive or income-proportional tax system. This would include people from the middle class, such as merchants, as well as the poor.

When is democracy viable?

2008-07-04T16:31:00Z

As I’ve been reading various books, an idea keeps popping up.

Suddenly radio playlists, MTV, and A&R guys aren’t the all-powerful gatekeepers anymore. At long last the music industry is becoming a democracy.

In our governmental systems, we elect representatives to make decisions for us, sending them to Washington to write bills, oppose bills, pass bills, or veto bills. We ideally find candidates who will make similar decisions to those we ourselves would make. We elect them in a process called democracy (unless it’s a presidential election, in which case the popular vote only determines a winner-takes-all vote for the state, allowing the electoral votes to originate from one party or another). In government, a direct legislative rule by the people is as dangerous as a direct legislative rule by any tyrant. In a country where we preach equal treatment of any minority, we cannot have raw majority rule, where fear of the majority silences all those who might oppose it out of fear of rejection, blasphemy, or outright violence.

As I’ve been reading various books, an idea keeps popping up.

Suddenly radio playlists, MTV, and A&R guys aren’t the all-powerful gatekeepers anymore. At long last the music industry is becoming a democracy.

This, of course, leads to problems, as the majority would:

Withdraw from Iraq

“Three in 10 voters favour the war, while 68 per cent oppose it. ”

Legalize gay marriage or civil unions

“Most Americans continue to think there should be some legal recognition of gay and lesbian couples, and 30 percent say same-sex couples should be allowed to marry”

Representative government also has many boons, since free trade would now be outlawed under a pure democracy, which of course could mean “Free Trade Agreements,” which are oxymoronic, but the article says these people fear “trade with other nations.” So, what do we do about this? I think keeping a republican form of government is central to our freedoms and the protection of minorites.

While my opinion of a pure democracy determining the law of the land, I am convinced that it is viable in many situations, particularly those where the decisions being made by the majority are based solely on the quality of a range of products. One example is art.

Art

Art is produced by an artist in order to promote ideas, encourage thought, make a political statement, inspire people, enjoy oneself, or simply to make a profit. When one observes a piece of art, he/she can generally come to a conclusion about how much they like it. Promotion of art based on a democratic system is perfectly acceptable since the minorities are simply manufacturers of art that most people find unattractive and those who like unattractive art. The result of unpopular art is the encouragement of artists to improve themselves. Yet, minorities can also form when a new type of art is being introduced, the majority still on the bandwagon of the last big thing. The fact that art has eras tells us that most people are not so attached to one era that they cannot begin to enjoy another one equally, therefore not polarizing them like political issues do. You’re either pro-life or pro-choice, but you can enjoy country and reggae music at the same time.

Summary

In essence, when one can only take sides on an issue, pure democracy and referenda are evil and should be avoided. Yet, when one can use democracy to promote things they find attractive - when promotion of any member of the category in question does not polarize the promoter - it is serving its purpose. When a choice by the majority does not prevent the minority from expressing themselves in any way they please, democracy is appropriate. Democratic input is definitely warranted in politics, and should have an influence on the representatives who supposedly study all the facts before making decisions (see the Read the Bills Act), but popular opinion should not have complete influence on decision makers.

Flash 10 for Linux Fixes Landmark Bug

2008-07-04T04:26:00Z

The new July 2nd version of Flash Player 10 for Linux finally fixes the HTML overlay bug that we’ve been seeing for years. You can now see things on top of the flash elements on the page, like so:

Get it now!

Update

After trying it with YouTube and TheSixtyOne, and seeing some lame bugs, I decided to go back to Flash 9 and face the music on overlays.