Interesting Stuff

I suspect this case will grow to be as big a Right To Die issue as the Schiavo case was. I’m not sure how I feel about this yet. Time will tell what happens…

In other news, Google has refused to comply with a federal subpoena asking to see search requests it handles, presumably to learn more about who is looking at pornography (shocking as this may seem, some people search for, and find, pornography on the internet!). Google, standing firm under its motto to “do no evil” claims that divulging this information, even if it contains nothing that links any searches with actual people, would be a violation of the privacy of the users of its search engine. Google seems to be the only company who has stood up to such requests. I have more and more respect for Google as the days go on. The only thing I see wrong with Google is its ongoing legal battle against the shopping website Froogles. At this point, Google and Costco are the only companies with my admiration.

For the first time in quite a while, the Supreme Court made a very nice decision to uphold an Oregan law allowing doctor-assisted suicide (which is only for terminally ill patients who will die in less than 6 months and are in sound mental condition, and which is actually a very thoughtful law to give back to terminally ill patients their dignity and to lessen their suffering). I think this is wonderful, and it’s the first time in quite a while that I’ve heard about a Supreme Court decision that I was happy with (the last one I agreed with was in the Schiavo case, and I don’t remember the one I agreed with before that).

Chief Justice John Roberts’ dissenting vote is a bit worrisome, however. I really hope he doesn’t turn out to be another Antonin Scalia, although he didn’t come off that way during his confirmation process. Time will tell…

I’m a bit surprised that Gore is doing this (he usually doesn’t come off as very assertive, but perhaps he’s changing), but Al Gore is finally standing up and making a direct challenge to the legality of the Bush administration’s policies. Personally, I feel that domestic wiretapping without going through the FISA court, the current policies on torture and extreme interrogation, the indefinite holding of “enemy combatants” (including American citizens!), the manipulation of information that led to the war in Iraq, and the USA PATRIOT Act as a whole are blatantly illegal (except the PATRIOT Act, which is unconstitutional and should not be legal). I’ve been waiting for someone to actually call the Bush administration on any of this, and it finally seems to be happening.

The Bush administration has a very clever policy of ignoring criticism and just going ahead with their stuff anyway. This has allowed them to accomplish a lot of things, and I feel powerless to stop them. I have relied on higher political powers to challenge the president, and have been severely disappointed. I really hope this is the start of a new trend.

Well, I have to be at the airport in less than 5 hours, and haven’t packed yet. So, guess what I’m doing? That’s right; after playing bridge for a while, I’m now looking around on Facebook. I thought I’d copy this post from the Straight But Not Narrow group, as written by Justin Huang (although I have edited his post for spelling):

10 reasons Gay Marriage is wrong:

10. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven’t adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

…just something to think about. See you Claremontians soon!

While I’ve been home this break, I’ve been ripping my CDs to MP3s. To accomplish this, I’ve been trying out my brother’s copy of iTunes. It’s quite an impressive little piece of software, particularly concerning its ability to recognize CDs. Apple must have an absolutely huge database to aid in this: it has been able to recognize all but one of my CDs so far (the one being Wave by Antonio Carlos Jobim, a Brazilian artist who helped invent bossa nova back in the 1960s). As anyone who has seen my music collection knows, it’s quite full of obscure, strange titles. However, iTunes had no problem identifying the Israeli techno, the local Tacoma band, or anything else. I was pleasantly surprised. A bit more standardization as regards punctuation and capitalization would be nice, however.

On a tangential note, the Macworld Expo was earlier this week, at which Steve Jobs revealed a Mac running on Intel’s x86 architecture. I am a bit saddened to see this happen, because the ppc architecture is vastly superior to the x86 (except for the clock speed, which is marginally worse but could almost certainly be improved). However, I can understand why Apple would want to switch architectures: the x86 sports a larger code base, a smaller price tag, and is already manufactured as a dual core chip. Still, the idealist in me wishes this hadn’t occurred. Well, we shall see how this all pans out…

It’s weird to think that in only 11 days, we went over 3100 miles (not including however far we walked and subway-ed) and did all this stuff.
Stuff I’ll Remember →

Starting the day after tomorrow, I will be on a road trip with some friends to the east coast. Most importantly, I will be spending New Year’s Eve in Times Square, though we’re also going to Boston, Washington D.C., Niagara Falls, Chicago, Toronto, Pittsburgh, and the rest of New York City as well (not necessarily in that order). I shan’t update during these next two weeks or thereabouts, so don’t expect anything from me.

In deference to the great enjoyment afforded me by the television show Jeeves and Wooster, I have begun to read the stories upon which the episodes were based, in the form of The Jeeves Omnibus by P.G. Wodehouse. While not exactly funny, these tales are immensely entertaining. The one blot on the Wodehouse escutcheon, however, is his debonair employment of obscure persiflage. This veritable patois made me reach eftsoons for my dictionary, which I have kept open for the nonce. Wodehouse’s Britishisms are easy enough to decipher, but his vocabulary provides a greater challenge. His writings are quite amusing nonetheless, and I highly recommend them.

For the Firefox users among you, I’d like to use the previous paragraph as a plug for the dictionary tooltip plugin. Once this is installed, you can double-click on a word to find its meaning, searching any of about a dozen different online references. It even claims to be able to translate from different languages, though I haven’t been afforded a chance to try that part out yet.

Today, the Bush administration attempted to defend its domestic spying program, claiming that when Congress gave the President authorization to use military force in the War on Terrorism (back when we were actually fighting a justifyed war against Afghanistan), it implicitly gave the Presidency authorization to do wiretaps and other intelligence gathering (since wars need intelligence to figure out what the enemy is doing). I feel silly asking this, but are we still officially at war? Certainly we’re still in the War on Terror, the way we’re also still in the War on Drugs and the War on Poverty, last time I checked. However, I don’t think that implies that we can use domestic wiretaps to spy on druggies or poor people. Moreover, I’m surprised that the administration claims that the FISA board is too slow. I had heard that they could do things fast, but I didn’t know that they held emergency meetings at 3AM to do things that fast. On top of that, the government is certainly permitted to spy on people for up to 72 hours before getting FISA approval. I still don’t understand how anyone can justify sidestepping FISA completely by saying that the court is too slow.

On a much happier note, all of Britain now allows gay civil unions which afford pretty much the same legal rights as marriage. Today, Sir Elton John married his long-time partner under this new law. I don’t usually care about celebrities, but I think this is pretty fantastic.

This entry has been edited for accuracy. The old version equated the current Sony DRM with the old Sony DRM rootkits, but they are two separate pieces of malware. This paragraph has been changed to correct this error. See the apposite comments for more information. It now appears that the CDs with Sony’s DRM technology on them (the CDs with rootkits have been recalled, so you luckily can’t get them any more, but other DRM’ed Sony CDs are still out on the market) will install their software even if you do not accept the EULA. Woah. This has definitely crossed some new sort of line that it hadn’t crossed before (and the old DRM rootkits had crossed several lines already). I hope Sony gets what’s coming to them…

On the terrorist front, the Bush administration appears to be afraid to defend its enemy combatant policy in front of the Supreme Court. One of these cases, in which a US citizen has been held without charges for 3 years on suspicion of planning to detonate a dirty bomb (he was recently charged, though these charges made no mention of such a bomb), has finally been appealed to the Supreme Court. In response, the Bush administration has attempted to move him to a civilian jail, rather than the military prison he is currently being held in (this would nullify any ruling that would otherwise be appealed to the Supreme Court). The Bush administration also tried to overturn a ruling which stated that the government could hold such people indefinitely (although this seems counterproductive at first, such an overturn would also keep this from going to the Supreme Court). The Bush administration’s actions on this case give the impression that they are afraid that the Supreme Court will rule against them in favor of basic civil liberties, and the administration appears to be trying their best to weasel out of this and continue holding citizens indefinitely. I really hope this hits the Supreme Court soon.

Jim called me up again the other day, and we played bridge both today and yesterday. It’s quite obvious that I’ve gotten rusty (before yesterday, my last sanctioned game had been with Jim back in August). We took second-to-last and dead last, both with 41% games, though today’s game played better than it scored. Our defense was rock-solid (with one horrible, stupid, blatantly notable exception in which I doubled our opponents’ game-level contract, and although we could easily have set them by two tricks, they ended up making it). Our offense was mediocre, but our bidding was pretty good, I daresay. We’re trying out some new things in our conventions, however, which are working out alright. Both today and yesterday, we played a control-showing step response to two clubs, which is actually quite clever (imo, better than the point-showing step response which I swore by back in sophomore year). Today, we also used a forcing 1NT (the perfect response to Sheri’s insistence upon weak jump-shifts – I have to show this to more people even if we don’t play 2/1) and upside-down attitude carding (statistically better than regular attitude, but more confusing. For instance, you now show a doubleton by playing the high card first if you’re on lead but the low card first if you’re following suit). Now, I need to get Jim to learn Puppet Stayman and Raptor Notrump, and we’ll be playing exactly what I want to play, except possibly for a different discarding system. Jim lent me his copy of Hand Evaluation by Mike Lawrence, which I look forward to reading.

A Notable Hand From Tonight →