Linux/Unix defeats SCO in court

As described at Groklaw here, SCO lost a major decision in their continuing set of patent infringement suits which will probably propagate through all of their cases. This major decision puts the nail in the coffin of SCO’s patent claims, and makes many Linux users such as myself sleep much easier.

Desktop Tower Defense

When not reading too many things or playing Puzzle Pirates, I’ve been spending a few minutes lately trying another great online amusement, Desktop Tower Defense. It’s a sort of RTS where you make a maze of towers to defeat the ever-advancing “creeps”. There are various types of towers, and various types of creeps, making enough variety to keep at least me amused. Soon they’ll be launching a multiplayer version of the game, which looks fun too. Just another quick amusement to spend your time on ;).

The gay marriage/civil unions debate

The Democratic candidates for President recently did a question and answer period on their views about gay marriage and/or civil unions (Coverage here). Although we often hear a lot of talk about the sanctity of marriage (Sanctity? Isn’t that a religious term? Separation of Church and State anyone?), one solution that no one seems to put forth, and the one that would make the most sense to me, is a rather simple one. Stop legislating marriage at all!

Eliminate the wording of marriage, so fraught with  religious and emotional baggage, from the law entirely. Have every current marriage declared a civil union, and every future one, in the eyes of the law. This would truly bring equality, without stepping on anyone’s religious beliefs about marriage. In fact, it might be better to separate religious marriage and civil unions entirely, for all of society.

As a further refinement, in my opinion these unions should be contractual in nature, and allow deviation in the terms, to pretty much whatever the people involved want. We already have prenuptial agreements, why not allow pretty much everything that contract law states? The possibilities are endless, and might lead to some interesting issues, but in my opinion marriage legislation has been, and probably always will be, a violation of the separation between Church and State.

What is it about plane crashes?

While reading BBC news today, one of their most read stories is about a plane crash that killed 14 people off the coast of Moorea (link here). While certainly a tragedy, and important to the people involved, I don’t understand why it is that these sort of stories get so much press. As an example of what I mean, we never hear about fatal car crashes, yet according to the statistics here, 116 people on average die every day in the United States alone.

Perhaps it’s the rarity that captivates us… far fewer planes crash than cars. Perhaps it’s the fact that more people die in an individual crash, and so they’re easier to report on. My thoughts on the matter, however, are different. In my opinion, what scares people about a plane crashing, and therefore captivates our attention when someone does, is the lack of control.

In a car crash, people think they’re at least somewhat in control of what happens. This isn’t always true, but the illusion of control is always there, as the driver can generally at least control the actions of their own vehicle. In a plane crash,  there is only one pilot and many passengers, and most of the people reading the news aren’t pilots. When we hear about a car accident, as most of us drive, we think about how we could have avoided it. Yet there’s no good way for any non-pilot to avoid a plane crash.

Feel free to comment about other theories, if you have any ^^.

Puzzle Pirates

One of my favorite online ways to waste spend my time is Puzzle Pirates. It’s a massively multiplayer online game, but is far different from your average MMORPG. In it, you are a pirate sailing the seas, taking money and other booty from brigands, barbarians, and merchants. Although possible to play alone, it’s EXTREMELY difficult to do well and make money at, and only possible once you’ve made (or bought, I’ll get to that later) enough money to afford your own ship and either become an officer in a crew, or made your own crew. Crews are the basic social unit of the game, being similar to guilds in many MMORPGs except that here they matter more.

As a new pirate, one can make a basic pittance and practice the puzzles around which the game resolves by taking jobs with the Navy. The Navy doesn’t fight anyone except in a mission that’s only available after you’ve gained some experience, so you just sail from island to island doing the basic shipboard puzzles. They resemble old-school 2d puzzle games, and in my opinion are all rather well made. Your success in a puzzle directly corresponds to how well the ship you’re on performs. Your previous experience and such matters little to the ability of the boat, it only lets you start at more advanced puzzle levels, thereby possibly allowing you (as long as you play well) to do better a little faster. All ratings are non-numeric, and are by descriptive words.

For each puzzle, you have two ratings: your Standing and your Experience. Standing is the one that matters more, showing savvy players how well you tend to score at a given puzzle. Experience is entirely a measure of time spent. All puzzles are rated, from shipboard puzzles like Sailing to gambling activities like Poker and Spades. The ratings are actually a competitive ladder internally, so it’s possible to go down as well as up on the scale.

The economy is pretty much entirely player run. There are a few shops maintained by the Oceanmasters, the in-game admins, but the vast majority of shops and trade is all done between players. It’s a very complex system, and would require more than one article just on the economy to fully explain. To put it simply though, it’s complex enough to be enjoyable, yet simple enough to be accessible.

Other than the basic Pillaging (going out on a ship and fighting other ships to make money), my favorite activity is being involved in Blockades. These are the high-end game, battles for which Flag (a Flag is an alliance of 1 or more Crews) controls a given island. They’re effectively big “capture the flag” games involving lots of ships. In a single blockade I’ve seen as many as 900 players participating at once. As a long-time player, I’ve been involved in just about everything one can be involved in in the game. I’ve been playing for about 2 years, and it always keeps my interest.

Although the game can be played free, someone has to pay money for most things you want to own… but it doesn’t have to be you, on Doubloon oceans. On these oceans, there’s 2 forms of currency, pieces of eight (the normal currency) and doubloons. Doubloons are brought into the game by someone spending real money on them, but can be traded on an exchange (or privately) for pieces of eight. As it is an exchange, the rates are determined entirely by players and supply and demand. There also exist Subscription oceans, on which there are no Doubloons but it costs $10 a month to have access to anything you’d normally have to spend Doubloons on (which are most of the items in the game, including ships).

Although it should be obvious, I love the game… and if you choose to look into it, say hi to me as Akerasi on Sage ocean (it’s a Doubloon ocean).

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Mechanical Turk is one of the most interesting things I’ve come across online, and a good way to make a little money in your free time. People post little jobs, called HITs, to the site and pay you for completing them. I’m especially fond of the Castingwords podcast transcription hits, as they tend to pay decently well per time spent. The most interesting thing to me, however, is that programs can be made to automatically request HITs on the site. This could lead to some very interesting applications, if done right… but no one really has yet, in my opinion, other than perhaps Castingwords (their system is mostly automated, although it does have human intervention throughout).

A chaos magician’s view on Scientology

Scientology has been in the news recently again, due to their “free mental health assistance” scam following the Minneapolis bridge collapse (I live in Minneapolis, about 3 miles from where the bridge collapsed, but don’t know anyone who was hurt or killed or anything). I have a rather unique view on their religion, due to my own unique religious beliefs. First, a quick primer on my beliefs, and then I’ll explain my thoughts on Scientology.

Although my beliefs don’t fit very well in one “box”, I can generally be referred to as a chaos magician. Chaos magicians are usually very skeptical members of the Pagan community, that look at spirituality and magic from a practical, scientific standpoint. They see spirituality as a tool or set of tools for making positive changes in their life. We’re a results oriented bunch, and often study many different religions, of all types,  and try to learn what works and what doesn’t work in them to put the working bits into our “spiritual toolbox”.

I tend towards the skeptical end of the chaos magic community, not trusting something until I’ve seen it in action or done it myself, but I am willing to try anything and experiment with it. I’ve studied and practiced actively many a religion, sometimes multiple at once, just to learn what sort of effects they can have on my life. My interests spurred by reading more about Scientology again, I decided to start to try some of their exercises and practices myself.

As I don’t feel like donating a few hundred thousand dollars to their organization, I quickly found information on the Free Zone sect of Scientology, a group of people who are trying to practice Scientology outside of the Church.  There’s a lot of good information there, including almost everything ever written for or about Scientology, if you’re willing to do a bit of digging around. When starting to look through their practices, the early parts of the most popular self-study book (download it here) remind me a lot of a lot of things I’d suggest any chaos magician try as basic training.

A lot of the early stuff seems to be based around making you more aware of the environment around you, and how your thoughts and feelings can change the environment. Very similar stuff to one of my favorite books, Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson (A great read… I’ll post a review of it some other time). Most of Scientology, until you start talking about Xenu anyways, seems to be 4 parts psychology and 3 parts chaos magic, with a bit of other random stuff thrown in. Really, I find the work in the Free Zone to be remarkably good… it’s not the religion itself that’s at fault, it’s the organization that’s the problem. At least, that’s my 2 cents.

Ron Paul, Ron Paul, rah rah rah?

I’m an avid reader of Digg.com, and it seems almost every day a new Ron Paul story hits the front page. If you took what is said on Digg to heart, it would seem as if there’s some grand conspiracy to discredit his campaign in the best way possible, by simply not covering it. Mainstream polls never show him at better than 2% in the Republican primary, which makes sense if one considers the demographics of such polls. Specifically, the fact that a great number of the more tech-savvy and info-savvy people, the ones who have heard of Ron Paul, don’t have terrestrial phone service, and therefore aren’t in any of the typical polls.

In my opinion, the big Ron Paul conspiracy thing is rather overblown on Digg, but there is some truth to it, as evidenced especially by ABC News and their blatantly biased reporting on all matters concerning the upcoming Presidential race. If you don’t read Digg, you probably haven’t seen this link pointing out their obvious bias there. The fact that his number of volunteers has risen so high so quickly, and the money he’s raised, is interesting and will make him at least someone to watch. It’ll be a lot of fun waiting to see if anything actually comes of it, or if most of those volunteers don’t actually show up, or aren’t real people but are simply a few tech-savvy internet users, perhaps the same ones who write scripts to stuff the polls whenever an online poll has Ron Paul in the options.

As for his actual views, as a Libertarian myself I find him rather to my taste. There’s only a few points on which I differ greatly with him, mainly on the abortion issue, but it’s based simply on a difference of opinion as to when life begins. If I believed a fetus was a person at conception, I would side with Ron; I don’t, so I don’t side with him on that issue. However, I am especially happy to see his views on taxation and the like at least getting some discussion. Even if he doesn’t win, he might remind some of his neo-conservative party members what being a fiscal conservative actually means.

I do wish him the best of luck, and might even volunteer for his campaign if it seems it might make a difference, but I don’t expect he’ll have a real chance at this point. It is possible, however, if he gets the word out about his views and his candidacy, that things might look a lot different soon. His campaign reminds me a lot of Howard Dean’s, and I doubt his will end as Dean’s did… he seems a lot more level headed than that.

The Miles Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold

I recently finished reading the entire Miles Vorkosigan series, by Lois McMaster Bujold. It’s a great read, focusing on different things than science fiction normally focuses upon, and I suggest that pretty much anyone who hasn’t read it, even if they’re not normally into science fiction, give it a try.

Although not all of the books are directly about him, the main character is Miles Vorkosigan, a member of a warrior caste (symbolized by the Vor before the rest of their last name) on a planet called Barrayar. It was lost for a while after it was first colonized, and later rediscovered, and so went through a long period where technology was of an approximately medieval level. That, however, is simply part of the past, and part of the rich backdrop that sets the scene for so many interesting stories.

Miles isn’t your average hero, by anyone’s definition of the word. He’s about 5′ 0″, his stature is a little hunched, and his left leg is noticeably shorter than his right. His bones are very brittle, and those that haven’t been replaces with synthetic ones in difficult medical procedures break extremely easily. These physical defects are due to a politically-motivated assassination attempt against his parents when he was still in the womb. His parents escaped without injury, but he was severely damaged in the womb.

He succeeds at the things he does mostly through smooth talking, efficient management, and quick thinking. It seems as if his physical frailty forced him to learn to use his mind to its fullest potential, but not necessarily in the ways we think of as intelligence. He’s mostly extremely people smart, always finding the best people to do a thing, finding a way that it benefits them as well, and explaining this to everyone involved.

The series never settles on a science fiction sub-genre, moving from theme to theme as Miles moves through different stages in his life. I find this far more believable than many similar long series, which often simply put the main character against bigger, but similar challenges repeatedly. Bujold’s writing style works well for all of the sub-genres she uses, showing her great depth as a writer. I highly recommend this series to anyone who’s interested in good literature of any sort, especially if you read science fiction, but even perhaps if you don’t.