It's just my opinion, I could be wrong

This year, Tuesday November 4th marked the day I'd colloquially term the Idiot Masses Day in the US. This is the day, bi-annually, when the idiot masses get to go to the polling stations, and help steer the country inexorably forward toward its destined idiocracy . It's the day when, no matter how informed or educated you may be on any particular political issues or candidates, there are an order of magnitude more people going to the polls to vote purely based on idiotic partisan categorization, some partisan or paid-for endorsements, or worse, a combination of distilled and filtered sound bites randomly garnered from media exposure. The setup virtually ensures we'll get a mediocre outcome at best, and reinforces the monetarily corrupt native of the current voting process. Which begs the question: could we do better? Well, that's a more difficult question, with no easy answer. Conceptually, there are several ways we could hope to have a better overall outcome, but the...

I'm going to preface this blog post by noting that it's somewhat more technical than political, so if that is uninteresting, feel free to ignore. I've been thinking a bit recently about what the internet needs moving forward. Specifically, I see a few looming problems which threaten to harm, if not effectively destroy, the internet as we currently know it. First, there is the problem of pervasive government monitoring, which threatens free communication of ideas. Second, there is the attack on net neutrality, which threatens to make only the content which the telcom providers sell viable on the internet. Both of these are serious problems, and although it's conceptually possible that they would have legislative solutions, that presumes the laughable premise that the government works on behalf of the people (as opposed to itself and/or large corporations who bribe them), which is obviously false. Therefore, it's prudent to look for a technological solution for thes...

President Obama has done a number of objectionable things during the six years of his presidency so far. Some things have been mere continuations, or slight expansions, of pre-existing objectionable policies (eg: domestic spying by the NSA, unauthorized and unconstitutional foreign military interventions, etc.). Others have been more substantial escalations of previous bad policies (eg: more expansive power grabs through executive orders, formulation of a legal opinion to allow arbitrary assassination of Americans, increasing the national debt at a historically record rate, etc.). Still others have been new, more creative attacks on American systems and long-term prosperity (eg: Obamacare, designed to be so expensive, arduous, and crippling to the health care system as to necessitate the adoption of socialized medical care). Obama is now finally regarded by Americans as the worst president in American history, and there's still [at least] two years of additional disasters to endure...

It would be fair to say that at times, I have been somewhat critical of President Obama, as well as Democrats in general, on this blog and elsewhere. As it happens, I find myself in frequent disagreement with his/their policies, pushes, and general philosophies on how government should work. However, I like to think of myself as having [strong] opinions on issues, and sometimes on ideology, but not on partisan political groups per se, despite the frequent overlap. In that sense, I'd like to espouse the following opinion: I have no issue, whatsoever, with how Obama has handled our military interactions with Iraq since he took office, and I don't feel he should bare much, if any, blame for the ISIS uprising there. It has been opined that the US should have persisted in Iraq, establishing a long-term presence to deter aggressive forces, as we have in other regions of the world. It has been opined that the Iraqi military was not ready to stand on its own, and needed more traini...

So Mark Cuban is being criticized for some comments  he made recently, tangentially related to the Donald Sterling controversy. Essentially, what Cuban said is that he would be cautious around people he perceived as potentially dangerous, and that perception could be based on many factors: area, race, clothing, tattoos, general appearance, etc. Then he characterized those perceptions as based on stereotypes... which is true, in a certain sense. In another sense, though, we might call that behavior by another characterization: common sense. People (as well as animals in general) have evolved to be cautious of things they perceive as potentially dangerous, and for good reason. Dangerous things threaten us, and it would be foolish to ignore potential signs of danger, or wander through life intentionally ignorant of your perceptions of your environment, and the people and things in it. You wouldn't wander across a busy freeway, intentionally ignoring the cars whizzing by in some absu...

So there was an EU court ruling recently, in which google lost an appeal to remove links to someone's information which was deemed to be "out of date". Without getting into the specifics of the case or the ruling (both of which were dumb), the aftermath raises a few interesting points. Among them: how should google comply with the ruling, and what should google do to prepare for similar future rulings in other jurisdictions. One publication, for example, suggested that google should modify its core search algorithm to generate results which were more compliant with the EU court rulings. I think that idea is absurd and unworkable, and I have a better idea for them. See, one of the problems google faces with complying with this ruling is the verification issue. Not only is verification of "outdated" data time consuming and expensive, but its also highly subjective. However, since fines in the EU can run as high as 5% of gross revenue per day , non-compliance is...

This blog post caught my attention recently: http://www.virgin.com/richard-branson/businesses-should-stand-up-to-climate-change-deniers In it, Richard Branson (of Virgin Everything fame) espouses a view that more corporations should do what they can to invest in renewable resources, and encourage people to not support the corporations if they do not agree with their [essentially] political views. He ends the post by encouraging people who are not Global Warming (the religion) believers to "get out of our way". And, despite not sharing his opinions on global warming and such... I wholeheartedly support the approach. The idea that people should not impose their beliefs on others is enshrined in the US Constitution, as well as much of the common idealism of the country. That goes both ways: in the same way the people who believe in Global Warming should not be allowed to force their views on others, so should the people who are more skeptically and/or scientifically minded n...