Ruminati

Piss-poor journalism

2008-12-01T01:23:00Z

Last night I saw a TV show about climate change. Propaganda isn't necessarily a bad thing, and these people certainly mean well, but they got most of their facts wrong and misrepresented a great many truths in order to make them support a particular conclusion. In particular, they interviewed some woman whose primary claims to fame are (1) they interviewed her, and (2) she likes diving on the reef. This woman saw some bleached reef. Because she remembers it as once being vibrant with colour,...(read more)

Dangerous government

2008-11-30T12:00:00Z

Friedrich Hayek says that in centrally-planned economies, an individual or a select group of individuals must determine the distribution of resources, these planners will never have enough information to carry out this allocation reliably. This is true but incomplete. All centralised systems are intrinsically unable to scale efficiently because the number of interactions is a geometric function of the number of participants: the overheads are crippling. Moral, social, ethical and other justifications...(read more)

Truth, justice and taking the law into your own hands

2008-09-24T04:51:00Z

If we can't take the law into our own hands, whose hands should it be in? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who watches the watchers?) Lawyers are professional weasels. General public consensus -- as well as private experience -- is that they are deceitful grasping sneaks and not to be trusted. Public servants don't care. Politicians are untrustworthy. They are expected to lie. They are also demonstrably detached from reality. Nearly all of them have declared conflicts of interest, too -- party...(read more)

Reporting Services and the intarweb

2008-09-16T02:00:00Z

Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, IIS7 and Reporting Services 2008 - latest and greatest, made for each other. ASP.NET developed using Visual Studio 2008, showing the reports in the Microsoft supplied ReportViewer web control. "Oh, that's easy! " said the documentation. "You just use the ReportViewer control. The server-side part of it acts as a proxy that runs in the process of your ASP.NET application's AppPool, so you just need to give database permissions to the AppPool...(read more)

Men are from Mars, women are a PITA

2008-09-09T03:30:00Z

The great "men's secret" of hunter-gatherers was that hunting entailed a couple of days bushwalking with your buddies culminating with a bit of light trapping on the way back. Why come back at all? Laundry, sex and the opportunity to be the conquering hero. You leave again just before your exalted status expires. We can't live like that any more. We're trapped with them. So we have to use other means to prevent familiarity from breeding contempt. A woman who holds you in contempt...(read more)