aubreyturner.org

I think someone has finally captured the essense of Al Gore:

… a purulent hemorrhoid about to burst into a million bitter droplets of anger and fiery indignation.

Late last week I noticed that Verizon employees were in the neighborhood working at the new fiber optic boxes that have been put in near the street.  This was the first time I noticed actual Verizon employees, though.  All of the other work has been done by contractors.  So I took this as a sign that they were nearing completion of the new fiber network. 

The Verizon press release has a few more details about the FTTP rollout, including this tidbit about proposed service speeds.

Bob Ingalls, president of Verizon’s Retail Marketing Group, said some of the new broadband access products will feature download speeds of 5 megabits per second, 15 megabits per second and 30 megabits per second. Verizon expects to begin marketing these products in Keller and elsewhere later this year. The new network will also support video applications and other new services.

“These services will be provided at a substantial value over anything that’s in the market today – highly competitive pricing because we know that’s what customers will expect,” Ingalls said.

30 Mbps is certainly better than anything I can get today, but I’ll be a bit disappointed if this is all they’re going to offer.  The equipment is capable of doing 100 Mbps (at least according to its specs).  I’m also anxiously awaiting the publication of their offerings and the terms of service for those offerings.  I want a symmetrical high-speed internet service that doesn’t have a significant penalty in cost for being symmetrical.  Since I work from home these days, I find myself being hampered by the silly upload cap imposed by the cable modem provider.  If you want symmetrical speeds with cable you have to pay for a business plan, which the last time I checked was around $100/month (unfortunately, they’ve removed their pricing information and replaced it with a contact form on the Charter website, so I can’t tell what their service costs now).

Verizon has a general information page for their new FTTP ‘DSL’ service here, including the ability to sign up to be notified when FTTP is available in your area.

I don’t normally talk about abortion.  It’s one of those nasty topics that can only get you enemies.  Otherwise rational people go stark raving spitting mad when it’s brought up.  That having been said, though, since today’s Bleat takes up the topic I thought, “What the heck?”

I once heard a libertarian (I think it was Dr. Mary Ruwart) propose a technological solution to abortion with the idea of transplanting the fetus to a willing recipient.  On first impression, that seems like an interesting idea, and one that could potentially end the whole debate over abortion.  The presenter of the idea thought that anti-abortion advocates would be better off putting their resources into researching and perfecting such a procedure.  And when considered strictly from a “market forces” approach, that may be true.  As we’ve seen, a simple ban on abortion will not end the practice.  Given that there will always be women who want to end a pregnancy, anti-abortionists can either provide an alternative or be ignored while abortions continue to be practiced (legally or not).

Since my falling out with the Libertarian party line after 9/11, though, I’ve started to question these things a bit more.  Also, since my cynicism knows few bounds, I suspect that such a simple solution would not actually solve the problem, or it least it would open up new problems.  But for the sake of argument, let’s accept the idea of a safe and effective medical procedure that would allow for the transplantation of a fetus from one woman to another.  As it turns out, such a procedure would open up a whole other set of questions.

Would such a procedure be accepted by the various religious authorities that currently condemn abortion?  Given the intransigence over birth-control in the Catholic Church, I could also see some sort of Papal edict banning the practice over some obscure bit of dogma.  Not being a religious person (I’m agnostic), I’m not really well versed on what issues might be raised.  I just sense that there could be some sort of resistance from this quarter.  Perhaps we’d see some ‘goalpost moving’ where the concept of life extends to the original mother or something.

Most of the anti-abortionists at some level want to see all abortion banned and made illegal.  Given that the law is not likely to make abortion illegal any time soon, would they be satisfied with this procedure as an alterative? 

But what about the pro-choicers?  Would they see this as an attack on their right to choose?  They’re pretty defensive about anything that gets in the way of choice.  They might interpret such a procedure as the camel’s nose of abortion prohibition under the tent (yes, this is counter to my assertion above that the legality of abortion is not likely to change, but I’m talking about the pro-choicers interpretation of events and their reactions to them). 

What would such a procedure cost?  I could see a situation where the transplant becomes more like adoption with the ‘donor’ vetting the prospective recipient and choosing based on homelife, income, etc.  The costs would then be borne by the recipient family.  But if the costs were too high, would there be enough propective recipients to take all of the unwanted fetuses?  Even if the costs are low, are there enough women who want children and can carry them to term but otherwise can’t conceive to take all of these fetuses?  According to the CDC, there were 857,475 abortions in the US in 2000.  At that rate, there’d have to be a veritable army of women volunteering each year to receive fetus transplants.

On the flip side of the ‘adoption’ scenario, would there be blind transplants where the ‘donor’ just wants to get rid of the fetus and doesn’t care who it goes to?  The adoption scenario presupposes that the woman cares enough about the fetus to go through the process.  If there is too much process or ceremony associated with giving up a fetus for transplant, it could continue to encourage some women to get an abortion.

What happens to the legal rights of the original mother after the transplant?  Does she implicitly give up all future rights and responsibilities or can she expect to have a knock on her door in 18 years?

What about the father’s rights and responsibilities?  If the father isn’t involved in the transplant can he suddenly show up and demand custody from the recipient?  Can he be sued for child support in the future?  Will the state come after him for support if the new mother ever applies for some kind of assistance?

I’m sure there a lot more issues that would arise.  These are just what I came up with after spending a few minutes thinking about it.  It still sounds like an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure in this situation.

This post from Instapundit about freedom of the press got me to thinking.  It’s gotten to the point where I don’t watch any of the major national networks for news (ABC, NBC, CBS), nor do I watch CNN.  The bias permeates every word and phrase of their reports to such an extent that I find myself screaming at them within seconds.  I only watch local news and read the papers (although the AP and other national reports are quickly identifiable as such by their bias, even if they didn’t have the byline to identify their source).

Anyhow, Instapundit’s correspondent was curious if freedom of the press would survive a hostile public as more and more people conclude that the press is anti-American.  Given our rather mix-and-match approach to the constitution these days, that’s not so far fetched a question as it might appear.  My first thought would be to give the journalists a dose of Second Amendment treatment and see how they fare.  No, I don’t mean shoot the bastards (although that thought is strangely tempting).  Instead, I mean to expose them to the same treatment that the Second gets in this country.  Namely, create a patchwork of conflicting and unconstitutional laws that vary from state to state.  Create unconstitutional national laws that can put them in jail for 10 years for a first-time paperwork violation, and consequently bar them from reporting for life.  Require background checks to buy reporting equipment.  Constantly harp on them about whether they really ‘need’ that printing press or those video cameras.  Create special taxes on video supplies.  Get local city councils to zone existing news buildings out of existence, forcing them to move to the country.  There are probably a lot more I could come up with, but you get the picture.

And when they complain that this is unconstitutional, respond with a disingenous answer about how the term ‘press’ really doesn’t apply to them. 

If I seem a bit peeved by the press these days, it’s only because these very same smug bastards who report on everything the U.S. does with a sneer would be calling for the heads of gun owners if we were even half as reckless with our guns as they’ve been with their reporting.  If I didn’t have the Internet as a source to know that there are good things happening on the ground in Iraq and all I based my impression of the situation on were the ‘mainstream’ press, I’d be pretty pessimistic about the situation.  Joe Sixpack, coming home from work and flipping over to Peter Jennings in the evening, probably thinks Iraq is turning into another Vietnam.  Or at least that’s what I gathered from the last time I tried to watch that sorry bastard Jennings and his socialist cohorts on ABC last Friday.

I heard on the news this morning that two teachers at Northwest ISD who were suspended for showing the video of Nick Berg’s beheading will be allowed back in the fall.  I must confess that I don’t completely understand the uproar over showing this video in school (at least in this instance).  It was shown to Junior and Senior level students and they were all given the option not to watch it.

I think it’s important for everyone who can stomach it to watch that video to understand just what kind of enemy Western civilization is facing.  These are brutal thugs who would subjugate all of us to religious slavery if they could only get away with it.  Anyone who thinks that negotation or appeasement is possible need only watch this video to understand the folly of that position.  You can’t negotiate or compromise with someone whose only goal is your destruction.

One of the interesting features of Expression Engine that I’ve been playing around with is the ability to define custom field groups and then create weblogs that use those groups.  This means that you can define any set of fields you want and then define a set of pages that display those fields.

For a while I’ve been toying around with changing the way my guns page is organized behind the scenes.  Right now it’s a bunch of kludged up PHP scripts, with the guns defined in a global hash array.  It’s a bit of a pain to manage and requires a number of manual updates when I add or change something.  Here’s an example of what the hash array entry looks like for one gun:

With Expression Engine I was able to define a set of custom fields and a set of templates to display the index page as well as an individual gun entry.  Using that, entering a new gun (or changing an existing one) is as simple as editing a weblog entry.  Here’s an example of the entry screen:

Here’s a shot of the index page:

And here’s an individual gun entry:

What’s interesting is that I spent at most a couple of hours arriving at this point. 

Although I’m convinced of the power of the tool, I still have some reservations before putting down $99 to purchase it.  Due to security concerns my hosting company prefers that PHP apps run as CGI processes.  They do allow PHP as an Apache module, but they have a number of restrictions on what PHP can do in that environment, since Apache is running as a system process, rather than under a specific user id.  This means that it is possible for User A’s PHP code to access data in User B’s directory in some cases (in fact, the installation instructions for Expression Engine require you to open up several of your files/directories to all users on the system; i.e. chmod to 666 or 777).  My main concern with Expression Engine is the developers’ attitudes to CGI and their dismissiveness of the security concerns.  That may be the deal killer for me.  CGI is not the hideous monster they make it out to be, nor is forking/exec’ing an external process the end of the world, at least for low-to-moderate volume sites.  If they want to continue to increase their user base, they’d be well advised to take the security concerns seriously and make their app work well with CGI (in their favor I should note that they do provide instructions on common problems encountered with getting it to work under the CGI execution model).

Still, the feature set the tool provides makes it tempting, especially with the competitive upgrade offer.  I’ve still got a week and four days to decide, so I will continue to play with it before making a decision.

At least you will be able to next week.

Tomorrow I will go in to the dentist’s office to have all of the measurements, X-rays, etc. done for braces (one of them is called a ‘cephalometric film’, which just sounds evil, although I know it isn’t), which will be fitted next Wednesday.  This is the beginning of a two-year course of treatment.  I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t qualify for the Invisalign braces because too much correction is needed on the top teeth.  It’s going to be kind of odd to go through the whole process at my age, although I know that a lot of people are getting it done.  My aunt, who is in her late 50’s, did it recently, although she had the advantage of using Invisalign.

Of course, none of this comes cheap.  The whole bill for the full course came to just over $4800, of which insurance should pay $1000.  They gave me a discount for paying the rest up front, which meant I had to pony up a little over $3600 today.

I’ve been playing with the 14-day free trial version of Expression Engine.  I wasn’t able to install it on my hosting account because the trial version uses Zend Optimizer to encrypt/obfuscate their PHP source.  Unfortunately, Zend Optimizer required root access for installation.  The fully licensed version will not have this problem, though.

In the meantime I installed the trial on my Linux system at home and created two weblogs.  I then imported all the entries from this site as well as The Bitch Girls into those weblogs and set about trying to figure out their template system.  While you can create multiple weblogs in Expression Engine, you have to do a lot of template customization to make those weblogs truly separate.  I think I’ve finally gotten it all figured out, at least in terms of how to code the templates.

There appears to be some kind of problem with the archive page, though.  It just displays the year and month and then nothing.  I will check the support forums to see if this is a known problem or if there is a fix.

I’m not sure if I’ll be implementing Expression Engine anytime soon, but I wanted to give it a try to see if it would be useful.  So far, though, it’s far superior in terms of posting performance in that no rebuilds have to be done for new posts or when changing templates/layout.  Also, comments seem to work faster than with MT.  However, this all comes at the price of being a little harder on the server since all pages are dynamic and require DB access to display them.  In a typical installation, using PHP as an Apache module, this would be mitigated somewhat by caching.  However, my webhost’s default configuration is to run PHP as a CGI process.  This provides better security in that they use a SUEXEC wrapper to allow the CGI process to run under my user ID rather than the ID of the server.  This allows for better file access control (i.e. you don’t have to set files and directories with 666 or 777 permissions) at the expense of the loss of caching.  I may try setting up my home system to run PHP as a CGI process to see how that affects performance.  I’d hate to finish the evaluation and buy the product only to find that it performs poorly in the actual production environment.

I’ve been running four weblogs with a total of nine authors on my current copy of MT (I interpreted this as being legal, since I don’t charge for it and I don’t offer a service; all the weblogs are run from a single instance of MT on a single server).  Movable Type just announced a new license model for MT 3.0.  From what I can see of their new license model, my current usage would require the purchase of “Movable Type 3.0 Personal Edition Volume License II” at a cost of $149.95.  They also offer a free version, but it is limited to no more than four weblogs with one author, so that isn’t an option.

Before I put down $150 for weblogging software, I’m going to investigate the alternatives.  Of course, the hassle of migrating to new software might make it worth the cost, but that remains to be seen.  MT 3.0 had better have improved a lot of things significantly if they want to charge those kinds of prices.

More at Slashdot. 

Update:  I really like some of the features I see in pMachine’s Expression Engine.  For the same price as the “personal” MT 3.0 version I could get Expression Engine for noncommercial use and have unlimited authors and weblogs.  I may give it a try one of these days.  But for now, as long as MT 2.661 does the job I’m going to leave well enough alone.

I wonder whether it might have a deterrent effect on certain Islamist elements if it were to be leaked that the US has an ICBM or three targeted at the coordinates 21°25’24” N, 39°49’24” E.  If an American city were to be attacked with WMD (any type of NBC weapon), these coordinates would become quite warm about 15 minutes later.