Conservatives love to lambast the ACLU for all kinds of perceived "attacks on America". But what they always fail to realize is that the ACLU fights for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and it is abundantly clear in this article: ACLU Tells High School to Allow Students to Protest ACLU at Football Game.

Seems Gate City High School in Gate City had a bad practice of offering sectarian prayers over the PA system at football games. Something that clearly was the school promoting one religion over all others. So the ACLU warned the school that what it was doing was wrong.

Because of this "attack", conservatives organized a protest which the school moved to stop.

Showing integrity that is totally lacking from conservative groups like the ACLJ, the ACLU is moving to defend the protesters and ensuring that their free-speech rights are enforced.

The sad part is I'm sure the protesters won't understand the irony that they are only enjoying their freedom to protest because of groups like the ACLU.

Tho technically 'socialism' wasn't the boogey-word in the 1800's is is now, tho I am sure the sentiment was the same (and I know many modern tea-baggers who regret those previous "socialist plots").

I rarely if ever buy music these days. Mostly because I don't listen to much music, but also because I don't think that any money spent on CDs or tracks actually goes to either the artists or to produce better music. I think the industry is corrupt in general, abusive to artists, and it refuses to change with the times and provide services that people want.

Two good articles came to my attention this week illustration why I don't believe that most labels have the artist's interests in mind.
( Read more... )

http://www.guns-n-gardens.com/

Wubwife likes home improvement shows so I get to watch too many of them, but I like this one - A home improvement show helping you deal with the zombie apocalypse!

Funnee

I love the logic diagram in the middle... yep, sounds like what those wacky theists believe

I've blogged a few times about gay marriage. I know it will eventually be the norm and no one will even blink an eye (and on that day, I would just love for some of the current opponents to apologize and admit they were wrong)

And here's a great study (warning PDF) showing why gay marriage not only will happen, but is inevitable.



The graph (and report) clearly shows that support for gay marriage among 18-29 year olds is over 50% in all but a small handful of states. More than 1/3 of 18-29 year olds who support gay rights is in Alabama (the most backward state).

With each new generation, the percentage of support only grows. So it is only a matter of time before a majority of the whole population realizes what is plainly obvious to so many of us: gay marriage has no impact on the world for most people.

I just hate that it will take so much longer for some people to realize and accept the truth. And I hate to think of how many more people will be subject to hatred and discrimination before that day comes.

Last nite we saw Star Wars in Concert. A live orchestra playing select pieces from the Star Wars movies.

Anthony Daniels was live and narrated the event. He brought charm and wit to separate the individual pieces.
During each piece, huge screens played select scenes from the movies and gave more emotion to the pieces played and brought the music to life.

Nothing could match the adrenaline rush when the orchestra started up.
Blasting drums with the trumpet fanfare. Then the immortal words flashed up on the screen "A long time ago in a galaxy far away..."... a brief pause as the stadium faded to black... the audience held its breath.. and the opening blast of the Star Wars theme filled the chamber with power and emotion. I think everyone in there wanted to cheer and hoot but we were struck silent by the music we all love.

The entire event was absolute mesmerizing blend of music and visuals. We were entranced for the entire show and wished it could have gone on longer.

Took long enuf... but then again, I wasn't really trying, so not really surprising that it didn't work for so long!!!

Anyway, finally got posting fixed. Now if I'll just get off my ass and post more often, everything would be fixed!

When TiVo and other Digital Video Recorders were new, the TV industry went insane with lawsuits and hysterical rhetoric about how DVRs were going to destroy the world!!!

Industry analysts claimed that DVR "potentially threatens the very lifeblood of how television is funded and how it's used for marketing and advertising."

Of course, what was really happening is what always happens when new technologies come along that change things: New companies talk about a "brave new world" that the tech offers, old companies fear for their very life and fight tooth and nail to avoid any change.

We saw it with VCRs, cassette tapes, radios, and every new technology to ever come forward.

Via an EFF posting, it seems that once again, history has shown that new technology improves things rather than destroys everything.

This weekend, The New York Times announced that "DVR ratings now add significantly to live ratings and thus to ad revenue."

Yes, new technologies disrupt things and sometimes business models have to change, but I, for one, am getting tired of the moral panic, doom-and-gloom we hear from the likes of MPAA, RIAA, TV and Movie studios and basically anyone wrapped in the old industry. History has shown them time-and-time-again to be wrong.

Some fun quotes below the cut
( Read more... )

Follow up to my earlier post: Judge won't marry interracial couples...

A Louisiana justice of the peace who drew criticism for refusing to marry an interracial couple has resigned, the secretary of state's office said Tuesday.

Of course, the racist doesn't think he did anything wrong

"It's kind of hard to apologize for something that you really and truly feel down in your heart you haven't done wrong," he said.

Luckily he didn't try to defend himself after his earlier comments

"I'm not a racist," he said. "I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house.

I don't like sounding like a petulant child, but I tend to like working with intelligent people and when the people I work with do dumb things, I tend to lose respect for them (we are not talking dumb things like a bad cut and paste error, we're talking dumb things like not realizing that they could use cut and paste in the first place).

Last week, I finally got around to making a visual change to one of our landing pages. Screen real estate is fairly valuable. You only have a certain area to work with, so you want to put important features high on the page and less important features on sub-pages or where the user has to scroll down to see them.

On one of our landing pages, there were a series of links that represented functions that will only be exercised occasionally by some of our users. They won't even be visible to most of the users (just blank spaces for them). These links were products of very early "sketch" layouts done by a cow-orker who is no longer here and they are absolute prime candidates for moving to secondary pages, so I moved them. In their place, I put functions that will be used daily by a majority of our users.

Now, another thing about landing pages and things like that. You do not want to make changes to them too often. As any developer can tell you, users are dumb. They do not like change and will be confused even if you remove a link they don't use.

I wanted to make the layout change before delivery of the final code because to make the change later will generate confusion among the end users. I would have made it a long time ago, but I was busy designing the back-end code that actually runs the site and didn't have enough time to fix all the little visual improvements that the site needs desperately.

So I made the change to the layout and our testers complained (note: we have 2 testers, not a whole suite of them).

They had pages of scripts that were "invalid" because the links were now wrong. These are not automated scripts. These are hand scripts that they follow. i.e.: Go to this page, click this link, on the next page, enter 12 in the text box, etc...

The change I made would mean that they would have to adjust their scripts to click an intervening link on one page. Something most people can get used to. And again, this is a distinct improvement that will have very positive improvements for our real end users.

I was overridden by my boss who sides with the testers because he doesn't want to "invalidate their scripts"???? (remember, these are NOT automated scripts).

So we are going to deliver a bad layout to users who will not want it changed after delivery, all to keep two testers (who are supposed to be intelligent, remember) from having to mentally add one step to some of their tests.


So, yes, my respect for some of my cow-orkers just went way down. And what really bugs me is that to lots of our in-house engineers, I am the face of this tool even if it is mostly a team-effort. So this bad-design very directly reflects on me and I don't like it.

So now I am very pissed and don't feel like coding today... which is not good since we do not have many days left before we go live...

What a great way to spend an afternoon... blowing anvils into the sky!



via boingboing

These people can not possibly understand the meaning of irony

Meanwhile, a Taliban group also sent two letters to the Lahore Press Club - one on October 12 and the other on October 14 - warning that if the media “does not stop portraying us as terrorists ... we will blow up offices of journalists and media organisations”.

Just keep killing people until they stop calling you a terrorist... good plan...

A good reminder that we didn't fight for some people's freedoms, we fought for everyone's freedoms.



via: boingboing

Finally someone asks the wingnuts the right question:

A federal judge challenged the backers of California's voter-enacted ban on same-sex marriage Wednesday to explain how allowing gay couples to wed threatens conventional unions, a demand that prompted their lawyer to acknowledge he did not know.

Most sane people know that gay marriage is not a problem. But wingnuts keep sticking their head into the debate with crazy claims that gay marriage will somehow destroy heterosexual marriage. But when challenged to explain how gay marriage will cause all this damage, wingnuts can't really explain

"What is the harm to the procreation purpose you outlined of allowing same-sex couples to get married?" [U.S. District Chief Judge] Walker asked.

"My answer is, I don't know. I don't know," Cooper [lawyer for the group that sponsored Proposition 8] answered.

Cooper didn't know because the only "evidence" wingnuts have is anecdotal and based on prejudice, fear and primitive superstitious nonsense not on any real facts or rational explanations.
I readily admit that society has a valid interest in supporting the raising of children, and that marriage is a very good institution to raise children in. However, that interest is not in any way diminished by couples who do not raise children (or cannot raise children). Children are not a requirement of marriage, so the idea that "procreation" is the only reason for marriage is simply not valid.


I know it's a pipe dream, but I hope that one day some of these wingnuts will have the guts to come forward and admit they were wrong...


also via the AP and here

I know there is still prejudice in the world, but I keep hoping we are over the worst of it when some redneck wacko goes off and proves me wrong again.

Interracial couple denied marriage license in La.

Of course its in the south, where ignorance is a virtue and stoopidity rewarded. But one would hope that state officials would at least show a modicum of decency or intelligence.

But you just have to love the take-away quote:

"I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way," Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. "I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else."

How very white of him!! He lets black people use his bathroom!!! How practically 1920 of him!

I think I'm going to be sick :-/

via Pharyngula

Interesting piece from Reason Weekly

Close to 1/2 of the people in America claim to go to church every week. The problem is, there aren't enough seats in all the churches in the country to seat even half that number:

Assuming that all are filled to capacity, that even the smallest of them can accommodate at least 400 people, and liberally adding 20,000,000 extra seats, the total number of available seats in churches across America is 59,045,600. That is just little over a half of what would be necessary to accommodate all the people who claim to go to church weekly.

So its interesting to see that not nearly as many people who claim to go to church actually do. And more interesting to see that so called church goers seem quite content to lie to pollsters.

I'm guessing most of these people lie because they feel they wont appear to be "good" unless they can show they go to church regularly. It will be a good day when people don't feel the pressure to lie to pollsters in order to seem like they are one of "the good guys".

In one simple article, the Onion nails wingnut's opposition to gay marriage:

If God Had Wanted Me To Be Accepting Of Gays, He Would Have Given Me The Warmth And Compassion To Do So

It is nearly impossible for me to pick a choice quote from the article. Every line is absolutely perfect.

...I know that if it were part of God's plan for me to stop viciously condemning others based solely on their sexual preference, He would have seen fit - in His infinite wisdom and all - to have given me the tiniest bit of human empathy necessary to do so.

and

Compassion, tolerance, understanding, basic decency, the ability to put myself in another person's position: God could have endowed me with any of those traits and yet - here is the crucial part - He didn't. Why? Because the Creator of the Universe wants me to demonize homosexuals in an effort to strip them of their fundamental human rights.

Just briliant...