At my last job, I used Spiceworks to monitor my network. At one point, I figured out that they collect data about my network and send it home to their servers, so that advertisers can hit me better. No worries, I thought. I read their TOS and found that the data is supposedly anonymized. That was enough to satisfy me at the time.

Now, I happen to work for a company that sells a product that Spiceworks customers might use, and we discussed advertising with them last year. At the time, we elected not to buy, but they encouraged us to be active on the forums and participate in the community.

So, I did just that. While not the most frequent poster, I got two ‘Best Answers’ and racked up enough points to move up a couple of their levels. You know, typical forum participation thing.

Naturally, I subscribe to the firewall and networking forums, where my company’s product fits in. And a few people asked for advice, and I chimed in with a recommendation to check out our product. Note that I was logged in as myself. I didn’t create fake accounts to astroturf. I’m not in sales, I’m not in marketing, and I don’t get a commission. I didn’t paste in copy from a brochure. I wrote a response tailored to each individual, from sysadmin to sysadmin, addressing their exact question. I have a few years of experience in IT, and I don’t like marketing BS. My responses were completely appropriate.

Next thing I know, I start getting PMs from Spiceworks people. They’re censoring my posts. Why? Because advertisers are supposed to pay. This seems kind of silly to me, because I think I’m providing pretty relevant information. So I check out their ToS:

“You may not post or transmit any advertising, promotional materials or any other solicitation of other users or Members to use or buy products, goods or services except in those areas (e.g., a classified bulletin board) that are designated for such purpose.”

I didn’t do any of the above, of course. I just answered a dude’s question. The number of general posts I wrote is much higher than the number of posts I wrote containing any information about my employer, so I would also argue I contributed quite a bit to the community, without being spammy.

Now, if they want to have a rule that says an employee may not say a word about his company’s products, then fine. Put that rule in the ToS (ironically, Spiceworks themselves would then be in violation of that rule), and tell your salespeople to stop telling potential custoemrs to be active in the forums. But their policy as it stands now is quite hypocritcal.

Oh, and one last thing. One of their employees took it upon himself to email my PMs to my boss. I actually already printed out everything, and we had discussed it at length, and my boss agreed with me, but that’s beside the point. Internet etiquette states that a “private message” is private, and is not disclosed to anyone else without your consent.

So, to wrap it up:

• Spiceworks sends network data to advertisers, which may or may not be anonymized and may or may not be secure.
• Spiceworks censors forum posts.
• Spiceworks forwards PMs to other people.

If you use Spiceworks, consider switching to something else. For me?

I suppose I care more about the regulating agencies themselves than the corporations they regulate. I care more about policy and politics than protesting. But since reform is ultimately a common goal, I tentatively support them.

But in all honestly, I think we have more pressing issues. Such as the erosion of our civil rights, as exemplified by the 2012 NDAA.

It’s cool that you want to pick on Occupy Wall Street. They are whiney, self-entitled morons. You found someone easy to pick on and you’re taking advantage of it. Congratulations.

Keep in mind that most self-respecting progressives that believe in capitalism and liberty wouldn’t be seen within a mile of the OWS protesters.

Also, don’t forget that the right still has its own nutjob wing called the Tea Party. I don’t think you need me to pull up pictures of all those misspelled signs held up by slack-jawed yokels to remember that embarrassment.

Also keep in mind that there are some intelligent people behind OWS, just like there are some intelligent conservatives. The Economist recently posted some coherent demands written by a NYC CPA, for example.

So before you go on patting yourselves on the back on how you proved liberals to be such idiots, remember: America is mostly full of idiots. And so far, the Tea Party is much larger than OWS.

“But I think the Republican candidates are talking about ways to transition this program, and it is a monstrous lie. It is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years old today, you’re paying into a program that’s going to be there.” –Rick Perry

Someone on twitter pointed out that Rick Perry just told every retired person that they’re taking money from Bernie Madoff.

Social Security is a government service rendered in the form of cash, paid for by taxes. It’s no different than any other government service that is paid for by many but used by few, such as fire and police protection, food stamps, and farm subsidies. Social Security is not, and has never been purported to be,  an investment instrument, with dividends and a guaranteed or promised payout, with shares growing in value at or above the market rate.

Ironically, the funding level of the program for a given generation is directly dependent on how many children they have, so it would seem that if one wants to guarantee solvency of the program, he would encourage as many people as he can to have as many kids they can afford.

By Perry’s definition, the federal government itself is a ponzi scheme, since it collects taxes from everyone and distributes them amongst various programs. Likewise, a church that relies on donations which it then distributes to fund its operations is clearly a ponzi scheme. Even businesses collect receivables and use those payments to fund other aspects of the business. Rick Perry’s campaign is taking donations, so he himself is a ponzi scheme! Everything is a ponzi scheme!

Of course, that is correct. If you were to average out all of my political beliefs on the scale, I would fall somewhere on the moderately liberal side. Ten to fifteen years ago, that was solid Republican territory. Now, it’s Democrat land. That doesn’t mean I am moderate about everything, and it doesn’t mean I like the Democratic party today, either.

What if I was strongly in favor of gay rights, and also gun control? Does that make me a centrist? Or a polarized schizofrenic? Or perhaps that just makes me a libertarian. This is why I can’t defend or attack an ideology itself. They all have their place.

However, I have no patience for the Republican party. I used to vote Republican. I believe in capitalism, low tariffs, and gun rights. But over the last few years, the Republican Party has been hijacked by simple-minded extremists. If you’ve watched the debates, notice how Jon Huntsman appears so reasonable compared to to his peers. They’re not even his peers, they’re like monkeys fighting over a banana. And sadly, he doesn’t have a chance at winning. From pushing selfishly flawed ideas like trickle-down economics (a concept Reagan himself disproved), to head-in-the-sand refusal to listen to science on climate change, to battling monetary policy with fiscal policy arguments, much of what they say just makes no sense.

So when I bash Republicans, know that it’s not because I’m a Democrat (I’m not) or an Obama-lover (absolutely not). It’s just because they deserve it.

Independent: Liberalism, conservatism, and libertarianism are all only partially correct, and are all partially wrong.

Surprisingly, nobody’s ever asked me what this means.

Philosophically, binding one’s beliefs to a single ideology is only defensible if one can prove it to always be correct. Any Philosophy 101 class could find edge cases where all of these break down. You know how Newtonian physics don’t work at atomic, subatomic, or extremely large scales, but they’re just right for certain everyday objects? It’s kind of like that.

It’s not difficult to prove this concept. Liberalism, when drawn out to its fullest extent, becomes communism. Conservatism, when carried to the extreme, becomes fascism, and libertarianism turns into anarchy. Clearly, we’re all just varying degrees of centrists.

Going deeper to a spiritual level, all of these ideologies are “philosophies of men.” A Christian will remember Paul’s warning to “not be taken captive by vain philosophies, according to the tradition of men.” In politics, ideologues are often put on pedestals. Yet any single pure ideology is clearly flawed. So we dilute them. You there, you’re a liberal, but you don’t think the welfare system should indefinitely support lazy slobs? And you over there, you’re a conservative, but perhaps think that a tiny bit of regulation of the financial industry would be helpful–maybe just enough to break up those “too big to fail” banks–so that it doesn’t self-destruct (again) and take the country down with it (again)? Congratulations, both of you have just proven your own ideologies to be wrong. The liberal must admit that incentivizing laziness by witholding consequences is expensive and wasteful, and that the concept of liberalism is therefore flawed. The conservative must admit that at least some government regulation is necessary and even helpful to the economy, and thus laissez-faire is a false prophet.

If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll accept these statements as truth. If you’re not, you’ll find a report from a think tank that just happens to subscribe to your ideology that proves me to be wrong. Ironically, you would have only proved my post title to be correct: Blind followers are blind.

It’s not easy to keep the blinders off. How can one be sure to keep an open mind? It’s probably impossible. Satire and humor are a good start. Reading multiple viewpoints is must. Since so much of the national debate centers around economic policy, edumacation is mandatory. If you’re not at least reading the two opposing viewpoints of the highly-regarded Becker-Posner Blog, you’re not qualified to participate in the conversation.

Of course, every individual will see politics through her own lens of life experience. Often, this is more of a weakness than a strength. Even a lifetime of experience is purely anecdotal. Few Americans that have consumed 20, 40, or even 60 years of television and music could compete in VH1′s World Series of Pop Culture. I’ve read a dozen or more science books yet am not even qualified to introduce a scientist at a conference. My point is not that a little bit of humility goes a long way. My point is that a lot of humility still doesn’t get you anywhere. Does anyone doubt their knowledge is limited? When you don’t know what you don’t know, how can you firmly claim that “America’s policy on X should be Y,” especially when you’ve never studied X or researched Y?

For this reason, the educated guess is king; the inevitable result of a world with problems that can’t and won’t wait for well-researched answers. And that’s okay, because behavior is unpredictable, policy must be ever-adapting, and it’s impossible to predict the right answer every time. And that’s my point. It’s not good enough to give an educated guess based on a flawed ideology. As much as it gets my goat that the fat cat bankers got away with secret bailouts and golden parachutes, I know that deep down, Bush and Bernanke were right–letting the banks fail would have annihilated any chance we had of preserving a modern, civilized society. And as much as it saddens me to see a homeless family on the corner, I know that as a whole, society suffers less due to the vast benefits of capitalism than it would under communism.

So, am I a liberal, a conservative, or a libertarian? I am neither and all of them. I am for correctness. I am for looking at the issue carefully and providing the greatest number of benefits to the greatest number of people. In other words, I am for optimization. That educated guess? It better have the most evidence showing it to have the highest amount of the desired effect at the lowest cost.

And if you start to argue policy about what that desired effect should be, it’s time to turn it around and look again at that optimization curve, and determine policy based on that.

On a higher level, wouldn’t that be a supreme being’s ultimate goal? Show me a god who is not on the Happiness Maximization plan and I’ll show you a god who doesn’t understand calculus. No doubt, atheists already agree.

All political ideologies are partially wrong, and at least all are partially correct. Prove me wrong in the comments.

I should have taken a hint. From myself.

It wasn’t long before I got back into web design, then more general IT projects, and finally as a full-time network administrator. Every move I’ve made has been towards something more technical, and I’ve enjoyed it all successively more.

Every corporate “IT guy” reaches a point where he’s tired of fixing people’s printers. He’s tired of removing spyware from Windows, he’s tired of migrating users’ Outlook profiles to new computers, and he’s tired of the politics revolving around the web filter and the size and quantity of everyone’s monitor.

At least, this one was.

After spending a couple of years deciding what I didn’t like (direct marketing, web design, email marketing, desktop support, Windows servers), I finally decided to dig into what I really did like: Unix and Linux. And it’s been very satisfying and very fun.

More importantly, it’s led to a new job opportunity. So my familiy and I have up and moved across the country. Goodbye beaches, goodbye great weather, and goodbye amazing sushi restaurants. Hello nice people, hello good barbeque, and hello cheap houses.

And hello, new job. I’ll be working as a Support and QA Engineer at Calyptix Security. Calyptix is run buy some extremely talented and intelligent people. For example, if you’re an old-time redditor, you probably remember this post, which caused quite a ruckus on the site, as accusations of hackery and tomfoolery abounded. It turns out, I now share an office with the gentleman (and scholar) who posted it. I only just discovered this about an hour ago.

Moving inevitably brings challenges and stressors. But it can also bring the opportunity to learn and grow. Because of that, I say: Change is good.

First, this is a movie for geeks. If you don’t believe me, look at the response on Hacker News to a write-up by a CG effects software designer and Unix hacker. A lot of detail was put into the mechanics of the OS, and those details were not lost on the geek crowd.

However, there were a couple of themes in the movie that a lot of people didn’t seen to pick up on. I’m actually surprised I didn’t notice this the first time I watched the movie, but the movie follows a God/Satan metaphor quite closely: God (Flynn) creates a universe, including Satan, who tries to force it into perfection. Meanwhile, evolution unexpectedly happens in the form of the ISOs, whom Flynn loves but can’t control. Finally, Flynn/CLU (God/Satan) destroy each other, giving way to science and evolution.

Even geekier is the metaphor between closed and open source software. At first, an irresponsible Sam felt that information belonged to the world and should all be free, as demonstrated when he posted his own company’s proprietary software publicly. But if you think of his disc as knowledge, he realizes that in the wrong hands it can be dangerous. A proprietary, draconian overlord structure is harmful to progression (the MCP and CLU), but an open system that allows for experimentation, as well as the ability to keep sensitive information private, can be beneficial to all.

Finally, a greater understanding of the digital world in Tron can be explained by understanding the Unix philosophy, as explained by Doug McIlroy:

This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

Every wonder why there are so many programs on The Grid? Because they all do one little thing, and they’re designed to work with each other. A single Unix command might combine the use of several programs, all on the same line, all communicating with each other. It’s a powerful interface, and it’s one reason why many of the best and brightest programmers prefer a *nix OS, such as Linux, Mac OS X, or BSD.

It’s not as if the original Tron was a masterful screenplay, and the suspension of disbelief is certainly a requirement for many aspects of the plot. It’s no Inception, but it certinaly is more complex and metaphorical than many people give it credit for.

Add in an amazing soundtrack and visual effects, and it’s an above-average movie. And seriously, who doesn’t like The Dude?

In the distinguished expert’s own words:

Well you know boys, a nuclear reactor is a lot like women. You just have to read the manual and press the right button.

And… we are especially thankful for nuclear power, the cleanest, safest energy source there is. Except for solar, which is just a pipe dream.

The tragedy in Japan has recently renewed interest in the safety of California’s two aging nuclear power plants, both of which are located on the coast. And rightly so—with the surprise discovery in 2008 of the Shoreline Fault that sits .6 miles offshore from Diablo Canyon, the revelation that a critical cooling system was unknowingly offline for 18 months, repeated citations at San Onofre for safety violations such as failed emergency generators, the lack of storage space for spent fuel rods, and  the design similarities between the California plants and Fukushima Daiichi, concern is certainly merited.

But of even greater concern is that our media has brainwashed us into thinking that the risks of nuclear power outweigh its advantages, and that those risks can’t be even further diminished. Never mind that coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste, or that “particle pollution from power plants is estimated to kill approximately 13,000 people a year,” or that the Kingston coal ash spill was one of the U.S.’s most catastrophic enviromental disasters (the volume of toxic slurry released was over 100 times the volume of the Exxon Valdez spill). Yet thanks to the public’s fear of nuclear energy, ground hasn’t been broken for a new nuclear reactor in the United States since 1974, allowing our consumption of coal, and production of toxic ash slurry, to steadily increase.

Meanwhile, reactor design and passive safety engineering have steadily improved. China recently announced its thorium reactor project, and pebble bed technology has been in development for decades. To Wired Magazine’s credit, it reported on pebble bed technology in China in 2004 and on thorium reactor technology in 2009, and has consistently championed safe nuclear power that “employ[s] passive safety technologies, such as gravity-fed emergency cooling rather than pumps.” Yet I can’t think of, or find via Google search, any other major media outlet that has even bothered to touch the subject, much less champion the cause.

The problem isn’t nuclear energy itself. The problem is a public lack of awareness of the pros and cons of various energy production technologies, and the media’s lack of  interest in educating itself and the public in order to move the debate forward. Perhaps stories on safe nuclear power don’t sell magazines or garner clicks, but as long as we ignore the issue, we’re allowing dirty coal plants to pollute our environment with arsenic, mercury, and lead.

We can do better.

The score makes or breaks the movie. Have you ever watched a rough cut? It feels more like a loose collection of detached, emotionless skits than a coherent, immersing experience. I’ve seen some decent movies ruined by horrible scores, and I’ve seen some mediocre movies heightened by a great soundtrack.

So it may come by no surprise that my favorite Oscar category is Best Original Score. In case you’re a normal person and don’t know who’s up this year, the nominees are:

• How to Train Your Dragon by John Powell
• Inception by Hans Zimmer
• The King’s Speech by Alexandre Desplat
• 127 Hours by A.R. Rahman
• The Social Network by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

Before I continue, I must say one thing:

It is outrageous that Tron: Legacy was not nominated for Best Original Score. —Me

Aside from that glaring blunder, all of the scores are superb. Having watched all of these movies at least once, I think 2010 was a much stronger year than 2009 was in this category. So to help you get up to speed, I now present them to you, along with my predictions (I recommend watching these on YouTube at 720p, for best sound quality, but here they are embedded for convenience):

127 Hours—Liberation in a Dream

I enjoyed the different genres Rahman was able to incorporate into this score. However, it is still probably the weakest contender of the bunch. Remember Slumdog Millionaire? Rahman took home two well-deserved Academy Awards for that one. Despite its versatility, I don’t think this score lives up to Slumdog. Rahman did, however, write a stand-out piece that is up for Best Original Song. It really is part of the score, but now that it’s been separated out to compete in its own category, the rest of the soundtrack is left looking a little bare.

Inception—Time

The Inception score was built on layers and textures instead of melodies and hooks, an apt methodology considering the movie’s plot. Zimmer also built some time-twisting trickery into the the countdown. This is easily one of my favorite soundtracks (and movies) of all time. Its only possible flaw is that it doesn’t have clear motifs for any of the individual characters, though this is actually by design. One might argue that this somewhat dampens the bond between Cobb and Mal, or at least prevents it from building into something greater, but I think the style draws out the opacity of their relationship, painting layers of complexity instead of a simple love story.

The King’s Speech—Title Track

The delicate piano melody and soft strings underscore the picturesque style of this film, a feast of early 20th century elegance. No brash brass here. With sublime restraint, the score slowly builds to a wonderful climax. On the other hand, the main character left his comfort zone to take a great risk, and it would have been nice if Desplat had played it a little less safe, even if just for a moment or two.

How to Train Your Dragon—Forbidden Friendship

You probably haven’t seen this if you don’t have a kid, but you should. You watched Toy Story 3, didn’t you? Well, this movie is funnier, and has a stellar score to boot. Powell uses the instruments of the northern countries to achieve a dramatic, almost epic feel.

The Social Network—A Familiar Taste

Reznor managed to mold an organic sound out of many of the synths he used in this score. The edge of the synths also brought an air of excitement to the film, seeming to mirror the story of innovation in the film itself.

Predictions

Of course, any of these could win. But only one will. I’ve already ruled out 127 hours. Although it’s my personal favorite, I’m going to eliminate How to Train Your Dragon as well, because there’s simply no buzz behind it almost a year later. Inception was a summer blockbuster that’s been repeatedly passed over. I think everyone’s just tired of talking and hearing about it. The most support right now seems to be behind The Social Network and The King’s Speech. The Social Network was a little more innovative, so I’m betting the Oscar will go to Reznor.

If these were the Ryans, the order would be:

1. How to Train Your Dragon
2. Inception
3. Tron: Legacy
4. The Social Network
5. The King’s Speech
6. 127 Hours

I’m not much for the Best Original Song category. “Coming Home” from Country Strong was actually quite weak. “We Belong Together” from Toy Story 3 was made in similar cookie cutter fashion. “I See the Light” from Tangled will win, and it probably really is the best song. But best doesn’t always mean favorite, and this year, I like “If I Rise” by A.R. Rahman, sung by Dido.