www.donaldmarino.com

I was watching a recent piece on ESPN where NBA players were comparing their passing game to that of hockey players. Watching NBA’ers think about playing hockey made me think about the different styles of fighting in sports. It’s funny how different they all are.

In the NFL, for example, there’s not that much fighting because there’s not really much point. Those guys aren’t really going to be able to hurt one another anyway, what with all the armor they’ve got on. I mean, they basically get into a street fight every time the ball is snapped. There’s just not much point in adding more.

Now in Major League Baseball, fighting is always a team sport. Think Sharks and Jets style street brawl. If one player fights, his teammates all fight too. All of them. Even the bullpen runs in from the outfield to get involved. No one usually gets hurt too badly; there’s generally just a lot of shoving and trash talking. It kind of looks like two college fraternities having a fight, where most of them really don’t want to actually fight, but they feel honor-bound to represent.

The NHL takes fighting seriously, it’s built right into the product. There’s centuries of history here and the players, and most fans, know and understand the detailed unwritten laws of these gentlemen’s diagreements. Honor and toughness are taken seriously here and violations of the code are not tolerated very well amongst other players. It’s really a phenomenon to watch. Two guys will square off, and instead of breaking it up, the refs all back up, give them room, and basically referee the fight. It’s crazy, but somehow it just doesn’t seem out of place in hockey. It’s all part of the appeal.

In the NBA, you just don’t see a whole lot of fighting. There’s been some notable exceptions, like the Ron Artest incident and the famous Rudy Tomjanovich shot, but those may be magnified by the relative rarity of these kinds of incidents. Also, the NBA hands down super-harsh penalties for fighting. You’ll get a harsh suspension just for leaving the bench to get involved. Carmelo Anthony got a month suspension last year for throwing one sucker-punch. Also, it just seems like these guys just don’t get as worked up. Why should they? They’re young, rich, happy, and they’ve got 64 more games to play. They just don’t seem as interested in duking it out on the court. Some guys obviously don’t like each other out there, but they aren’t likely to come to blows. So it’s pretty funny to think about these guys playing hockey. They wouldn’t last 10 seconds out there.

Here’s the latest comment I received on this blog. This is typical of the level of intellect we’re dealing with in the evangelical right wingers. Apparently God did not grant this fool any grammar or spelling skills…

“your a douche if you actually pulled your head out of the dirt and look the bible has actually answered and been more proven the that sciene shit scientist just hate to be wrong and there only true threat is my religion do you see them atacking any other religions no you don’t they always go after christianity cause it gives more correct answers then they can put out themselves they have never been able to prove it wrong and lots of scientist have turned into christians….and Darwin himself said “even i can’t prove my theory and doubt its correct if we can’t find the missing link then it should be disband!” we haven’t found a missing link and its been so many freaking years since he was dead so yeah in this world christians are the most attacked and as the bible says one day it will become hard to be a christian cause some of ous will be slaughtered for it its already happening in islam were next and dude wouldn’t rather die a christian just incase im right which i believe i am and many of my atheist freinds believe me now if you were to die would you rather go to heaven or hell its in you hands don’t screw it up!” - Wayne Brown

The story

This will be the shining example for all time of how corporate greed will ruin anything. Michael Dell is perfectly happy to torch Linux for Microsoft’s benefit to try to save his sinking ship. Remember, Dell had to come out of retirement recently because his PC business was on the rocks.

It really would be appropriate to send Michael Dell, Steve Ballmer and Ron Hovsepian to jail for this stuff. After 17 years of volunteer work by thousands of volunteers to bring the Linux platform to where it is today, the Hovsepians and Dells are happy to throw it right into the volcano in an attempt to save their flagging companies. It really should be illegal. They really deserve to be punished severely. I’ve bought my last Dell and I won’t let friends buy Dell if I can help it.

You should boycott Dell and Novell entirely. Fuck ‘em.

I guess I should explain a bit more for the non-tech portions of the audience.

Recently, Microsoft struck a deal with Novell, who market a Linux server distribution. The deal basically partnered the two companies in such a way that Microsoft and Novell are building a “interoperability lab” for Windows and Linux. It’s important to remember that Novell didn’t write or create Linux. Volunteers did. The volunteers gave it away and licensed it in a legally binding way so that no one can actually own it in the corporate IP sense. Microsoft basically came out and said that Novell’s Linux users would be protected from lawsuits that Microsoft might consider bringing against Linux users in the future. Microsoft claims to have patents that Linux infringes upon, and likes to imply that if use use Linux, you might get sued eventually. The problem is that it’s BS. Microsoft has about a trillion patents. That doesn’t mean squat in terms of reality. Microsoft claims to have patented such things as a mouse cursor and user permissions, things that demonstrably predate Microsoft itself. They patent everything, literally, everything, whether theirs to patent or not. Everyone knows this. Linux is explicily community property and the courts have consistently upheld it’s Public License. If Microsoft tried to sue Linux users, it would not work. They already had SCO try this. It failed. That does not stop them from continually threatening the Linux community and potential users with this shite. So, now that Dell has joined in, this sends a really bad message to all the folks out there who don’t know any better than to believe them. If Dell is playing along, folks are meant to think, then there must be something to this. It’s all a lie though. The PC market is, as always, being manipulated. Now when folks are scared to get Linux pre-installed on PCs because of this crap, Microsoft will go out and say, see - no one wants Linux.. too risk, etc.. All bullshit. And Dell is the enabler this time. Novell already sold the community down the river. Dell is setting it on fire and pouring kerosene on it.

So, please take this seriously. I write software for a living, so I know that stealing IP is serious. What Dell is implicitly saying is that they _do_ believe that the IP rights for that 17 years of volunteer labor actually might belong to Microsoft. That’s Evil(TM). What the Linux community has accomplished is a GOOD THING. Allowing Microsoft, Novell, and Dell to stomp it out is a BAD THING. It’s a very clear moral choice. If you continue to support these companies, you are doing real harm.

It just doesn’t. I am avoiding the newsmedia right now.

Jaime and I went to the Boulder International Film Festival Saturday to see Air Guitar Nation, a documentary about the growing international sport of Air Guitar.

Air Guitar Nation follows the story of formation of the US Air Guitar Championships and the rise of American Air Guitar Champion C-Diddy to become World Champion in Finland at the World Air Guitar Championships. The other main character is Diddy’s american rival Bjorn Turoque (pictured above). The documentary, story, and sport are all real.

The movie was pretty much hilarious. They also mixed in a message about world peace. Apparently the founding motives of the Finnish in establishing the World Air Guitar Championships is that “If you’re holding an air guitar, you can’t hold a gun”, so if everyone air-guitared, there would be world peace.

Competitve air guitar is modeled on ice skating. Competition consists of two rounds, the individual round, where the players choose their own song, and the compulsory round, where all players play the same song, only revealed to them at contest time. Judging is by three judges using a 4.0 - 6.0 point scale, just like skating. Each song is 60 seconds. The main judging criteria is “airness”. Airness is described as “the extent to which the performance transcends the medium and becomes a higher form of artistic expression. It’s hard to describe, but you’ll know it when you see it”.

Funny stuff and a good message to take things less seriously. I don’t know where you can see this film, but I’m sure it will be available on DVD at some point. Click on the video link on Diddy’s hompage to see the video of his winning performance.

Rock on.

I’ve been hearing a lot about whether the current field of Presidential candidates’ messages are ‘resonating’ with folks. We all know by now what the cliche means, but I suppose I haven’t experienced much of it yet personally. As a single, white male under age 40, basically none of those candidates are speaking to me. They are trying to win votes in minority blocs or they are talking to big business owners or unions or something. Seems like a regular guy like me who can mostly take care of myself and doesn’t really bristle at the prospect of paying a little more taxes is not of interest to the campaigns. It always seems like they’re talking about someone else with their message. You hear a lot about single mother in the inner city, the American farmer, the small-business owner. You don’t hear a lot about white males who are not wealthy, but getting along fine. I think, however, that Barack Obama is doing a really good job of ‘resonating’ with me for the first time. Every time I listen to guy, I can’t help but think that he’d be a million times better as a leader than anyone involved in the current administration. Now, I’m not an unabashed Barack-and-roller, but at this point he is obviously a better choice than anyone else. I like the fact that he is _clearly_ an extremely intelligent person. That alone is a good sign. Whether or not you think he is inexperienced, which really, I don’t think at all, he is _clearly_ smart enough to go to the White House and figure out what to do. There really shouldn’t be any debate about that.

I hope, unless Gore can be drafted, that he’ll beat Hillary Clinton. I really don’t like Hillary Clinton. All this talk about how inexperienced Barack Obama is, somehow you don’t hear the same about Hillary. So far as I can tell Hillary’s qualifications are as follows:

1- She passed the Bar at some point in Arkansas.
2- She was married to the President for 8 years.
3- She carpetbagged a Senate seat in New York.

OK, that really doesn’t seal the deal with me. Her message doesn’t ‘resonate’ with me. She always seems snarky and angry. Something about her bothers me. It’s certainly not her gender, it’s more of this vague feeling that it would probably be alright if had a President someday who _wasn’t_ named Bush or Clinton. I am certain we can find a leader elsewhere. Really. Senator Obama seems to me to be that guy.

So, I’m watching Obama. It’s early, but I like his message, and he is very easy to root for. Until Al Gore gets drafted (Please,please), I’m for Obama.

Iraq used to be nation in the Middle East. Now it’s merely a place full of various people (many of them American soldiers), most of whom are either trying to kill each other or simply trying to stay out of the way and not become casualties.

WTF?

I want someone to explain the reason that the USA is militarily involved in Iraq. The putative reasons were demonstrably false.

1- Saddam Hussein hated the USA, had stockpiled WMDs in order to use them against US or US Allies’ targets.
2- Saddam Hussein was harboring Al-Qaeda and helping train them.

OK, oh-for-two. Neither assertion is or was true. So, why again four years later are we not only still “at war” in Iraq, we are escalating the conflict, pouring more US Soldiers and (billions of) dollars into Iraq?

Can anyone possibly state unequivocally why we are engaged in Iraq? Who is the enemy? What does it mean to “win”? As far as I can tell, we are not at war with “Terror”, we are at war with insurgents in Iraq. Mostly, I would argue that these insurgents are not people who posed a threat to the security of the United States until we illegally invaded their country. The same down home red-staters who think the insurgents are some evil scum are the first ones who would turn out, NRA baseball caps shining, to meet some foreign invasion on our soil. But if Iraqis do the same, they’re “terrorists”.

We are stupid. We are arrogant. There is no denying it. We have a leader that perfectly reflects that. The US foreign policy is based in ignorant aggression, lack of diplomacy, some strange, vague Christian Fundamentalism, brinksmanship, and the false impression that our military might is unlimited in the world. We are the stupid people who elected this administration and have suffered its megalomaniacal “War President”. Well, now that GWB and Barney are they only subscribers to the Iraq war escalation, what are we to do to stop them? Again our Congress fails us, lamely debating and failing to pass even a non-binding rebuke for the Administration. We have seen the age when the US Government has begun to fail. What can be done to restore sanity again to public discourse? What can be done to prevent the President from sacrificing more of best and bravest in this ignorant delusion of “winning in Iraq”?

No one can answer these questions. The real answer seems to be that the war in Iraq is happening because it suits the president and vice-president’s tastes. Really. In my heart I believe that this war was started and carries on simply because the loonies in the White House and Blair House have some agenda that is fulfilled by it. We must face the fact that some of our best and bravest citizens are being killed in Iraq so the President’s ego and the business interests of his friends are served.

This ongoing militarization of US foreign policy is the biggest crisis to face our nation in a very, very long time. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et. al. Made the biggest, stupidest mistake of our entire generation. They confused having “the strongest military in the world” with having unlimited miltary power. Big difference. Big mistake. Now our military is hopelessly overstretched in the Middle East, our treasury is a smoking ruin, and we have certainly taken our eyes off the prize. Where is Osama Bin Laden? George Bush has said that he doesn’t care where he is. WTF? We need to admit that we were screwed over by the Bush Administration, and that our Congress utterly failed us. I want to hear every Senator explain WTF they were thinking when they voted in support of the war. If you can’t state why you did that and what you’re doing about it now, you don’t deserve to represent us in Congress. You failed us then and you aren’t exactly doing anything about it now.

I don’t know what to do about it. I used to abstain from voting so that I wouldn’t feel responsible for sending these assholes to represent us. Now, I vote, but it has made me even more hopeless about the entire situation. No one who runs is able to do the job anymore. The system is utterly broken.

But I have hope still. My fellow Americans, I have a dream today. Well, it’s more like a fantasy. What I’m hoping for is that the new Congress finds it’s spine somewhere along the lines, begins to behave like a co-equal branch of government, and puts a stop to the most egregiously unconstitutional behavior of the Executive Branch. I hope that Albert Gore waits until much of the early infighting and smoke clears and then runs for the Presidency with Barack H. Obama as the Veep. In my mind its the “dream team”. I want intellectuals in the White House and Blair house. I want peaceful, thoughtful men who aren’t slaves to big business. I want men who understand science and aren’t crassly and ignorantly anti-intellectual. I want men who can be religious without forcing their religion on others as a centerpeice of their policy. I guess I, like many, want the exact opposite of the fools we have endured since 2000. Please run, Al Gore, please. Only you have the foreign policy experience, intelligence and integrity to lead us out of this dark, dark time. Gore/Obama ‘08. Let it come to pass.

It is shameful. I cannot believe this is actually happening in our country.

The Bush Administration has tried to have the National Park Service tell the public that the Grand Canyon was not caused by natural geologic forces, but rather it is a direct product of Noah’s Ark Flood of the bible.

This is reiterated on an NPS publication offered at the park for sale. Shameful. Park rangers aren’t even supposed to be allowed to tell tourists the actual age of the canyon anymore, to avoid ‘offending the Fundamentalists’. It’s too much. Something has to be done. I’m serious. Only an ignorant jackass would believe that the Grand Canyon was caused by Noah’s Flood and that the canyon is less than 6000 years old. Only someone who is actively, purposefully evil would try to convince everyone else that geology isn’t real and Noah’s Ark floated down the Colorado River. Except now our government is trying to do exactly that.

Scientists and normal, rational folks are outraged. Here is a letter of protest signed by the head of various important scientific communities.

“As one park geologist said, this is equivalent of Yellowstone National Park selling a book entitled Geysers of Old Faithful: Nostrils of Satan” - from the article below

W T F ????????? We have got to be the stupidest country on earth.

The article

When I was finishing up college in southwest Virginia in the late 1990’s, I worked for a couple of years at a Virginia Tech sports bar called Champs Sports Bar and Cafe. When I was hired on, the General Manager of Champs was a fellow by the name of Kevin Halpin. Kevin was universally referred to as Halp. Halp was a former marine, a veteran of Desert Storm, the first Gulf War.

Halp was a perfect bartender, knew everyone in town, and was generally a personality in Blacksburg. He also happened to be the ex-boyfriend of the girl I was dating at the time. So, it was slightly intimidating when Halp approached me out one day to recruit me for a bartending opening. I thought he was coming to give me trouble about dating his ex-girl. I couldn’t have been more suprised when he offered me a bartending gig at Champs on the spot. He’d been poking around and decided I’d fit in there. Halp turned out to be a great guy and we were good friends during the remainder of my time in SW VA. I promptly quit my job at the Macado’s sandwich shop waiting tables and reported to work for Champs. This would’ve been 1996.

One of the first things you find out as a rookie bartender is how much freakin’ work bartending is, and how much of that work can be distasteful. Champs didn’t have a cleaning crew, so the bartenders did the worst of the cleaning, since they made the most money. This was typical of how Halp ran things. The best part was cleaning the toilets. Imagine these toilets for a second. Picture 1000 drunk college kids tearing it up on friday night before a Hokies game. And let me tell you, the ladies room was no better than the men’s. Cleaning these toilets was horrible, but I never minded doing that much, because of the way Halp trained me.

I can still picture it right now, Halpin standing there in his khakis, motorcycle steel shank boots and white polo, hair cut high-and-tight, over a toilet that it’s best not to describe. He kneeled right down by that toilet, grabbed his rag and proceeded to clean the bejeezus out of it with this rag, bucket and bare hands. This was a thorough job, incuding a small demonstration of how the flush handle worked, how to care for it and prevent it from leaking, and advice on how to deal with cleaning up vomit (”Just don’t think about what you’re doing”). I can clearly remember him scrubbing that sucker down “This is how you do it, okay.. You got it?”, tying a knot in the rag (our universal sign of evil - do not pick up a rag with a knot ), tossing it in the rag bin and scrubbing up. Let’s just say I was impressed. Halp could’ve stood at the bar, counting the money and told me, or anyone, really, to go do the toilets. He certainly didn’t have to get down on his knees and scrub vomit and other horribleness off of it. After that, I didn’t grouse about cleaning the toilets. If Halp could cheerfully scrub that sucker, when he certainly didn’t have to, well I couldn’t complain. It was a good lesson on how to lead folks, and I still remember it sometimes when I clean my toilet.

I haven’t written about the latest interesting development in the Operating Systems realm yet, but I think I should explain this a bit, mostly for the benefit of my non-technical audience. The following opinons will almost certainly bother some folks, which is alright, I’m just saying up front that I hear ya.

Microsoft recently entered into an agreement with Novell (vendor of SuSE Linux), whereby Novell and Microsoft will create a Linux compatibility laboratory for Windows. This was annouced with much of the usual MSFT fanfare and bluster. The Open Source community instantly smelled a rat and waited to see how Microsoft was to turn this into the next attack on Free Software and Linux in general.

Let’s go back in time a bit to Microsoft’s last big try at taking down Linux. The short version of the story is Microsoft funded a small company called SCO, which bought up some remnants of old UNIX intellectual property and then proceeded to sue the pants off of IBM, Auto Zone, and whomever it thought it accuse of putting their newly acquired UNIX code into the Linux kernel. Over five years later, the IBM case still drags on and SCO hasn’t shown any offending code. There never was any. Along the way, SCO tried to cash in by selling licenses to use Linux “the clean official version” as it were, that had been approved by SCO. No one bought. SCO is in ruins and everyone now knows the ploy failed, embarrasingly badly at that. SCO is now an industry joke. Microsoft funded the whole stinkin thing, denied it, then was outed and forced to admit it, embarrasingly, at that.

Now, let’s return to modern day. Now, Microsoft and Novell are going to sell you a ‘legit’ Linux operability kit. Microsoft is trying to control the linux market now, by choosing a favored vendor/partner and forcing everyone to play by their rules. Because, now, Microsoft says it has patents to the stuff inside Linux, and well, you’re going to have to get indemnity by using the Microsoft/Novell linux stuff or they’ll sue the pants off of you. Same game, different name. The problem is, the general public doesn’t know about the GPL license that the Linux work is released under. The upshot is that Microsoft can’t make that stuff their property and sell it to you like Windows, it’s illegal. Now there is likely to be another dragged out court challenge to all this. Microsoft says they found a legal loophole in GPL. We’ll see.

Why should you care? Because if Microsoft gains this kind of legal control over Linux, then all of our computing environments will be toast. Microsoft’s products are already of dangerously poor quality and security. They’d get worse and worse without the stiff competiton of the Open Source world. Your choice of computing environments would be gone, and you’d be stuck with whatever crap MSFT rolled out. This could be compared to everyone being forced to drive a Buick because Buick somehow claimed to have the patent to internal combustion. The only cars would be Buicks, which would suck really bad, except, well, most folks would really just be happy with _any_ car, as long as it worked most of the time. That’s more or less what we’re facing here. Look, if Microsoft executives had their way, every UNIX and Linux server in the world would be replaced with a Windows OS. That would be utterly horrible and lame for reasons I don’t have space to indulge here. Why would you ever trust something as essential as the world’s computing platform to a private company that has demonstrably practiced every evil business practice in the books and invented a whole new class of evil business practices to meet the changing technological landscape? Uh, I don’t think so.

The good news: It won’t work. Firstly, the GPL is pretty explicit. Whether MSFT claims to have found a legal loophole (as they claim) or not, it has stood the test in the courts every time, and let’s remember it can also be modified very quickly. The F/OSS community is not about to let Microsoft steal or kill the fruits of their decades of labor, all of which was perfomed under unceasing assault by Microsoft itself. Ridiculous. The only way this even begins to work is if the public is too lethargic or stupid to care. If the public buys into the Microsoft fear campaign, then it could be more difficult for the truth to come out in the end. But, really, even the biggest luddite knows that Microsoft and Linux aren’t the same thing, and I just don’t think that this latest Microsoft play to kill off Linux will work. Linux is just too resilient and now it’s too well established. It won’t be taken out by some mere trick of corporate law or ‘gamesmanship’. Perhaps the best testimony to the success of the GNU/Linux Operating System is how hard Microsoft is still trying to find a way to kill it off. Don’t think that others haven’t noticed. Sun Solaris used to be an extremely expensive UNIX Operating System. Now, it’s totally free and open source. Sun knew that it needed to be released ‘into the wild’ to survive, and smartly decided to let it go. Linux proved that Open Source community property works and even Microsoft , with all of its resources and evil tactics can’t stop it. But I wish they’d stop making it so difficult.