Ahab Has A Blog.

Bad, bad news.

I know that aside from the knee jerk fuckwads who can say terminally stupid shit like this - They say let the government dictate it...I urge my colleagues to reject government regulation of the Internet - that most people have little understanding of what the stakes are. And part of that is right wing public brainwashing - the sort of "Capitalism" that doesn't believe in open, free markets, just corporate control. In other words, the kind of capitalism once practiced in Mussolini's Italy and today in Russia and China and many other countries America should not attempt to emulate. The worst kind of capitalism - no free markets, just state and corporation as one and the same.

Make no mistake - this is about turning the Internet back into cable tv.

It would be one thing if there were a market in Internet connections in America. But there isn't. And it's due to the worst kind of government interference - granting of monopolies - and the worst kind of government non-interference - no creation of a market through rules promoting competition. Even where the rules allegedly promote competition - say, requiring the "naked DSL" offering - the major corporations are allowed to flout these rules with impunity. The result is that the USA is well on its way to becoming a second-class nation in terms of Internet access. From Europe to Korea and Japan, healthy regulation provides consumers with more choice and better (faster) and cheaper selections than we have in the USA. And wonder of wonders, their corporations still turn a profit. If we had these kind of choices, I would not be worried about equal access to the Internet - any provider who denied their customers equal access would soon perish.

But we fucking don't have free market choices in the US. No free market, no freedom, protection of individual rights necessary.

Again, let's be clear: this is ALL about the kind of "capitalists" who don't believe in competition. And I say fuck them, fuck their inherited money, fuck their privileged access to capital, fuck their anti-competetive practices, fuck their bribery of elected representatives, fuck their antipathy to free democratic discourse, and fuck the horse they rode in on.

All fun is now being removed from playgrounds. But that's not enough; running, too:

"To say `no running' on the playground seems crazy," said Bartleman, who agreed to be interviewed on a recent outing at Everglades. "But your feelings change when you're in a closed-door meeting with lawyers."

Die, don't run. Right. It would no longer seem crazy, it would just seem heartless and evil and a sure sign of the immediate death of society. It would seem much more sensible instead to kill the lawyers first, then if a parent sues over their child, say, breaking an arm from tripping while running, break the parent's arm, too.

My childhood bridged the era of metal "monkey bars" over concrete to the nasty beginnings of crippling our children through kindness - if they don't learn by skinning a knee, they'll learn by getting hit by a train because the signal was broken and they didn't think to look anyway. In our playground, that meant no using the swings, because someone might fall onto a bed of dangerous mulch, and no using the other equipment because it was near the kindergarten and might "distract" a bunch of 5 year olds (how would you be able to tell - seriously?). After school, we could break our necks and no one would care, but during recess (when we actually got it), that left 4-square, dominated by a small, co-ed tribe of total assholes and flaming prigs.

I decided one day that it would be fun instead to catch the leaves falling from a tree. My friend started doing it, and pretty soon it was a big rowdy fun game. The neighborhood toughs would try to push people out of the way just before catching it, but eventually they tried to catch the leaves, too and while we didn't dare push them, we weren't above snatching the leaf just over their outstretched hands. Kids were actually having fun, even kids who didn't usually play together. Of course this was banned. That's right there was a new rule announced: No Catching Leaves. I'm not kidding.

So to all my elementary school teachers, I say: fuck you, you shrill fascists. To all the school district lawyers, I say: an excess of caution can do more harm than good, and you're wasting time on playgrounds while you've got more important things to worry about: schools built on landfills, teachers fucking students, students throwing bricks at people, bullies, bomb scares, teachers' contracts, etc. And to the parents who sue over every playground injury, no matter how accidental or unforseeable, I say: fuck off and die a painful, slow death; you are destroying civilization with your selfish, childish, parasitical behavior.

Every behavior does not need to be controlled, not every accident requires a counter-measure, and not every injury implies a wrong. Grow up, you soulless idiots.

First, Perl 6 is on the road to going somewhere. They are fixing the substantive criticisms of Perl 5: a syntactically ugly (though eminently flexible) OO system; and general obscurantism (though the latter applies wherever the users of a language will test its capabilities severly, which is to say: wherever things aren't boring). They seem to be ignoring (thankfully) the less substantive critiques: Too Much Freedom, Insignificant WhiteSpace, and Punctuation. I've never understood that last criticism, personally, but it seems to be very popular among the Significant WhiteSpace and B&D OO programming advocates. That these "problems" seem not to matter in practice recalls the (possibly apocryphal) French Academic "joke" (see the Sunday NY Times: we don't need no stinkin blodges) that goes something like "yes, that is true in practice, but the problem is, will it be true in theory?"

Second, the most interesting thing (to us) on this graph is that around day 30, there's an innput of new committers and a temporary flattening of the number of commits. A micro-visible example of Brooks' LawUpdate: Autrijus pointed out I seemed to have the lines reversed. Either that or I was seeing a signal in noise - frankly I can't remember enough to distinguish. Anyway, I can report that Pugs works (and there's even a FreeBSD port), which is cool. I think Perl 6 looks very promising and I'm starting to believe it will happen in time to keep Perl from being slowly overtaken by Python.

Also, Autrijus is apparently Taiwanese. Also interesting, if you know what I'm talking about, which you probably don't.

Also, this pretty much sums up this entire content zone: Warnock applies