Here's my big complaint about precedent-based law: if a party of a lawsuit is incompetent, an unreasonable verdict can be reached that sets a precedent that's difficult to overturn.

Based on this article which contains the entire text of a legal "finding of fact", performing zone transfer could be considered illegal. This is complete nonsense.

When it becomes illegal to access publicly available information, we start to live in a scary world. In points 8, 9, and 10, the court correctly found the purpose and nature of zone transfers.

This morning's commute was enough to make me want to put a bullet in my head.

People seem to think that computers should be easy to use.

No. No. No. No. NO!

There's a very good reason that computers should be difficult to use, and there's lots of evidence to back this up. The reason is that life is hard. Computers can make your life better, the can not make it easier.

It's pretty simple really. There are only two ways to make life easier:

1. Have the person get more skilled at living life.
2. Take their life away from them and give it to someone who's more skilled than they are.

The title is not meant to be sarcasm. It's also not meant to be derogatory. Yes, it is criticism, but more important, it is a serious question that someone deep within the community should make an effort to answer, at least for their own internal understanding.

Apparently, "Luke" finds FreeBSD to be an embarrassment. I'm a bit late coming to the table with this, as it was posted in 2006, but he doesn't seem to have changed his opinion. I wish I'd known he was going to be at Ohio Linux Fest, I would have confronted him about this page of idiocy.

"Why is it idiocy?" you ask. Not because he's wrong about FreeBSD's packaging system being substandard. No, the FreeBSD community knows that better packing is something FreeBSD needs.

It's ironic that I'd have such a story to tell on 9/11, which also happens to be National Preparedness Month.

Ironic, but also terrifying. It seems we (as a country) haven't learned a damn thing.

I suppose I should expect this kind of thing out of a company as deceptive as Verizon, but their latest round of advertising is so blatantly deceptive that I can't ignore it.

If you haven't seen the commercial, it involves a fellow working on his laptop, then suddenly getting frustrated and throwing it out the window because "it's broken, it has a virus". This is probably a scenario that Windows users have to deal with frequently.

Parts of western Pennsylvania are being overrun with Emerald Ash Borer bugs. Apparently these things are not native to this area, kill ash trees dead, and spread like crazy.

There are a lot of ash trees in this part of the country. Should we get an infestation locally, there'd be 3 or 4 trees in my yard that would die.

Luckily, our state government cares. Unluckily, they're completely incompetent.

They've decided to issue a quarantine. This is good. It's currently illegal to transport wood around if you're in an infected area.

There's was recently a fairly heated discussion on the PostgreSQL advocacy mailing list. Generally, I don't feel that I've got anything useful to contribute to such discussions and tend to stay out of them, but for some reason, I decided to make a few comments regarding this one.

I didn't really have too much to contribute, just a few thoughts. But this guy apparently needs to switch to decaf.

If you're creating software, you're probably using some sort of database. It may be an SQL database, or something like XML or some other format, but it's likely a database of some kind.

I was thinking recently, and I figured I'd put my thoughts on the blog. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who already understand what I'm about to write, and many who understand it better than I do.