can i see your screen, doc?

wired recently published an article on putting sticker prices on the medical industry; it's a bold move with powerful implications for health care that would affect each and every one of us.

bad science posts all sorts of interesting things, but the letter regarding tamiflu is a great synopsis of all that is wrong with corporations and governments not exposing data that would allow for public oversight.

there are very clever things that can be done when industries are forced to operate with a reasonable level of transparency, but we shouldn't need to hack the system, which is what trotter's referral scanning does. not that that's not a good idea.

proper industry transparency (on trials, not on trade secrets) would also give enough insight into the doings of companies involved in GM. food and drugs should be tested responsibly, and at the end of the day even if the results aren't amazing the consumer (and industry experts) would be able to make smarter, better, more personalized choices, which should be in the industry's interests.

colder facts

well, the temperature dropped and the wind picked up. -7? i can handle -7. -7 with wind? good lords, i thought i was going to die. it took me way too long to realize that my coat wasn't closed enough, and google maps voided some of the bus timing and i ended up standing and waiting in the wrong place for a while :(

what the hobbit had managed to help me forget came straight back as soon as i got home (i looked at my facebook feed): the massacre in connecticut today. you know, i don't even have an opinion about that. there're so many being flung around and i wouldn't dare to try to frame the reality with anything like an explanation or possible response.

bittersweet victory

the old-world institutions really need to give in to globalization and accept the idea that the internets are upon us. why the hell won't paypal israel let me purchase something and deliver it to myself in canada when my visa card has no problem with that?!

anyway, thank you backcountry.com for holding affordable snowboard gloves. i'm shocked that it's so bloody difficult to find them, and glad to hear that they should get here when the snow does ^_^

i *do* hope they fit :P

otherweb

google's on an important mission, please join them.

unless you want the internet to operate under the same misguided notions as the old world, such as fear and inequality, lack of transparency and the inability of the small man to make a difference, internet regulation is a very bad thing. i've talked about his before.

tertiary

this article on banks and universities gets a bit of a rise, but it's only a brick in the grand wall the old world has built to protect us from the new one.

if the internet is free then institutions like universities are going to go the way of the other dinosaurs. universities have become less and less about academic enquiry and education than about professional training and the upkeep of people and places who otherwise wouldn't be able to hack it.

i'm not suggesting abandoning the universities, but the massive bureaucratic black holes which students must test themselves out of really aren't as good a breeding ground for advanced ideas anymore. sure, there are exceptions, but even notable exceptions (like MIT) have been pushing info and lectures online because their livelihood is the research, not the bland and boring teaching of first year students.

i'm plenty glad for my exposure to excellent teachers throughout the classes i've been attending during the past two years, but i'm fully aware that while being physically in their presence contributed loads it wasn't crucial to the experience. we could have done just fine with a virtual classroom and video-conferencing, etc. heck, out of classes of near a hundred students only a handful of us ever opened our mouths anyway, and some of the physical presence was downright detrimental.

and as for libraries, don't get me started. the very idea that not all libraries are digital and open to the public is nothing short of offensive to me. universities have essentially become limiting agents instead of catalysts.

the future of education is in our hands; the internet has made it so. any trade, any skill, any principle can be learned online. any preliminary research can be performed and the real stuff should be available soon. all we need to know, and to teach our kids, is how to climb in, how to separate the wheat from the chaff... so, critical thinking and curiosity. all the rest can be up to the student.

you are legion

i'm now sorry it took me so long to get around to watching we are legion - the story of the hacktivists. i'm glad i read wired's inside anonymous before watching it.

1. hypocrisy
how is it okay for governments to use hacking techniques to spy on their own citizens while simultaneously fighting (and traumatizing) their citizens who actively attempt to defend their rights to freedom of speech and privacy, and especially to protection from governmental abuses, by using those techniques?

i can only understand the greater sentences of hacktivists (in relation to sex offenders and murderers, etc.) as an implicit statement on their perceived threat to their governments. if this is the case, then these governments are most certainly not operating in the interests of their citizens.

2. stupidity
i keep wondering about the absurd attachment some americans have to the literal sense of "the right to bear arms". no amount of personal rifles is going to afford any of them the ability to revolt successfully against a tyrannical government with a modern army.

today, the arms that make a difference are virtual. they are the internet, anonymity, freedom of speech and hacking tools. those are the arms whose right we should fight to bear.

good service

it's been almost a week since i used vinegar, and about 2/3 of a month without shampoo or conditioner. oil production appears to be more or less regulated (if i run my hands through my hair they feel weird afterwards), my hair doesn't smell funny, and i've only pulled out two plastic bristles from my hairbrush so far.

dreads will definitely be less effort than all this brushing :P

---
four and a half hours' sleep before the early wednesday psycho-babble class? nice. amusingly enough, i'm the only person in the class familiar with a rebus (i'd link to wikipedia if they weren't closed*), albeit in the form of cartoon strips called "funetics" that used to be published in capetonian newspapers and magazines.

* SOPA and PIPA are threats to the very foundations of the internet... not only because the internet is so overwhelmingly american, but because if they're stupid enough to pass laws like that then other governments will happily follow suit.
here's what wired have to say, and the oatmeal is on form as usual, and this guy is made of win.
of course, some of the big boys are in too.

i sat an hour or so with scr and we learned how to configure installers for services and perform basic debugging. i'm actually testing it right now, but it's not quite right yet :/
at least all the tricky stuff has been stored legibly in the new office wiki, so we won't have to rediscover it again.

i made it back to campus just in time for second. i enjoyed most of the class (eugenics and cyborgs), not including the five or ten minutes wherein i couldn't focus or keep my eyes open: that kinda sucked. i'm not entirely sure what was being discussed during that time, but i suspect it was interesting.

aside from some good news from the other office (my code passed the initial tests quite well), and some good news regarding sorter's project, and some planning towards the rather complicated things that need to be done to my apartment's roof, it's primarily been an evening of procrastination. and it doesn't help that this stuff HAS to work by tomorrow morning... :S