How to solve the world's problems with one simple personality bug-fix.

I am seriously beginning to think that one of the biggest problems with the world today is the "I don't, so why should you?" mentality, also known as the "I do, so you bloody well will as well!" mentality. Can be referred to as the "I refuse to live and let live, because I'm a nosy, self-righteous, biggoted prick" mentality as well.

There are no shortage of examples:

• Homophobes who try and get homosexuality outlawed or branded.
  
• "Right-to-life" activists who refuse to honour the right of abortion clinic doctors to life.
• Any door-to-door evangelist.
• Any evangelist, actually.
• Pretty much anybody who ever uses the phrase "family values" to justify anything.
• And so on.

But nowhere, surely, is this illustrated in such a petty fashion as in a quote at the bottom of this article: iPod use causes rage amongst fellow commuters. (Courier Mail)

Although the title might suggest that too much sound leaking out is pissing people off, the actual point of the article is far more bafflingly WTF than that:

" "The non-users in this study, while understanding the need to 'escape'... seem to resent or take issue with this use because the PMD user fails to communally experience the aural soundscape," Mr Walsh said."

(Personal Music Device, in case you were wondering)

Communally... experience... aural... soundscape... YOU FECKING WHAT???

Now, honestly, apart from the tautology of "aural soundscape", are you seriously saying that people are annoyed because they're sitting on public transport and somebody doesn't want to listen to their conversation? I don't know if I'm experiencing more incredulous bafflement or depressing doom-of-the-human-race disappointment.

Commuter was quoted:

"I don't want to have a couple of things welded to my f---ing ears (so) that I can't hear anything else that's going on."

Fair enough, sir, that's your opinion and clearly you are a man of opinions at least as strong as my own, but... Your point?

You don't want to be cut off from everyone else, so iPods shit you, but this is relevant to everyone else how?

If someone started to groove along to the music and elbowed me in the floating ribs, I would be ticked off. If they started singing along, I may be moved to express an opinion on that point. If I could hear their personal choice and didn't agree with it, I would be annoyed if it was loud enough to be inescapable, but my first choice would be to grab my own headphones.

But being annoyed because somebody is sitting down, by themselves, and chooses to tune out? That's just petty.

This is, I strongly suspect, illustrative of why ideologies, predominantly religions but with a strong recent showing from anti-theistic political belief systems, have tried so very hard to fuck up the planet for the rest of us.

Link to Courier Mail article

N.B.: None of this is to be confused with anti-smoking or pro-helmet laws. These are based upon public health debate, not private interests.

Never let the bastards know you exist.

This is really unpleasantly sneakily nasty.

I get a lot of spam at my job number 2. A lot. As in, I had spam coming in between my email address being created and my computer being configured, a process of about five minutes.

I have sent literally nobody an email using that address, because I can't access it remotely, so I just use my gmail address.

And this morning, after a week of not being here, I had 85 "spam" and 25 "junk", or thereabouts.

So I'm quite aware of spam at the moment, and then I delete one message, and get a note saying that the sender has requested a read receipt, and do I want to send one?

For those of you who may not know: Spam doesn't just get sent to legitimate addresses. It gets shot-gunned to addresses, based upon likely addresses built up out of name databases. If you ever reply, however, or in some way confirm that this address actually works, then your address goes from being a may-as-well to a very valuable commodity, and you will never be free of spam for as long as you use that account.

The good part here is that receipts like this appear to be a Microsoft invention, or at least something that I have only ever encountered using Outlook. If you use a different program, particularly a web-based system, you probably don't need to worry.

Which basically means that the most vulnerable people are those in a uniform corporate IT environment.

As they didn't already have enough pain to be going on with.

Would it be too much to ask...

To be able to specify a national spelling dictionary on mobile phones? Hell, with Nokia being so networked, you should be able to connect to a Nokia server and download a different spelling, if they don't want to include all options. I'm sick of having to teach it words like "tyre" just because the Scandinavians appear to prefer USglish.

It's actually quite hard to mess with body chemistry

A brief background, without references:

Many people believe that Vitamin C taken above normal daily requirements can prevent or get rid of colds and other basic maladies. This is substantially incorrect - provided you have whatever your body wants, the rest gets pissed out anyway.

Many people also believe that megadoses of Vitamin C (in the order of several thousand times the recommended daily intake) can cure cancer. This is not only incorrect, but doses that high can lead to kidney stones as the kidneys try to piss out more than they evolved to handle, so should be avoided anyway.

Now this: Vitamin C may blunt cancer drugs, study finds (ABC News Online).

Suck on that, alternative medicine freaks.

The best advice on diet ever remains these seven words:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

One misplaced fear, and we have very real unpleasantness

It's finally happened.

In the UK, rates of vaccination have dropped to the point where measles has reached epidemic proportions and entire schools have closed.

In the USA, measles has slipped from "nearly eradicated", where the only identified cases were from immigrants and visitors, to several hospitalisations this year.

Now, in Australia, vaccination rates have dropped to the point where the extraordinarily painfully unpleasant childhood disease whooping cough has spiked (ABC news Online).

Here's the thing: Vaccination works. Vaccination is no more 100% safe than any other medical procedure is (people with blood clotting disorder can bleed to death after taking one aspirin tablet, for example), but it has no confirmable connection with autism, which is the fear that has lead us to this mess.

Not only are individuals at risk, but we're losing herd immunity.

What do I mean by herd immunity? Vaccination is not 100% effective any more than it's 100% safe. But if most people are vaccinated, then there are so few people who are at risk of catching any particular disease - from no protection or from protection that hasn't quite taken or isn't quite good enough - that the chance of any one of them catching it reduces to the point where it probably won't happen: herd immunity. But when the number of vulnerable people increases to the point where they're in contact with each other regularly, we have an opportunity for an infection to gain a foothold. We lose the herd immunity, and this is what is happening if parents are either afraid of vaccines or can't see the point any more.

I'm just glad that my parents were medically knowledgeable and I got all mine.

Link to ABC News Online story "'Unvaccinated kids' linked to whooping cough spike".

Does the right hand even know that the left hand exists?

It is my view that many of the problems facing the disability sector in Queensland - messy service delivery, too many sources of funding, too few funding packages availble for intensive support, a nightmarish collection of sources of assistance which lead families to breakdown point just trying to navigate them all - could be removed or rendered harmless very simply and very quickly.

Here's how:

The right hand and the left hand have to talk to each other.

Example: Housing Queensland and Disability Services Queensland are starting an initiative called 'Housing with Shared Supports' which basically means that two or three adults with disabilities share a state-owned house, and they each get a small amount of support from DSQ which, being shared, means more for reach. All good? Well, although the feedback we're getting from Housing is "This is only one option", and they have lots of forms which require everyone involved to get along, and make it easy for existing residents to veto proposed residents, and they seem to have a handle on the fact that it can actually be really hard to find three complete strangers who can live together peacefully, the feedback we're getting from families is that DSQ is saying "It's this or nothing, so deal with it."

Example: Centrelink have recently introduced a "Special Disability Trust" which enables people with a disability to have a huge (half a million and growing with indexation) trust fund in their name without affecting their pension, and people on a pension to make large contributions without affecting their pension under gifting rules (although were they got the large amounts of money to contribute, I'm not sure - this isn't very useful, it's just there). Except that these large amounts far exceed the liquid assets limit set by Housing, and said person with said disability can find themselves evicted for being too well off, have to spend their savings on renting instead of support services, go broke and reapply to Housing as a crisis situation.

Ever tried to get meaningful mental health support for someone with a different category of disability? Health need to talk to DSQ.

I could go on.

It's really sad when parallel government departments, who each receive money from the same source, can't even exchange memos.

Assuming stupidity leads to self-fulfilling prophecies. So don't.

Once upon a time, Gnome was one of the great shining lights of Open Source/Free software. A powerful, modern, slick-looking and attractive complete desktop environment built upon a powerful, themable and evolving graphics toolkit.

And then they introduced their own Human Interface Guidelines (I could do a whole post on why that phrase is a serious worry and evidence that the people involved in writing them just don't get it, and I don't care how good Apple's or Amiga's are). And "spatial file managers". And all of a sudden they started alienating people. At some point, somebody decided that copying one of the single most loathed components of Windows - the Registry - was a good idea, and everyone else agreed, and they alienated even more. In fact, the current configuration regime is a major reason why I use XFCE for my GTK-based desktop goodness, not Gnome.

Over the years, however, these two worries have become a sort of background nuisance (configuration can be handled through other tools, the spatial crap can be turned off) to a far bigger problem: They assume that people are stupid.

They really do.

Now, making things simple is good. Simple, if done properly, also means fast and efficient for both the hardware and the user. But they have gone further, and reached the point where Linux Torvalds himself, creator of Linux and general all-round software development god, can contribute a patch to make certain configuration choices easier and be told "No, we don't want to let people do that in case it confuses them." Linus has since told people to use KDE instead. (At this point, I would like to throw in another vote for the slim goodness of XFCE.)

The thing is: Fast and efficient is good, but incapable is bad. Adding control is not the same thing as simply removing power. In fact, it demonstrates your incompetence at design, not your good choices.

And this right here illustrates why I won't be going back to Gnome, ever:

In the FAQ there is this question: "I can't find the "Open Terminal" menu item on the desktop context menu. Was that functonality removed in Nautilus 2.12? "

And the answer is: "Yes, this was removed from Nautilus, since we consider terminals only suitable for power users."

Well, fuck you. You can't even be bothered to spell-check your own website. (That question was copied and pasted, not copied by hand).