Author: Shawn K. Quinn

“We’ll censor anything, even the dictionary”

According to this story in the Press-Enterprise (Southern California), school officials in the Menifee Union School District have decided to censor a most-unlikely target: the latest Merriam-Webster dictionary. The reason? An allegedly too-precise definition for “oral sex.”

If it’s the same as this definition from merriam-webster.com then I honestly can’t tell what all the uproar is about. Quoted below just so you can see what I’m referring to:

Main Entry: oral sex
Function: noun
Date: 1973

: oral stimulation of the genitals : cunnilingus, fellatio

The reason given is, to me, lamer than a one-legged duck:

“It’s just not age appropriate,” said [district spokesperson Beth] Cadmus, adding that this is the first time a book has been removed from classrooms throughout the district.

Particularly troublesome–and according to the story, parents and members of the school board have a problem with this too–is that it is based on one parent’s complaint.

I concur in principle with Rita Peters, a school board member who is quoted in the story as saying “If we’re going to pull a book because it has something on oral sex, then every book in the library with that better be pulled.” I say “in principle” here because the far more likely outcome is that this silly run of censorship will be stopped dead in its tracks because nobody will want to go through an entire school library looking for mentions of such things.

It’s a slippery slope, and I don’t think there’s a single place where one can draw the line that will make every parent happy. Besides, the kids will learn about “the birds and the bees” at some point anyway. Should that be taught in first grade? Probably not. The age at which it is appropriate is a topic of debate and may not even be the same for every child. What is not appropriate, at any age, is teaching our children that censorship is an acceptable response to objectionable material.

A dissection of advice

This went over so well last time I tried it, I think I’ll do it again. Since this advice was given to me in private, via a series of text messages to my phone, I’m going to keep the author anonymous for now. I’m going to say a bit about the mystery author in the commentary, and his/her actions towards me as a member of the community. This person will probably flip out when he/she sees I’ve posted this; such is life in 2010.

If you think you know who gave this advice to me, please do not reveal the source. Also, please do not claim authorship if you are not the author of the advice I dissect. The former is extremely tasteless, the latter is fraud, and really, I’m in the mood to just ban people from commenting in my blogs and be done with it for either. At the very least I’ll edit the mentions out of your comments.

There were actually more items than this. I’ve clipped those that are of dubious relevance.

1. Life is short. Real short. Be around those who care about you and want to grow with you. Experience life with others is a beautiful thing. Treasure it. Wasting your time with people who are not friendly with you makes life tougher and [censored]. Trust me I should know.

I don’t know what’s worse. People that are overtly hostile, or those that pretend to be friends and are hostile behind my back. The former are at least easy to identify; the latter are like snakes in the grass.

It’s possible for one to waste time with people who appear to be friendly to oneself but in fact have their own evil, sinister motives at hand.

To me, life has been long, way longer than our mystery advisor would claim it to be. And he/she is still alive as of the time I wrote this. I saw him/her in person just tonight; we no longer talk, which quite conveniently brings me to the next item:

2. Be transparent and honest. To yourself and those who care about you. As well as when you meet new people.

Now, a note here: my friendship with the mystery advisor ended when I followed this piece of advice. What does that tell you? I know what it tells me.

There is a limit to opacity and dishonesty. A certain amount of it is a damn good thing, though. Sometimes, it’s worth it to blow enough smoke up the nether regions of others to keep them guessing. Because apparently, it’s one thing for one to tell others to be honest and transparent; it’s another to accept that kind of honesty and transparency oneself.

So no, I’m not going to be completely transparent and honest. Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me. Burn me three times, shame on me again.

Moving on:

3. Be yourself. You can always grow into a person you want to be. One’s growth is noticeable by those who care. Including yourself.

I can make the case I was following this nugget of advice to when the mystery advisor and I parted ways; I am who I am. I’m pretty much the same person online as I am in person. I don’t play the game that certain others in this community play of having a split persona, one that online invites all kinds of contact and attention, but in person is much more “private” and reserved.

I say it’s quite healthy to try, once in a while, to pretend one is something one actually isn’t. In that respect, “be yourself” all the time, is a rather piss-poor lifestyle.

I’m not going to spill all the beans right now. I will say that a business plan I’m formulating may well qualify as, technically, being something I am not. Or, more accurately stated, being something I’ve never been before.

So no, being yourself is not always the best course of action either. A little careful B.S. artistry can go a long way. (And I don’t mean drawing in crayon over a bachelor of science degree either…)

I’m going to sign off here before I turn this into an advice column. Slam me all you want, maybe you think my advice is just as bad as the advice I ranted against not too long ago, and such is your prerogative. At least I’m trying to communicate what has and hasn’t worked for me in a no-nonsense fashion.

My take on the story of “Chris”

A recent post on bitrebels.com details the story of “Chris” who was recently demoted for some of his Twitter posts that his company’s loss prevention department apparently took exception to. It is unfortunately very scarce on details, so there’s not much for me to comment on.

I find it difficult for a company–especially the loss prevention department–to find anything to really take exception to anything that can be said on Twitter short of “wow, I hope this million-dollar embezzlement goes down smoothly, then I can book the plane to Hawaii and leave this %$*@# dump,” leaking trade secrets, or financial info for a privately held company. Something tells me it’s not any of these kind of things.

Usually, it is obvious the rank-and-file employees of a company speak for themselves. Now if “Chris” is the PR or marketing guy, or high up enough in the company to have some kind of chief officer position, the rules change a bit. Usually the CEO/CFO/COO/etc are responsible to at least the shareholders for a publicly held company.

I’ve known of at least one friend who has had e-mails taken out of context and construed to mean something entirely different, and was fired for it. Thankfully he bounced back in the months after that incident. And this was back in 2002, long before Twitter and Facebook.

This company, whoever they are, could have handled this much better. Instead of taking a “submarine” monitoring approach, they should have worked with “Chris” so that this never would have had to happen. I certainly would like to know who this company is, and if the circumstances are what I think they are it will be tempting to boycott them.

Windows 7 boot time shenanigans

According to a recent CNet article, it seems that Microsoft has been a bit deceptive with their claims that Windows 7 boots faster.

The claim is from a company called Iolo Technologies:

[Iolo’s] lab unit found that a brand-new machine running Windows 7 takes a minute and 34 seconds to become usable, as compared to a minute and 6 seconds for Windows Vista. Iolo notes that it measured not the time it takes for the desktop to appear–which can be as little as 40 seconds on a fresh installation of Windows 7–but rather the time it takes to become fully usable “with CPU cycles no longer significantly high and a true idle state achieved.”

I’m not the least bit surprised that Microsoft would take the deceptive, underhanded path here, and make Windows 7 look like it boots faster even while the rest of the “booting” is still going on in the background making the system relatively unresponsive. Much of the rest of the computer-using public, however, falls for this kind of thing hook, line, and sinker.

I have no access to a computer running anything more recent than Windows XP Media Center Edition, so I cannot unfortunately lend my personal insight there. (Some of that is by choice: I hopped off the Windows train at Windows 98, and my next new PC will come preloaded with a GNU/Linux distribution called Ubuntu which is an offshoot of Debian. I’m running Ubuntu on this rather geriatric PC (800 MHz Celeron, 256M RAM, 20G drive) that I am using to write this, and if I’m careful about what I run it’s not too bad. Certainly much better than the Windows 98 it left the factory with.)

What I can tell you, is that with just about any operating system and GUI released as free software, what you see is what you get. The desktop or login screen comes up, and that means the system is done booting. Microsoft would do well to adopt the same model of transparency, or drop their deceptive claim that Windows 7 boots faster when in fact it probably does not.

I am definitely curious as to how fast Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and Debian
5.0 (lenny) would boot on the same hardware Iolo Technologies used for their
test. I have never actually timed the boot procedure on this PC, but I have
nothing to really compare it to so it may not be that relevant.

Aerial drones, lies, censorship, and video news reports

Whatever would I do without great posts from Boing Boing like this? The YouTube video embedded therein is a news report from KPRC-TV (which Houston folks will know as Channel 2, our local NBC affiliate). Stephen Dean reports on what was supposed to be a secret test of unmanned aerial drones conducted by the Houston Police Department (HPD). I’ve embedded it below for ease of commenting, but I do recommend you check out the Boing Boing post linked above for the comments.

[Edit 2016-04-05: the original video was deleted when the YouTube account was terminated due to multiple copyright infringement incidents. I have replaced it with another link I found, still online today.]

The scary part is a quote at 2:54 into the video:

Back at the secret test site, police helicopters claimed the entire airspace was restricted. They even threatened our Local 2 Investigates pilot with action from the FAA if we didn’t leave. But we checked with the FAA several times and there never was a flight restriction. That leaves some to wonder whether the police are ready to use terrorism fears since 9/11 to push the envelope even further into our private lives.

Really, HPD? What jurisdiction are you operating under? Airspace is the FAA’s jurisdiction; local police departments cannot arbitrarily restrict airspace. If local police were allowed to restrict airspace at will we would have total chaos, and there would be little use for the FAA at all.

The KPRC-TV news team had every right to gather the information they did. It is unfortunate that the law enforcement agencies running this exhibition (particularly HPD) did not secure the proper airspace restriction from the FAA, relying instead on the “no media allowed” on the invitation and bully tactics.

I think HPD is owed a visit by the FAA for what certainly appears to be a nominal disrespect of Federal law, possibly much worse. Law enforcement agencies must operate within the law, or risk losing the respect of the citizens which they have sworn to protect and serve. Example: Ever seen a police cruiser blasting by you, well in excess of the posted limits, without lights? They’ll say it’s a “code 2” or something similar, an emergency that’s just enough of an emergency that speed limits can go out the window, but not for lights and siren. Now, no matter what emergency we, the common citizens have, we are subject to getting a ticket if we do that. The same goes for stop signs and red lights, or even parking tickets.

And I’m not even touching on the downright creepy surveillance allowed by this technology yet. That’s almost a whole rant in and of itself. The fact that HPD went to these lengths to hide their new toy (which quite possibly fly in the face the First Amendment of the US Constitution in addition to FAA regulations) is quite chilling, and makes me wonder what kind of a society we live in now in \2010. The report mentions speed limit enforcement as one possibility; I think I made my viewpoint clear on that above. This is the stuff of dystopian sci-fi novels, made into reality. Sorry to disappoint, but I’d prefer as much of that be kept fiction as possible.