random bits

[cellio]

Having completed the first pass at digitizing or replacing our folk music on old media (we still need to do some proof-listening), Dani and I are merging our iTunes libraries so this might be easier going forward. Oof. We're up to "S" so far. "T" is big because it includes all the "The"s. Tracking changes (e.g. to tagging) going forward is still going to be a bit of a challenge.

Was Joe Biden president of the US for about 5 minutes today? (We were watching in a conference room at work, and it was several minutes past noon before they got to Obama's swearing-in. So I'm curious.)

In English we say "it's all Greek to me". What do speakers of other languages say? Whom do they implicate? Wonder no more; Language Log has a nice graph of some of these. I admit to being surprised by China's designee.

What if the stop sign were designed by corporations? (link from filkerdave)

As dsrtao said, an airline charging a cancellation fee when they rebooked you on a downed flight is near-canonical chutzpah. (Yes, I saw the note that they recanted.)

This story of a mailing list gone wrong (from Microsoft) made me laugh. And sigh, because while I haven't had to deal with quite that level of mess, even 20ish years after mailing lists started to become broadly accessible, there are still an awful lot of people out there who don't behave appropriately.

There's an interesting discussion of filtering and politeness on social networks over on CommYou.

Note to self: if Shalom Hartman Institute is too expensive this summer, the Aleph kallah might be an alternative. It could be good or it could be too esoteric for me; I can't tell from the available information. When they post class descriptions I'll have a better idea. I had a similar concern about NHC but it turned out to be good, so I'm keeping an open mind. Has anyone reading this gone to one of these?

Comments

[tashabear.livejournal.com]

You can make the "The"s easier by adding sort tags. Select all like artists, right click, select Get Info, then select the Sorting Tab, and enter the artist name without "The" under Sort Artist or Sort Album Artist. Only problem is you will have already done some of those letters...

[cellio]

We're actually walking the file tree importing artists one at a time and cleaning up the dupes. This ended up being faster/easier than using the iTunes import interface. (And for some reason, our libraries randomly disappear from each others' iTunes interfaces from time to time, for a few minutes or a few days. Not a network problem. Weird.)

In case you're wondering how we could have problems with dups, if we've tagged them differently or they got ripped at different bit rates (we rethought that partway through and redid stuff), the new one doesn't tromp the old one -- which is correct IMO, but means we have to clean up. I want better merge tools. :-)

[kayre]

According to both NPR and CNN, the oaths are a formality, confirming the change; in fact Biden and Obama took office at noon, regardless of the fact that Biden took oath before noon and Obama several minutes after.

[geekosaur]

I bet there's a lot of confusion, and wonder who's right: the CBS feed said that in fact Biden was President briefly.

(I also echo someone on MIT zephyr who pointed out that nobody may actually know the rules, and if it ever becomes a serious question it'll be one g-dawful succession crisis.)

[siderea]

I was under the impression that briefly Biden was Vice-President under President Bush. Isn't that the whole point of inaugurating him first? First you move the safety net...

[cellio]

That's what I assumed was happening -- we had Bush-Biden, then Obama-Biden. But if Bush timed out at noon and the oath was required (that was my impression when I posted), then for a few minutes the only sworn-in, non-term-expired person there was Biden, so it seemed like that would have made him president briefly. If the oath is just a formality as others have said, then we had a clean transition from Bush-Biden to Obama-Biden.

[siderea]

Right. If the oath is just a formality, it raises the question of what happens if the president-elect drops dead the day before the inauguration. Apparently, "president continues to serve until new election is held" isn't it.

[geekosaur]

Yes, you inaugurate him first, but that's to insure that someone's got the job at noon when Bush's and Cheney's terms expire. So it would have been something like Bush/Cheney > Biden/Pelosi(?) > Obama/Biden. (Except that I think the below is correct and the oaths are merely formality; the succession is already set, so at noon Bush/Cheney became Obama/Biden, oath or no oath.)

[geekosaur]

And it's kind of a pity that it doesn't work this way; if it did, then for 5 minutes we would have had a female vice president.

[magid.livejournal.com]

I know that French says it's all Hebrew to them.

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

I wondered the same thing (actually, I wondered if we briefly had a Bush/Biden administration, and what would happen if Bush died. But then it was clarified Obama became president at noon, independent of the oath. I guess it is like a Bar Mitzvah.

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

"Now I am a President"

[blackpaladin.livejournal.com]

The 20th Amendment explicitly states that the terms of the President and Vice-President expire at noon on the 20th day of January, at which point their successors' terms begin. The oath is a complete formality, and CBS News was misinformed.

To answer siderea's question: as I understand it, if the President-Elect drops dead on January 19th, then the Vice-President-Elect becomes President at noon on January 20th and is sworn in as such.

At no point did we have a President Bush and a Vice-President Biden. At 11:59:59AM we had President Bush and Vice-President Cheney; one second later, we had President Obama and Vice-President Biden.

[cellio]

At no point did we have a President Bush and a Vice-President Biden. At 11:59:59AM we had President Bush and Vice-President Cheney; one second later, we had President Obama and Vice-President Biden.

Ah. The oath does not affect state, so just because Biden was sworn in at 11:57 (or whenever; before noon is the point), that doesn't mean anything changed. I was modeling taking the oath as passing the baton, hence my misunderstanding.

[blackpaladin.livejournal.com]

An understandable and common misunderstanding. (And my apologies if my response seemed curt; I'm having this same discussion in a number of venues at the moment. :-) )

Yeah, the taking of the oath is completely symbolic: you'll note that it doesn't say "I hereby assume the office of whatever," it just says "I promise that I'll do a good job at what the Constitution says the person in this job is supposed to do."

(Another offshoot of the conversation in another venue is the idea of swearing on a Bible versus separation of church and state. My thought is, get a copy of the Constitution and swear your oath on that, since that's what you're pledging to "uphold and defend" in the first place. But apparently that's just crazy talk...)

[cellio]

No problem; I assume this is being discussed a bunch. (We weren't watching CBS, by the way, so I didn't know that anyone had asserted my question on-air until I started seeing people mention it. I came up with that little misunderstanding all by myself.)

My thought is, get a copy of the Constitution and swear your oath on that, since that's what you're pledging to "uphold and defend" in the first place. But apparently that's just crazy talk...)

That's what I would do if I were in that position (which of course I never will be). I've always been uncomfortable with the bible being used in official proceedings like this (and in courtrooms). And I do give a bible (not the Christian one) deference, but that doesn't make me more likely to use it; it makes me less likely.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

That has a circularity problem--you can't swear to respect and uphold the thing you're swearing on, because swearing on it at all has as a precondition that you already respect and uphold it, enough that you are unwilling to stain its honor by lying. Consequently swearing to what you're swearing on is always a no-op: either you already respect it and you swear truly (end result: no change), or you don't and you swear insincerely (end result: no change). The oath is effectively a copy-transfer of respect from the thing you swear on to the thing you swear to--if these are the same then it's pointless.

I'm mostly in favor of not swearing on anything at all, because I think regardless of it all you really have is the person's word anyway.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Email - it's a stupid software design, and nothing more.

I say that because: we know how people behave, and then if one builds a system that absolutely frags itself when people do what people do, the system is ill-designed.

Not that Microsoft hasn't made a lot of money attempting to retrain the human race.

[geekosaur]

Honestly, most of TCP/IP is that way; the protocols were designed for a tiny ARPANET.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Please explain? I do not find it so.

Perhaps that's because they keep generating new RFCs at IETF. (And, for the nonce, let's ignore IPv6...)

[geekosaur]

Telnet? FTP? (for that matter, TFTP?) rsh/rlogin? DNS's various weaknesses, which DNSSEC doesn't fully address in part because it would break compatibility? There have been a lot of bandaids applied, but it originated in a small, controlled environment and that still shows in key places.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

I think I see your point, but if you would forgive me, I think your example is a poor one. TCP/IP worked, and continues to work - and is not against type or against the way people behave. If it weren't for address space shortages, it would remain fine.

Some of the protocols layered on top of it, made assumptions about the use of the Internet that were naive - mostly the assumption that trust can be levied. (Hell, I remember, barely, when Stanford would let you create an account on login...) In some respects, the failures you are citing were not so much retraining the user in how to use the system, but in exploiting people's natural abilities to trust.

The examples could be trust-hacked, and some simply did not scale well, but they were not always examples of "do things in an unnatural way, or your system will hemorrhage and die".



As for your examples, just to fellow-geek...


Who uses those? SSH and SSH2, SFTP. And DNS is fast evolving + there are many alternative implementations including djbdns. Many of the commercial DNS providers use proprietary DNS. Until a recent layoff, I was at Akamai - and the customer facing portions of Akamai use a home-brew DNS that has so far been immune to all published DNS flaws I am aware of. (Some systems did use bind, but it would have done little good to anyone to pervert those machines - presuming they could.)

The universe of IETF is full of examples of tried and failed/replaced or tried and adapted protocols. But (perhaps with the exception of MIME, maybe others I am not thinking of) there is little that makes users act against their own natural interests, in order to protect the network.

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

"Who uses those?"

Huh. I just posted (http://theweaselking.livejournal.com/3207885.html?thread=16088525#t16088525) a comment about the use of some of those elsewhere. I use ssh and occasionally sftp, but I still find telnet, rlogin, and ftp useful enough that I'd hate to have to do without them.

[cellio]

In my opinion mailing lists should never default to reply-all; users should have to take explicit action, and if that means a few useful messages don't make it to the list, surely it is dwarfed by all the useless messages that would have been sent by people who don't know how to behave. Alas, most mailing lists I am on are not administered in my preferred way. Fortunately, there's procmail to help.

Yes, Microsoft had some bad software design going on there (maybe still does for all I know). But people are also stupid sometimes, and wishing for a design that better defends them doesn't mean we can't also wish that people weren't stupid.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

You are exactly right - the software should accommodate people, as they are.

And not break when they act as they are.

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

So Esperanto basically says "That's Volapuk to me". That struck my funny bone, but it makes sense considering the history.

BTW: I notice the site mentions "Gringo". I've heard a number of theories regarding the etymology of this word, but I note that there is a heraldic cross that ends in little snakes: it's called a "cross gringolee". Considering that the name "Sioux" comes from the Cherokee (? IIRC) word for "little snakes" (the Sioux call themselves "Lakotah") I wonder if "Gringo" comes from some Spanish-based insult meaning "little snake, worm".

[jducoeur]

As [info]dsrtao said, an airline charging a cancellation fee when they rebooked you on a downed flight is near-canonical chutzpah.

To be fair, this is probably less about chutzpah than it is a fine example of the dangers of bureaucracy and overly-strict rules. I'd bet dollars to donuts that the charge came from the computer's automatic algorithms, and the representative they talked to didn't have the authority to override those.

This story of a mailing list gone wrong (from Microsoft) made me laugh.

It's actually a pretty good example of why CommYou is focusing on small communities first. Scaling systems up to large communities is pretty tricky.

There's an interesting discussion of filtering and politeness on social networks over on CommYou.

Correction: Art of Conversation actually doesn't have anything much to do with CommYou yet (aside from the topic) -- it's a bog-standard Wordpress blog, and not even an especially fancy one.

I hope to move it over to CommYou eventually, but like I said, CommYou is initially mainly focused on small-community discussion, rather than open public discussion. The use case of blogging demands strong anti-abuse capabilities, so I don't want to put CommYou forth as a blog alternative until I feel that it's ready for that use case, and that's going to be some while yet. It's probably going to require at least half-a-dozen new features before I feel that it's good enough for that.

The hell of understanding this subject really well is that I'm my own harshest critic. I've got a very strong sense of which features are needed for which use cases...

[cellio]

Correction: Art of Conversation actually doesn't have anything much to do with CommYou yet

Whoops! Sorry 'bout that. I know that, of course, but screwed up when harvesting the tabs. (I also had a CommYou tab open, you see...)