Yet another argument for the Internet to be shut down

Apparently, there are brothels in Second Life (that absurd online role playing game with the economy that's collapsing even quicker than the real world's). Apparently, a person of the male persuasion pays about 6 dollars (that's real dollars) for service. Erm, what service, exactly? The various news sources mentioning the silliness are silent on the matter. Apparently, one brothel owner makes $50,000 (real money) a year on it; probably on about 20% of the takings.

Yes, people are paying hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars for poorly-animated sex on an unreliable online service. You couldn't make this stuff up. It's actually more pathetic than those premium-rate sex lines advertised on dodgy satellite channels.

Women as chattels; not just for Islam anymore!

Men! Ever feel envious when you read the news and see that Saudi Arabia has just executed another woman for having seen a man out of the corner of her eye? Ever worry that your son's child bride may not know who's boss? Ever worried that those silly little women are beginning to think of themselves as, well, people? Then this just may be for you!

So, there exists something called a 'Purity Ball'. Just the name tells you this won't be good, doesn't it? A purity ball is where fathers, stepfathers and future fathers-in-law promise to 'guard' their daughter's 'purity'. The daughters, from kids to college-age girls, come as their dates. Where's this happening? Saudi Arabia? The Middle Ages? Well, close; Colorado in the United States. That is, it's happening in all of the more Christian-overrun parts of the US; the article I read focuses on Colorado.

A quick Google BlogSearch shows that most people are, rightly, either making fun of this or damning it. But then there's this:

Young women should not be viewed as sex objects to be exploited, but as regal princesses to be cherished and protected. And father knows best.

It gets worse:

One of the most memorable highlights of the ball is when the fathers stand in the middle of the ballroom and form a circle around their daughters standing all aglow in their lovely ball gowns. The fathers place their hands on their daughters, and together we pray for purity of mind, body, and soul for generations to come.

And then they throw them into the volcano, as I believe virginity fetishists are wont to do.

Rather she will be saving herself for a real loving man just like her strong daddy. A man who will respect her and knows that the package is clean and new and pure. Something worth waiting for.

Or worse.

In an age when so many children think their parents “aren’t cool”, It’s refreshing to find young girls who want to “date” dad.

Oh, dear. Have the FBI been notified?

Amen Roy Ubu! I bet you that when Sam Brownback takes that little filipino daughter of his to her Purity Ball she will be beaming with joy. Lord knows she probably won’t understand one word of what they are saying, but she will just be happy to be on a date with her daddy.

Sam Brownback seems to be another loony presidential candidate, and there's no indication that his 'little filipino daughter' is mentally disabled; presumably she won't understand one word because, well, those foreigners don't talk proper, do they? It's genetic; they can't help it, the poor things.

And then it goes from comments from the dim to comments from the evil:

Why do you think there is such a thing as rape? Its really when the girl’s lust drives her to sin and then she LIES to get out of it. GOD KNOWS what she did and her punishment is to HAVE that baby, perferablly one of those deformed ones that she can take care off for the rest of her life. That would be a suitable lesson for the other girls to learn.

Why is it that Christian extremists sound so like a paedophile ring? Ugh.

Back, then, to the less creepy New York Times.

The Wilsons organized what was considered the country’s first father-daughter purity ball 10 years ago, as their oldest girls entered adolescence.

Yep, this isn't just some awful Middle Ages thing that hasn't gone away; it is new. Bush, what hath thou wrought?

“Something I need from dad is affirmation, being told I’m beautiful,” said Jordyn Wilson, 19, another daughter of Randy and Lisa. “If we don’t get it from home, we will go out to the culture and get it from them.”

Eek!

But studies have also shown that most teenagers who say they will remain abstinent, like those at the ball, end up having sex before marriage, and they are far less likely to use condoms than their peers.

Oh, what a surprise. My, I am shocked! God must be turning in his grave!

Stephen Clark, 64, came to the ball for the first time with Ashley Avery, 17, who is “promised” to his son, Zane, 16. Mr. Clark brought Ashley, in her white satin gown, to show her that he loved her like a daughter,

Arranged marriage! Not just for the heathen anymore either!

If most teenage girls would not be caught dead dancing with their dads, the girls at the ball twirled for hours with their game but stiff fathers. Every half-hour, Mr. Wilson stopped the dancing so that fathers could bless their daughters before everyone.

The above quote is absolutely not to be read into! Not if you want to sleep tonight, anyway.

Isn't it odd that as America tries to carry on a war against Islamic extremists, it turns into more of a religion-addled nuthouse itself?

Note that that Wikipedia article on the subject has 'Covert incest' as a related item. Unfair, perhaps, but that's sort of how it looks...

BBC in Scary Cherie Photo Suppression Shocker!

A couple of days ago, I noticed this article about Tony Blair secretly controlling Gordon Brown, presumably in much the same way as Maggie secretly controlled John Major in later episodes of Spitting Image. I was immediately drawn to it by the wonderful photo of Cherie Blair, so bookmarked it. Cherie Blair is of course Tony's crazy wife; you can read about her wacky exploits here.

Have a look. The photo's pretty pedestrian, eh? And well it might be, because the BBC replaced the original with boring stock photography. The original was... brace yourself... a larger version of this:

I assume that all of this is part of the media conspiracy to imply that Tony and Cherie are actually humans, and not evil robots possibly designed by the Spitting Image version of Margaret Thatcher. Think about it. It makes sense.

Bonus: Here, we see the tragic results of XP Service Pack 3 being applied:

My Super Sweet 16 - oh, the horror

There's this horrifying show in MTV called 'My Super Sweet 16', in which a revoltingly well-off kid has an absurd birthday party, and make it very clear just what a horrible spoilt git they are. It's really shocking, but with that sort of train-crash, can't look away quality.

I wouldn't know much about the topic, mind you; I, regarding other kids as more objects of fear than companionship, never actually had any friends in school (those people who insist that school is the best years of your life are obviously dangerously insane), and in college (where people, in my experience, are rather more grown up, saner and less vicious) my birthday rather inconveniently tended to fall during end-of-year exams. Generally the day of a digital logic exam, by some bizarre, sick coincidence. In fact, this year will be the first that I can sensibly do something for my birthday, but the thought of being 23, horrifying as it is, is putting me off a bit.

Sweet 16's primarily an American thing, but MTV UK did make at least one series; one of the episodes is about Lorcan from Blackrock. That'd be Blackrock in Dundalk, by the way; I know, I was amazed too. He's horrible. It's really shockingly awful, and well worth a watch. I realise I'm a bit late here; it was a minor Internet sensation in Ireland a while back. Oh, well. For some reason, although all the other episodes are available to view on MTV's site, this one isn't out in the open; the first part of it is hidden away on their site here though.

He turns out to also have a bebo (knowledge gleaned from aforementioned Internet sensation), but I won't direct you there; you see, the young, well, they don't spell like us. My eyes still ache from punctuation used as letters.

The worst of it is, the very most dreadful of the UK/Ireland ones seem to be better than the US ones; in the US series, a fit of temper should be expected if the birthday present (generally a car or similar) is worth less than $50,000. Really. Welcome to the new, scary, consumertastic society!

And yes, I am watching a lot of crap TV this weekend, thank you for asking.

Disturbing UI message of the day

You know how Apple is famed for their wonderful UI design? Well, they don't always hit the nail on the head, it would seem. From the iPhone SDK installer:
Yargh! In fact, it really means that it is installing MacOS 10.5 development tools, but it is one scary way to put it.

In fairness, though, the new version of XCode is quite the prettiest IDE I have ever used. You should see the code completion! And as for the electric brackets... stunning, simply stunning. Brings a tear to the eye.

Sadly, I do most of my proper work in Eclipse (CUSP and ErlIDE), which isn't so pretty.

Scary old America

Just saw an American news channel (Fox, I think). Presenter says that someone fired on American soldiers in Baghdad, injuring six of them. Sad face. Then, she says that they fired back, destroying three houses and killing at least 25, most of them civilians. And she grins. Really. It was terrifying.

See, this would be the difference. People rarely grin about pointless death on Irish or British TV. I worry that the TV presenters have perhaps become just a little detached from reality.

Evil eval

Common Lisp, in common with many other languages, has a command called 'eval', which evaluates the input it is given as a Lisp program. This seems like a nice idea, but there are issues with it.

SBCL, the implementation I generally use, compiles everything it's given, by default. This means that every time it is told to eval something, it must compile it. There is an interpreter, but it's not used at all by default, and is horribly slow. The need to compile any form given to eval is a problem even for very simple things, though:

This is SBCL 1.0.12, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp.
More information about SBCL is available at .

SBCL is free software, provided as is, with absolutely no warranty.
It is mostly in the public domain; some portions are provided under
BSD-style licenses. See the CREDITS and COPYING files in the
distribution for more information.
* (time (dotimes (i 10000000) (+ 4 5)))

Evaluation took:
0.014 seconds of real time
0.01 seconds of user run time
0.0 seconds of system run time
0 calls to %EVAL
0 page faults and
0 bytes consed.
NIL
* (time (dotimes (i 10000000) (eval '(+ 4 5))))

Evaluation took:
10.175 seconds of real time
9.77 seconds of user run time
0.37 seconds of system run time
[Run times include 0.27 seconds GC run time.]
0 calls to %EVAL
0 page faults and
2,720,007,360 bytes consed.

Yep, that's 2.7 gigabytes.

By contrast, clisp interprets everything it's given by default, and its compiler produces far slower code than SBCL's. Here is clisp doing the same thing (note the ASCII art menorah, which has caused endless squabbling on the clisp mailing list...):

i i i i i i i ooooo o ooooooo ooooo ooooo
I I I I I I I 8 8 8 8 8 o 8 8
I \ `+' / I 8 8 8 8 8 8
\ `-+-' / 8 8 8 ooooo 8oooo
`-__|__-' 8 8 8 8 8
| 8 o 8 8 o 8 8
------+------ ooooo 8oooooo ooo8ooo ooooo 8

Copyright (c) Bruno Haible, Michael Stoll 1992, 1993
Copyright (c) Bruno Haible, Marcus Daniels 1994-1997
Copyright (c) Bruno Haible, Pierpaolo Bernardi, Sam Steingold 1998
Copyright (c) Bruno Haible, Sam Steingold 1999-2000
Copyright (c) Sam Steingold, Bruno Haible 2001-2006

[1]> (time (dotimes (i 10000000) (+ 4 5)))
Real time: 8.722473 sec.
Run time: 8.71 sec.
Space: 752 Bytes
NIL
[2]> (time (dotimes (i 10000000) (eval '(+ 4 5))))
Real time: 11.29976 sec.
Run time: 11.27 sec.
Space: 752 Bytes

And timing corresponding compiled functions:

; no eval
(time (bla))
Real time: 0.455828 sec.
Run time: 0.45 sec.
Space: 0 Bytes

; eval
(time (bla))
Real time: 2.433657 sec.
Run time: 2.44 sec.
Space: 0 Bytes

Lesson (hopefully) learned: while 'eval' could seem like a reasonable option on clisp and other Lisps with a good built-in interpreter, causing only a small slow-down, you do not want to use it in speed-critical, much-visited areas of code. After all, someone may want to run your code with SBCL, or another implementation without a decent interpreter. Obviously, it's fine for things which hardly ever happen.

Somewhat worrying Macbook Pro issue

After not having used it for 20 minutes or so today, I opened the lid of my new Macbook Pro to see, well, something like this, though without the swirly effect; that seems to one of those taking-photos-of-screens issues:

Vertical dark bars down the screen, more visible on low light settings.

There's a forum post on the subject here, and, as it says, opening and shutting the lid again fixes the problem. This leads me to believe that it's probably a software or firmware problem; maybe some of the screen illumination isn't being switched on correctly.

Scary, nonetheless. I wonder how common it is?

Oddly, it's not the first weird display issue I've had, but the first one was definitely software and only started happening after I upgraded to 10.5.2. Scrolling slowly in Safari would cause some minor distortion of the page being viewed, and buttons in Eclipse flicker madly. This has only happened twice, and rebooting seems to fix it, but annoying all the same.

Scary German Food

Here's a comparison of what the packaging for various German packaged food shows, versus what the food actually looks like.

Quite frankly, a lot of the food looks less scary in real life than in the photos...

Not in this case, though:

I mean, the concept of herring salad is bad enough, the photo nauseating, but the real thing... Excuse me; I think, I'd better visit the bathroom. After all, someone has to make it!

It should be noted that the Germans seem to think that a sort of wallpaper paste is an acceptable substitute for potatoes. Repeatedly. Fairly certain that that was what World War II was about.

Also, ,see the flags on the products. Most of the more dreadful concoctions are blamed, with little credibility, on other nations. Remind me not to buy processed food in Lidl...

There is a WASP in my kitchen

No, not that type.

There is a live wasp in my kitchen. In March. In Dublin. Fortunately, it's currently contained; there is a glass on top of it. Ridiculous.

Here is the wasp. Note, if you can, that it is moving a bit; my phone isn't actually very good at taking video. Also, careful; I cough half way through.

PayPerLie?

I remember thinking at one point that the obvious extension to the then-lucrative (now happily more or less killed by good old Google) PayPerPost business model would be to simply pay newspaper people and so forth to lie.

As always, the real world seems to have been one step ahead of me.

It is alleged that the head of Wikipedia (a non-profit) modified someone's page and destroyed the history (he certainly destroyed the history) in return for a hefty donation. It is further alleged that Wales likes to fly first class on Wikipedia's buck.

I really, really hope it isn't true. Wikipedia is of dubious trustworthiness enough as it is, without bribery. At the moment, it all seems to be nasty rumours, more or less. We shall see how it pans out.