Month: April 2005

Insanity

You know, I remember reading, a while ago, a popular book on profiling by FBI profiler John Douglas. He said that a lot of people try to pull an insanity defense, but the really insane people are pretty easy to pick out: they’re the ones who are easily caught, because they’re out of touch with reality enough not to cover their tracks.

For example they might form a corporation to protest corporations, and kill a police officer to protest police brutality, and publish manifestos confessing to their crime and explaining why they did what they did. They might push away their family and fight tooth and nail against attempts to force them to be declared insane, in the belief that they will be vindicated by the contents of a gigantic manifesto they are preparing.

That’s of course the kind of person who needs the insanity defense most, the kind of person who will refuse it unless forced into it — but the adversarial justice system we have encourages each side to care more about winning than about the truth. So prosecutors (and prosecutor-sympathetic judges) will allow a plainly crazy guy to represent himself all the way to the electric chair.

Here’s the story.

At first when I read this story I was going to react to the way they portray him as some kind of “terrorist of the left,” and I was going to speak up as one humble left-wingish type and say UM PLEASE NO MURDERING IN OUR NAME WE ARE NOT ABOUT MURDERING ANYBODY WHATSOEVER AND THAT INCLUDES POLICEMEN THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

But reading more about it, political considerations seem completely beside the point. This kid’s completely crazy. And he’s probably going to die for being crazy.

OS X Emacs

I’ve been using Carbon Emacs for my coding. It’s the official Mac branch of Emacs.

Just noticed AquaMacs, which is similar but “enhanced” to make it more friendly to general Mac users.

I tried it and my head exploded, because they remapped old-fashioned keys I use constantly (control-v to mean ‘scroll down a screen’). It may be better for new users but it was not good for me. Oh, and the proportionally spaced font — very pretty, but useless to me for coding in Perl, which is what I do in Emacs all day. Disaster. And new windows popping up all over the place all the time!

On the flipside, I also discovered Emacs-On-Aqua, which is based on the old NextStep port of Emacs, so it’s Cocoa-based, not Carbon-based.

Eh, it’s OK. I think I’ll just go with a recent build of Carbon Emacs.

Kill Bill

clevescene.com | Kill Bill is the story of a vicious software giant which sends out photocopied, baseless lawsuits to harass and intimidate the wrong college student.

He didn’t have any money… but he had a lot of time on his hands and a willingness to do a little legal research.

Microsoft’s lawyers never knew what hit them.

You know, I’d respect the Bush campaign against frivolous lawsuits by ordinary people against large corporations more, if they’d recognize that a large corporation is much less vulnerable to frivolous lawsuits by ordinary people, than ordinary people are vulnerable to frivolous lawsuits by large corporations. The “sue them till they run out of money defending themselves” technique is pretty powerful. If this had happened to an innocent head of a family with a 40 hour a week job, instead of an innocent smart and courageous college student with little to lose and a lot of spare time, well, it would have been a victory for the bad guys.

Story via Adam Black in instant messages.

Tackhead in the area!

I never thought I’d see it — a live tackhead video on their site. Recently recorded.

“I take donations from all denominations! In any currency, big or small…”

I haven’t heard this song in years. Never heard it live. Wow.

And there’s a new Tackhead song in the “downloads” section too. I never thought I’d use the words “new Tackhead song.”

Wow.

And you can order their first album again for the first time in about a zillion years… shipping to the U.S. from Japan’s a killer though.

I swear this site was not up, none of these things were around, last time I looked for Tackhead stuff. Schweet.

OK, I’m really going to sleep now, I’m even going to save the new Tackhead track to listen to tomorrow.