If you said 'no', you're probably one of those annoying pseudo-intellectuals trying to sound smart (and failing). Please stop.

When I say 'yes'--the correct answer--people assume I'm being all naive and not understanding the point they're trying to make. The truth is their point is stupid. Lemme asplain:

Sound is not in your head. I know, you think you're super-clever for pointlessly redefining this common English word (and scientific term) in terms of qualia¹ instead of the physical phenomenon it really is, but you're really not. Crack open a dictionary, or an encyclopaedia, or a physics textbook. It will tell you that sound is vibrations. Physical. Not mental. Stop redefining this word. You're not Locke².

Some of you more clever people may object, 'Oh, no! you misunderstand: I'm an idealist³'. Tell me, then, Mr. Idealist, if no one is around, how is there a tree to fall? You could, of course, explain that God is always in the Quad, but now you seem to be arguing that God is deaf. I don't buy that.

¹ Being an annoying pseudo-intellectual, you probably don't know what 'qualia' means. Well, it's what you're redefining 'sound' to refer to. The 'what it's like' in your head.

² Locke annoys me so I take cheap shots at him whenever possible. (Anyway, I'm sure he did something immoral at some point in his life so it's okay to treat him like a rabbit wolf and off him^2b.)

^2b Doubleshot!

³ The less clever of you probably think I mean I-think-things-should-be-perfect idealist. I don't. I mean Barkley. Imagine The Matrix without the computers. The entire world is nothing but ideas or perceptions in our minds. Yeah, you think it's a stupid idea (or maybe you've decided to believe it because it'll make you sound clever). Please go read something by Barkley before doing either of those. It's a lot more sophisticated than you or Sam Johnson take it to be.

I was in the public library earlier today and I spotted a couple books which I am now ordering everyone on the Internet to read:


Meet the Puncs or suffer my wrath!

Some time ago I came across this formula for checking if an integer is a power of two: ((n & -n) == n)

Upon seeing this, of course, I noticed that it was wrongwrongwrong. So I popped into IRC to ask my brother to agree with me, which he did:

(17:00:58) lkbm: One thing iss telling me that '((n & -n) == n)' will check if n (a signed integer, I assume) is a power of two, but wouldn't 0 & -0 == 0?
(17:02:30) Miciah: Absolutely.
(17:02:40) Miciah: Why don't you write some C to try it?
(17:02:49) lkbm: Doing so right now.
(17:02:55) lkbm: Haven't done C in a year.
(17:03:50) Miciah: It is easy stuff.
(17:04:07) lkbm: 'var n = 0;' is wrong.
(17:04:16) lkbm: Let's try 'int n = 0;'
(17:04:17) Miciah: C wants types.
(17:04:39) lkbm: It also wants my "s to match.
(17:04:50) Miciah: If they aren't escaped or quoted,
(17:04:56) Miciah: ...or commented.
(17:05:00) lkbm: Right. Looksl ike we're right though.

Of course, it works for all values but one, and it's trivial to fix. What cleverness.

Oh, and for you ignorant people wondering why it works, look up 'two's compliment' and keep in mind that '&' is a bitwise and.

(Potentially relevant link)

I got a digital camera for Christmas. Canon PowerShot A520. I don't like it as much as the Kodak EasyShare I had.
The Canon is slightly smaller, which is good, but I have to keep it on fast shutter in order to prevent excessive blurriness. The batteries aren't Lithium, but I suppose that's okay. The UI, however, seems considerably worse. Icons do not replace text. I would rather be given text in German or Italian or French than just icons. I also have some trouble getting it to shoot sometimes.

But it's a good camera, for the most part.

Anyhoo, this means I now have new photos to post rather than lesser images from my archive of un-uploaded pictures.

Also, I've added a 'Request species information' tag to my images for which I want help identifying the species pictured. If you're a botanist, or just someone willing to take two minutes to look this stuff up, please help me out. My photos are CC-Att, so people can use them if they can find them. Correct labels help everyone.

Okay, Jesus is officially no longer fashionably. That bugger should've at least called to let us know he'd be late.

At supper tonight I asked what the french word for soup was, 'cause it'd come up at lunch when no one but me and some unknowing kids were around.

My mom listed 'potage', 'véloute', 'bouillabaisse', and probably one or two others¹.

This being a more-German-than-French² household, I commented that bouillabaisse is good to give people as a gift.

Of course, none of them got it, though if my brother had been paying attention, he might've. He knew what was needed to be known, anyway, even if wouldn't've connected them.

¹ She didn't mention 'soupe'. Odd word, that. 'soup' is obviously of Germanic origin.

² Language-wise. Ancestorially, I think it might be slightly more French. My dad's side was French some ways back and my mom's German probably a longer ways back.

Normally people think a dream is bad because it involve monsters hunting them down and killing their family and such, but nothing's wrong with dreams like that.

A bad dream is when you dream about perfectly normal daily routine during which you discover that you misrememebered and World AIDS Day is actually January 1, not December 1 as you'd believed. Such dreams fill you with misinformation that you have little or no reason to doubt.

Luckily this dream was easily confirmed a dream. World AIDS Day is December 1. Take that, subconscious!

(Why is 'subconscious' a noun? What idiot did that?)

The mere fact of placing a copy on a shared directory in a computer where that copy can be accessed via a P2P service does not amount to distribution. Before it constitutes distribution, there must be a positive act by the owner of the shared directory, such as sending or the copies or advertising that they are available for copying.

Say...I've noticed that when I have Kazaa running and connected, I receive requests to my computer asking if I have such and such files. 'Britney Spears'. 'XXX'. All that good stuff. But when I don't have Kazaa connected, I don't receive these search queries. So...just how do the searchers know when to ask me? I mean, apparently all I've done is set up a shared directory filled with files. I didn't advertise it at all, telling anyone else on the network know I have stuff to share.

No such evidence was presented by the plaintiffs in this case. They merely presented evidence that the alleged infringers made copies available on their shared drives.

Ah, so the judge isn't saying filesharing copyrighted material on Kazaa is legal. He's just saying the CRIA (RIAA of Canada) didn't bother to mention one I-thought-obvious-but-apparently-needing-explicit-stating detail. Whoops!
(Source: PDF, HTML (The results ('CRIA wrong; ISPs of filesharers right') of the appeal of the famous 'file sharing is legal in Canada' decision.))
(Note that Bill C-60 will fix this stupid ruling and lay down the groundwork for a bunch of worse ones in its stead.)

The appeal decision also mentions the old decision that putting a copier and copyrighted material close together isn't authorising someone to violate copyright.
True. Good decision, that was. However, is he claiming that--if the downloaders copied copyrighted music--they did it without authorisation, and therefore the people sending the music isn't to blame? The file sharers didn't authorise the downloading of this music when they, I don't know, installed a p2p program, configured it to share their music, connected it to the P2P network, and knowingly permitted it to then transfer the music to other people over their connection?

So on one forum I hang out at, a troll, in a trite-but-effective bit of trolling, recently declared himself candidate for forum president. Other people decided to run, and held an election and votes were actually cast. But it was never well organised at all, and certainly unofficial.

Then the troll declared himself winner, ignoring the non-troll election, as any idiot except all the ones on the forum knew he would.

So I explained it to them like this:

Chen Shui-Bian is president of China.

Of course, these idiots won't get it. But I think I'm very clever, and I shall preserve this bit of wit here, even though Google (blog search included) doesn't index archived posts. Even if they get zero results, they won't show old blog entries.

Yeah, that totally handles blog spam, dumbasses.

At the ECU costume contest last year, I realised what I just had to do this time around.

the contest goes like this: We each go up onto stage, say who we are (IRL) and what we're dressed as, and walk across the stage, doing our thing. When it was my turn, I proudly stated 'My name is Luca Masters and I'm a guy wearing a cape'.

Of course, I didn't win, and I didn't expect to. I'm not claiming my constume was the best there, but the point is that it wasn't necessarily the /worst/ one their either. Take that, half-assed-costumed contest enterers!

Anyway, I absolutely must give honourable mention to one hoopy frood. He was there tonight, as well as at the /Rocky Horror Picture Show/ costume contest last week. No, he wasn't Dr. Frank-N-Furter. No, he wasn't Timmeh. He was the Black Knight, from /Monty Python and the Holy Grail/, and he should have won if not tonight, at the /Rocky Horror Picture Show/. He got my cheer. That guy rocks. I took some lame pictures of him at the RHPS, but I then lost my camera. Dang.