"The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory." - Paul Fix

Random Playlist Song: Paganini - 24 Caprices for solo violin Op.1 - No.18 In C (Itzhak Perlman)

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Viewing my counter I noticed that only 33.10% of the visitors to this blog came via referrers. Which means that more than two thirds actually type my blog URL into their browsers, instead of clicking onto here from another site.

I always thought that two thirds of my hits came from people looking for zaogeng pics, or pictures of Emm* W*tson naked.

So who are all of you, the two thirds of the over 200 people I get everyday?

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Apparently today, while my father was using my laptop, it BSODed.

He then freaked out and told my mother, and both of them started screaming, shouting, ranting and raving forthwith. This was related to me by my brother in law, since I was not at home when this happened (I thank all the seven Shichifukujin for sparing me from this horrendous fate).

Supposedly, if any money has to be paid for my laptop's future repair, I will have to foot the bill. Of course, if I used the perverted brand of logic that my parents are so fond of (The laptop was fine before my father used it. My father used it. Therefore my father is responsible for whatever might go wrong with it), that would not be so.

But I'm too tired to press the point with them, so.

Rational argument is always useless in the face of a priori conclusions.

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"It is a persistent historical tradition across cultures to begin arduous and otherwise meaningful intellectual journeys with both beverages and snacks! So come on time to class on Tuesday and we’ll begin our own 14 week journey with hot Milo, coffee, tea, fried bananas and curry puffs. That way, if you decide to drop the course the day after, at least you will have gotten something out of it!"

Haha.

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牟宗潇（15岁）：“如果我是校长，嘿嘿……我只选漂亮的女老师来教书！”
Translation: Some student (Age 15): "If I were the principal, heh heh... I'd only choose pretty female teachers to come here to teach"

This is an innocuous sounding line from Lianhe Zaobao was uttered by a PRC student in Li Hua Secondary School (aka 河谷中学 - He2 Gu3 Zhong1 Xue2, aka River Valley High School, aka 立化中学, aka The School with the Most Disgusting Uniform in Singapore Bar None), but the person who uttered it was told to write an apology to Lianhe Zaobao and the Principal's Office.

With incidents like this and that of the AJC girls who kissed for fun while posing for their class photo (also archived in talkgeek2me.com with the original photo, on the yuri LJ community (with commentary on and analysis of the kiss) and on sg_education on LJ sans photo, it's no wonder that we're having trouble encouraging creativity.

People need to let their hair down. Oh, I forgot. They won't even give their pupils very much freedom where their hair is concerned.

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”For copyright, the implications (of electronic publishing) are fundamental. Established notions about copyright become obsolete, rooted as they are in the technology of print. The recognition of a copyright and the practice of paying royalties emerged with the printing press. With the arrival of electronic reproduction, these practices become unworkable. Electronic publishing is analogous not so much to the print shop of the eighteenth century as to word-of-mouth communication, to which copyright was never applied.”

- Ithiel de Sola Pool, “Technologies of Freedom”


"Throughout the time I’ve been groping around cyberspace, an immense, unsolved conundrum has remained at the root of nearly every legal, ethical, governmental, and social vexation to be found in the Virtual World. I refer to the problem of digitized property. The enigma is this: If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it? How are we going to get paid for the work we do with our minds? And, if we can’t get paid, what will assure the continued creation and distribution of such work?

Since we don’t have a solution to what is a profoundly new kind of challenge, and are apparently unable to delay the galloping digitization of everything not obstinately physical, we are sailing into the future on a sinking ship. This vessel, the accumulated canon of copyright and patent law, was developed to convey forms and methods of expression entirely different from the vaporous cargo it is now being asked to carry. It is leaking as much from within as from without. Legal efforts to keep the old boat floating are taking three forms: a frenzy of deck chair rearrangement, stern warnings to the passengers that if she goes down, they will face harsh criminal penalties, and serene, glassy-eyed denial.

Intellectual property law cannot be patched, retrofitted, or expanded to contain digitized expression any more than real estate law might be revised to cover the allocation of broadcasting spectrum (which, in fact, rather resembles what is being attempted here)"

- John Perry Barlow, "The Economy of Ideas: Why Everything You Know About Intellectual Property is Wrong"

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Legislative Sentry: HB1677 - Have Miscarriage, Go to Jail? - "Guess what? You just earned yourself up to 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine. Why? Because you failed to call the cops and report your miscarriage within 12 hours. True? Not yet. But if Delegate John Cosgrove (R-78) has his way, HB1677 will become law in a few short months, and this scenario will be reality for many women in Virginia."

Solving and creating captchas with free porn - "The ingenious crack is to offer a free porn site which requires that you key in the solution to a captcha -- which has been inlined from Yahoo or Hotmail -- before you can gain access. Free porn sites attract lots of users around the clock, and the spammers were able to generate captcha solutions fast enough to create as many throw-away email accounts as they wanted."

Navel Gazing - Why even feminists are obsessed with fat. - "There's simply an irreconcilable contradiction between feminism and femininity, two largely incompatible strategies women have adopted over the years to try to level the playing field with men. The reason they're incompatible is simple. Femininity is a system that tries to secure advantages for women, primarily by enhancing their sexual attractiveness to men. It also shores up masculinity through displays of feminine helplessness or deference. But femininity depends on a sense of female inadequacy to perpetuate itself. Completely successful femininity can never be entirely attained, which is precisely why women engage in so much laboring, agonizing, and self-loathing"

N Korea wages war on long hair - "A campaign exhorting men to get a proper short-back-and-sides has been aired by state-run Pyongyang television... It stressed the "negative effects" of long hair on "human intelligence development", noting that long hair "consumes a great deal of nutrition" and could thus rob the brain of energy."
Women must be dumber than men, then.

Controlling the Internet: The use of legislation and its effectiveness in Singapore - "Internet legislation in Singapore is analogous to a drift net in that it is wide enough to catch an ambit of transgressions as it trawls the ocean of the digital pulses. There is a deliberate vagueness and ambiguity in the language of the legislation that allows for flexibility of interpretation that is useful when dealing with technology whose developments and uses one cannot foresee. An example of this ambiguity would be the Internet Code of Practice that states that ‘(p)rohibited material is material that is objectionable on the grounds of public interest, public morality, public order, public security, national harmony’. Conversely, however, the very drift net nature of the legislation has a potential for abuse in its interpretation and application."