You Know What Would Be Cool?

A walking stick that could fold out into a camera tripod or telescope to fit in a pair of cargo shorts.

Nose to the Grindstone

What's an advantage of downloading 100GB of mp3s in three months?
I can discover interesting music I didn't even know I had, six months after the fact.
On a couple occasions over the summer, I asked my brother "Hey, this sounds cool. Who is it?" "It's XYZ. I got them from your computer."

Thought Universe sounds interesting. I'm not quite sure what electroncia subgenre they fall in, but they're sort of like Matmos, though a bit less seizure-inducing. Sort of spacy, somewhat experimental, fairly austere. Lots of little blips.

In other news, Alt. Rock and Grunge are good at keeping the coding focus. Since several people "came down with the flu" today, my Computer Graphics professor removed the deadline for Assignment 7, though Assignment 8 depends on it. Boy am I glad I didn't stay up all night.

Now I can focus entirely on my philosophy paper (due today) as I skip class all day. I hope our OS group can sufficiently wave our hands about our lack of significant project progress. And hey, I might even have time to figure out how to use Java's StreamTokenizer before I leave for the ACM Regional Programming Contest tomorrow.

Deadlines? Bring 'em on.

Night in The Box

Private prison construction is a $2 billion a year industry. Its profitability is rivaled by the private administration of prisons. This is a fundamentally flawed system because it gives groups a financial incentive for lots of people to break the law. It is in the interest of prison service companies for people to commit rape, burglary, arson, and murder. It is further in their interest for as many behaviors to be criminalized as possible. The prison industry contributes more to political campaigns than the NRA, and you can bet they don't support the decriminalization of nonviolent private drug use.

I have a better solution which could increase the profits of such companies while decreasing the crime incentive. When your system administrator wants to protect a computer, he doesn't build a firewall around everyone who could compromise the computer in question. Rather, he builds a firewall around the computer.

Analogously, prison companies could offer their services to people concerned about the dangerous world. The terrorists won't blow you up if you lock yourself in jail. I imagine such customers would be willing to pay more for better accommodations. Comfortable beds, private showers, better food. And just think of all the annoying tasks they'd do for you -- cooking, shopping, cleaning, screening mail... And most of it is provided at minimal cost by prisoners!

Jail: The Original Gated Community.