Mike Cohen

Burning a Book Before It’s Printed. It is easy and comfortable to believe that we live in enlightened times, that scientific and rational thought have illuminated all parts of our culture. But every now and then we are reminded that there are subjects that we are not supposed to talk about, even think about. One of these subjects is child sexuality, as is demonstrated by the reaction to the book Harmful to Minors by Judith Levine. Even one month before its publication, it has been widely denounced as “evil” by people who have never read the book — because it argues that children and juveniles should be allowed to have satisfying sex lives. A stunning tale of shutting up those who dare to ask the wrong questions. [kuro5hin.org]

16159 ª April 7 12:16 PM. The only moral and practical answer that there has ever been to this question: partition, territorial compromise, a two-state solution, the establishment of a Palestinian state in most of the occupied territories with security arrangements in the Jordan Valley and identity arrangements in Jerusalem. An analysis that I can live with from The New Repuclic. [MetaFilter]

This article contains a very interesting statistic: 1,229 Palestinians and 408 Israelis have died in the conflict. We lost more people than both of them together on a single day in the attacks of 9/11. Israel needs to get rid of Sharon and find someone more moderate & reasonable who’s willing to negotiate. They’re accomplishing nothing with their attack on Arafat’s headquarters except provoking more attacks. They should be negotiating with him instead of attacking him.

Morons in the News: All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.. As usual, an anti-gay-equality petition drive finds itself up to its eyeballs in scandal… they just can’t seem to collect signatures without lies, trickery, and deceit… [Morons Dot Org]

The new WorldBeatPlanet is now open. I’ve converted it from a static site to a Nuke-based site.

Apple Security Update released for Mac OS X [MacNN]

I ran Software Update and it said I’m up to date. Has anyone actually been able to download it?

Here’s the picture from the news story. The white Toyota behind the police car is mine.

SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There was a murder in my building!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

He was one of the first people I met when I moved here & he offered to help me move stuff. He seemed really nice.

I did some network performance tests on my application using Open Transport & BSD Sockets. I had it do the identical server transactions several times with both APIs and took the average times.

I found that BSD sockets are a lot faster than Open Transport. Average times with OT were about 550 ticks & with sockets it was around 360 ticks (calculated by calling TickCount before & after the server interactions).

Yesterday i received my VisorPhone, which I’m now using with my Visor Prism. The software is great & I love Avantgo, but unfortunately the sound quality is pretty bad. The headphones help a lot, though.

As I was waiting in the motor vehicle office this morning, I synced avantgo and read Scripting News to pass the time.

I just had an “interesting” morning. Yesterday I tried to change my address on my drivers license but was told they couldn’t do it online or over the phone because there was a problem with my license – I needed to take a vision test. It turns out that they had my old address off by one digit, so I never got any notices. As a result, my drivers license was revoked in 1999, but I was unaware of it until yesterday. I’ve presented it for identification many times, including when I applied for my mortgage and I was never told that there was anything wrong with it.

Luckily I was able to get it resolved without any problems and it only cost me $10 at the DMV (plus $45 for an eye exam… at least I didn’t need new glasses).