1. The shiny new smart phone I just got, which has more CPU grunt and nonvolatile memory all to itself than I had to share with 1000 other undergraduates in 1995, does not function as a telephone outside the continental USA.
2. It can talk to satellites in space and find out where I am standing, but cannot deduce from this that I am standing at a bus stop, nor find out when the next bus will arrive.
3. AT&T (thankfully, as of day before yesterday, my former telephone carrier) has just billed me nearly four dollars a minute for a phone call to New Zealand.

You can now buy it, courtesy of Zazzle. (Slightly redesigned, font now URW Bookman. Still CC-BY.)

The CA Supreme Court ruled today that Proposition 8 stands, which means gay couples cannot be legally married in California, except for the 18,000 such couples that married last year, in between the earlier ruling that allowed it and the passage of the proposition in November. Here’s the full text of the decision; I confess I have not read all 185 pages of it.

Subtext and hair-splitting. I read appellate court decisions for fun. It’s a hobby of mine. As you might expect, appellate judges are masters of hair-splitting — they have to be — what you might not expect is that they’re also very, very good at subtext. One of the subtexts that you see fairly often boils down to We looked under every stone for an excuse to rule otherwise and could not find one. This decision is dripping with it. I concur with aphrael’s comment here: the court was in a bind, it could not rule Prop. 8 invalid without also invalidating a whole bunch of earlier initiatives that no one wants to disturb right now (although, looking at the list, some of them deserve to be thrown out). They go so far as to point out that that in a sense, petitioners’ and the Attorney General’s complaint is that it is just too easy to amend the California Constitution through the initiative process. They wouldn’t even mention that if they didn’t agree with it.

So since they can’t overturn the initiative, what they do instead is an artwork of hair-splitting: they declare that the proposition carves out a narrow exception applicable only to access to the designation of the term marriage, but not to any other of the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage...  (emphasis in original). In other words, the state remains obligated to provide some legal framework to gay couples that is identical in all but name to marriage. I guarantee you this is not what the backers of Prop 8 had in mind.

Words matter. Identical in all but name is still not equal, and not just for symbolic reasons. There are hundreds if not thousands of little ways in which someone you are married to is special cased: in law, in contract, in custom. (My personal favorite example: your spouse is automatically allowed to drive any car you rent, no questions asked, no extra fee, even if you’re over 25 and they’re not.) Now, the state legislature can easily pass a law saying that all those special cases also apply to anyone you are civilly united to, but imagine you’re out there on the sharp end of the stick, arguing with a bigot over whether you have to pay extra for your same-sex lover to drive the car you rented. The State of California says we’re married, so fuck off has ever so much more force than The State of California says we’re civilly united and the word spouse on your form legally includes that (so fuck off).

Sixty miles to the nineteenth century. California is not as liberal as one might like to think. We’re a community property state. We’re a right to be fired for no reason state. We’re a 2/3 majority to pass the state budget state. I live in the district of U.S. Representative Brian Bilbray (R), whose push poll about taxes sits on my desk even now waiting for me to have enough acid to dip my cursor in for a suitable reply. And he’s popular. Some friends of mine, out in east county, put up a No on 8 sign last fall and it was vandalized within 24 hours. Point being, there really is a majority against gay marriage in this state. This is why the U.S. Constitution and sane state constitutions take repeated supermajorities to amend. No law abridging the freedom of speech would, at the least, have a flag-burning exception by now if it were as easy to change that as this. (Although, we shouldn’t forget that the ERA fell just short of the 3/4 state legislature bar.)

Is this well-formed (assume nothing else in the translation unit)?

  template <class T> class R {
    int f();
  };
  template class R<int>;

Now, how about this?

  template <class T> class S {
    int f();
  };
  template <> int S<float>::f() { return 10; }
  template class S<int>;

The crux here being that, in both cases, a definition of S is in scope at the point of the explicit instantiation, but a definition of S::f isn’t (only a specialization, in the second case). Section 14.7 of the C++ standard is so confusing that the authors included a joke about it in the text. GCC doesn’t complain at all, but I don't trust it to get templates exactly pedantically correct.

I saw this and cracked up:

Spotted on joeydevilla.com. Extra special "screw you" to Flickr for making me extract the image URL from their page with Firebug.

I dreamed this bumper sticker.

No, I don't know what it means, but if you have a use for it, please feel free (let's say CC-BY licensing, just to be clear).

Font is New Century Schoolbook.

I'm reading The Children of Húrin and I keep thinking: gosh, they could have avoided all this if Eru had been willing to share the power of True Creation with Melkor in the first place. I realize that within the mythology, that's a logical impossibility, but from the external perspective, why the heck not?

This in turn leads to a badfic idea in which a being from outside Eru's creation (I want to give it a completely ordinary name, like "Karen") shows up in Arda at some point during the First Age and offers to teach Melkor this, the power he's always truly wanted, if he'll just pack up and leave...

Has anyone already written a script - I don't care how - that does, or can be made to do, this:

1. Starts GDB on a specified program, with specified command line arguments.
2. Runs the program; does not molest its input or output in any way.
3. If the program running under GDB exits normally, the script exits too, with the same exit code as the program and without producing any output.
4. But if the program running under GDB receives a fatal signal or calls any of a list of lethal functions (e.g. abort, std::terminate - it's okay if this list is hardwired into the script) then GDB should regain control and dump out a stack trace on standard error. The script should then exit with a nonzero exit code.

[EDIT April 6: Tom Tromey, who knows, tells me that it's not possible to do this using only GDB's internal scripting language. So, y'know, if you want to write, or have already written, a super duper expect script that does this, or something like that, that would be wonderful; but don't waste any time staring at the gdb manual thinking there must be a convenience variable to tell me if the program stopped on a signal.... Because there isn't.]

Debian policy has specified the build-arch and build-indep targets since eight years ago.

dpkg-buildpackage -B should be changed right now so it unconditionally invokes debian/rules build-arch, and if any packages break, then that is those packages' problem.

Dammit.

I'm peripheral to peripheral in what is now generally called RaceFail '09; I am close friends with some of the people on the fringes of it (notably shweta_narayan) and have nodding acquaintance with some of the people at the center (met at a con once, read their blog, sort of thing). To first order my reaction has been disappointment in some of those nodding acquaintances. I thought they were better people than they have demonstrated themselves to be.

One thread of it, though, I think I might have something constructive to say on. I write computer programs for a living. My employer tests these programs to make sure people who weren't involved in writing them can figure out how to use them. I don't do it myself, because one of the iron rules of user testing is: you don't let the programmers in the room. The programmers know how the program works, so if they are allowed into the room, they see the testers being confused by the program and think argh! stop making mistakes! But they're not the testers' mistakes — they're the programmers', for not making the right action obvious. My coworker Jono explains this phenomenon in more detail here.

So too, perhaps, with fiction. This whole thing started (to oversimplify a bit) when matociquala wrote a book containing a character who has characteristics that can be read as racial stereotypes. I am using hedge words here because I have not read the book. Avalon's Willow and deepad say they read the book that way; I believe them. matociquala says that her intent was not to write the character that way; I believe her too. Because it's easy to put things in fiction that you didn't mean to put there. Just as it's easy to put confusing in your user interface when you didn't mean to.

And so too the proper response. When I get test results and they say that my UI is confusing, yes, my immediate reaction may well be to think THER DOIN IT WRONG!!!1! to myself, because I have an ego just like everyone else. But then I fix the damn program. Likewise, when an author writes a book that someone has a negative reaction to, for whatever reason, they are entitled to think THER READIN IT WRONG!!!1! to themselves. For a moment. And then they should go write a better book, because the problem is with the book, not the reader.

I think, for the record, that matociquala understands this, both in general and as specifically applied to Blood and Iron; she has said things in the larger discussion that are not helpful, but I read most of 'em as intent to do the right thing not coming through because words are hard, even when you write novels, and especially after two months as a target of a whole lot of anger.

[EDIT: queenpam points out that I'm oversimplifying the user testing thing a bit. It's actually good to have the programmer in the room so they see directly where the problems are, can ask "why did you do that" type questions, and can intervene if the tester-user gets completely stuck, but you mustn't allow them to coach the tester in the use of the program. I think the analogy still goes through, since it's about the reaction the programmers/authors have to the reception of the work.]

I join a glorious tradition, as hallowed in the writings of elisaana

Be one of the first five people to comment here, and I will make you a present and send it to you. The catch (or the fun part!) is that you need to make the same offer in your own LJ.

• I make no guarantees that you will like what I make!
• What I create will be just for you
• It'll be done this year. No guarantees when, it will be a total surprise!
• You have no clue what it's going to be. I may draw or paint or knit something. I may bake you something and mail it to you. Who knows? Not you, that's for sure!
• I reserve the right to do something extremely strange.

ADDITIONAL NOTE FOR ME ONLY: Whatever I do, it will be a PHYSICAL OBJECT. If you would rather not tell me your postal address you should not tag!

Bwahaha!

It's another iteration of the which-of-these-books-have-you-read meme, this time courtesy melbournite; I'm not sure who compiled this list, but it looks like it has a lot of overlap with the Hugo novel award winners since the fifties. Bold if you've read, italicize if you tried to read, strikethrough if you hated, underline if you loved... and hover over the asterisks for footnotes.

1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
3. Dune by Frank Herbert *
4. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein *
5. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
6. Neuromancer by William Gibson
7. Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke *
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick *
9. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe *
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov *
14. Children of the Atom by Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight by James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett *
17. Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson *
24. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman *
25. Gateway by Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling *
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin *
31. Little, Big by John Crowley
32. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement
35. More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man by Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach by Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld by Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner *
45. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock *
48. The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks
49. Timescape by Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer