Picture dump from coloring and finding Easter eggs:
Easter 2016
March 28, 2016 1:47 pm
Corinne’s First Year
March 19, 2016 9:19 pm
Brand New:
1 Month:
2 Months:
3 Months:
4 Months:
5 Months:
6 Months:
7 Months:
8 Months:
9 Months:
10 Months:
11 Months:
One Year!
Corinne’s First Birthday
3:07 pm
Corinne turned 1 on Thursday. She’s almost walking (she’ll try to take a step and then go into a controlled descent). She’s making some sounds, but not saying anything identifiable in any reproducible manner. But she seems to have a sense of rhythm, so she has that going for her. Regardless, she’s still adorable.
Jess wasn’t feeling well so I took Thursday off to stay home and help her get some rest. Corinne opened presents after Heather got home from preschool and before she had to leave for gymnastics.
After gymnastics it was out to dinner at Cravings (pasta/pizza/calzones) and then back home for cake. A white cake, colored blue, with chocolate ganache filling and vanilla frosting.
Corinne was pretty excited, but didn’t like the frosting on her fingers. I don’t think she ate more than a few crumbs. The rest of us are enjoying it though.
The Talos Principle: Questioning Doubt
March 6, 2016 12:16 pm
I started playing a game, “The Talos Principle” yesterday. It’s a puzzle game with philosophical/religious overtones. Throughout the game you find little snippets of communication from in-game people or passages from books (real-life and in-game). I thought this section of an in-game speech was particularly on point and relevant to my recent ruminations:
They say “doubt everything,” but I disagree. Doubt is useful in small amounts, but too much of it leads to apathy and confusion. No, don’t doubt everything. QUESTION everything. That’s the real trick. Doubt is just a lack of certainty. If you doubt everything, you’ll doubt evolution, science, faith, morality, even reality itself – and you’ll end up with nothing, because doubt doesn’t give anything back. But questions have answers, you see. If you question everything, you’ll find that a lot of what we believe is untrue…but you might also discover that some things ARE true. You might discover what your own beliefs are. And then you’ll question them again, and again, eliminating flaws, discovering lies, until you get as close to the truth as you can.
Questioning is a lifelong process. That’s precisely what makes it so unlike doubt. Questioning engages with reality, interrogating all it sees. Questioning leads to a constant assault on the intellectual status quo, where doubt is far more likely to lead to resigned acceptance. After all, when the possibility of truth is doubtful (excuse the pun), why not simply play along with the most convenient lie?
Questioning is progress, but doubt is stagnation.
Forced data access (Apple’s Stand)
February 25, 2016 9:39 am
[Before we start, I want to acknowledge that people that know me know that I have no particular love for Apple in general and that my defense of their position here could hardly be argued as simple fanboyism.]
Apple is in the news recently regarding their refusal to go to unusual lengths to provide access to the contents of an iPhone. One of the most interesting bits is that Apple is not saying that what they’re being asked to do is technically impossible. They are explicitly stating that they won’t do it–not that they can’t do it.
This is an interesting distinction partly because it concedes the point that many have made for years that if Apple wanted to access any user’s device they could, but it’s a matter of necessary effort. Apple gets credit for having intentionally made it harder for them to access a user’s device, but so long as they control the hardware, the software, the update service, and the “cloud” storage it seems unlikely they will choose to reach a point where they have no technical ability to access a user’s device [though there are now rumors circulating that they will, we’ll see]. Creating a device that they can’t access essentially requires that they give up the ability to automatically push software updates without resetting the phone to factory conditions [that is, a user would have to first unlock the device and provide some interaction for the update to happen].
But that’s more of a side note to the main event here. From my perspective there is really one main point and a corollary that need to be discussed:
1. How much effort should a company be required to expend to comply with law enforcement desires?
1.a. Should companies be required to design products to be accessible by law enforcement (i.e., mandatory backdoors)?
Note: Whatever answer you provide will be used by our and other governments to demand the same cooperation for future cases.
And why would anyone use or buy backdoored products when actually secure tools are readily available (a backdoor is, by definition, a security vulnerability)?
Many people see Apple as being obstructionist in their stand. After all we’re talking about a phone used by someone who thought shooting a bunch of people was a good idea. And they know that. I imagine that Tim Cook is thinking a lot about this quote (generally attributed to H.L. Mencken):
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
Apple is very much relying on a slippery-slope argument. For a slippery-slope argument to be valid you need to show a basis for the idea that if you provide A then soon you’ll be asked for B and then C and then D and then E. Often times slippery-slope arguments are made fallaciously–providing support is necessary to turn it into a valid argument.
I think Apple can make a convincing slippery-slope argument here because of the long history of law enforcement, and the executive branch of the government in general, demanding more and more information of lesser and lesser importance almost for no other reason than that the information is available. To the point that in recent history illegal wiretapping scooped up data on every American phone call for years, just because they could.
Apple can also show that other countries have and will demand that Apple provide access to devices for reasons that Americans would find unacceptable (religion, sexual orientation, political views, etc.).
Apple’s argument is that the only way to guarantee civil liberties is not to make violating them illegal, but to make violating them impossible. It’s a very strong stand.
You, as an American citizen, have to think about this and decide where the line is. Too many people make knee-jerk decisions without spending any time to consider the continuum of possibilities and outcomes.