Apparently the NCAA is banning the use of Indian mascots in postseason tournaments. This of course is utterly rediculous. Ray Ratto apparently agrees.
First of all, every single school on the planet takes pride in their mascot. It’s hard to imagine a better way to carry on the memory of many of these tribes than by teaching it to millions of college students or exposing it to hundreds of millions of fans.
Secondly, at this point tradition is a huge part of the schools that are using these mascots. College is all about tradition. College sports are even moreso about tradition. It’s simply not fair to require these schools to change their tradition so they can take part in postseason play.
Thirdly, if the US Government doesn’t require states like Indiana and Illinois or cities like Miami to change their names because it’s insulting and racist to have them named after Native American tribes, then I don’t see where the NCAA gets the authority to force changes in mascots based on the same reasoning.
What happened to Native Americans is really horrific, but I find it hard to see how it’s racist to use their tribal names as a mascot.
I really should comment about the Michael Lynn – Cisco situation. I’ve been really quite interested in this since news first broke of it. In case you don’t know anything about it the basic situation is threefold. First, Michael Lynn found a vulnerability of some kind in Cisco’s routers, which make up a very large portion of all routers on the Internet. Second, Cisco decided that they didn’t want word of this to get out and took actions to prevent Michael from presenting his findings at a conference. Third, Michael decides to present anyhow, and all hell breaks loose.
My thoughts on this are pretty simple. Michael Lynn absolutely did the Right Thing ™ here. He’s coming through this pretty clean. Cisco is wasting time and money on trying to censor something that can’t and shouldn’t be censored. They are coming through this pretty dirty. Cisco needs to make absolutely sure that they address the technical issues Michael has discovered as quickly as possible. Already there are myriads of black hats out there, who never thought to attack a Cisco routers because of their reputation for highly secure code, that are now looking into the possibility.
Lastly, I think it’s super sad that one of the most basic tenets of computer security is still not easily understood by a major corporation. Obscurity is NOT security.
In other news, I’m really glad to see that Mike Modano is staying with Dallas. It’s nice to see some loyalty still exists. I know he probably could have gotten a slightly better offer somewhere else, particularly with the new salary cap for the NHL. Good to hear he chose to stick with the only team he’s ever played for. Also, it was nice that they were willing to make him a competitive offer to give him that choice. I think a lot of sports franchises simply give up with their free agents.
Slate.com has an interesting article on why Supreme Court Justices tend to become more liberal over time. Personally, I really subscribe to the theory that virtually all clerkships are given to freshly minted lawyers from rather liberal academic institutions with high reputations. It’s hard for anyone to remain the same when they are surrounded with liberal clerks for decades. Just my thoughts. I’m not a Supreme Court Justice, so I obviously don’t know for sure.
One last thing. I found a really cool flash card program written in Java. I’m using it to help study for the GRE and I’ll upload my wordlist when I get it completed.
I’m back from OLS and I’m hoping to get an update posted as soon as possible, but I’ve been really busy catching up on various things that always seem to lag when one goes away on a trip. For example, the 452 email messages I had waiting for me at work…
In the meantime, I thought I would point out two cool links I found out about. The Pacers have picked up another point guard and it looks like they are doing all they can to be a contender next year.
Also, I thought I would post a link to a place where you can download Steve Jobs commencement speech to Stanford this past year.
Ok, so I have been super busy over the last couple weeks and didn’t make the time to post here. I knew that I would have to approach this as something that I simply make five or ten minutes for on some days if I wanted it to be maintained regularly, but somehow I have failed to do that. Anyhow, here I am posting again and I wanted to update a few things.
The ESPY results are in. Peyton Manning won for best NFL player and best record breaking performance for his 49 touchdown pass season.
Lance Armstrong is about to win his 7th straight Tour de France. This was obviously huge news in Austin the past couple weeks.
Sandra Day O’Connor has commented on John Roberts Jr. whom President Bush announced as the nominee to replace her on the Supreme Court. Personally, this pick was an extremely good political move and fits well with me. It’s hard to say exactly how Roberts will be on the Supreme Court because of his lack of a record as a Judge, but you can say that about any potential Supreme Court Justice. I also tend to like picking a younder justice, not just because they can serve longer, but also because this particular court is so old.
I’m currently at the Ottawa Linux Symposium and having a fantastic time. Yesterday I went to the talks on the Novell Linux Kernel Debugger, Len Brown’s presentation on ACPI, TWIN, Martin J Bilgh’s presentation on memory mapping, and of course Jonathon Corbet’s presentation about a roadmap for the 2.6 kernel. Today I went to the nfsim talk, Trusted Computing and Linux, Building Murphy-compatible Embedded Linux Systems, eCryptfs, Kdump, and an impromptu session on Embedded Linux concerns. Obviously, this is a lot to talk about and I hope to be able to post some of my impressions of this process later on when I have more time to reflect.
If you haven’t voted yet, you should go vote for Peyton Manning in the ESPYs!
The Pacers were able to get a steal in the NBA draft. Grainger was a potential top five pick who somehow managed to still be availible at #17. He’s positioned to play immediately. He’s not a shooting guard to replace Reggie Miller, but he just might be the last piece of the puzzle needed to get a championship.
Also, in the news of the insane, we have this little gem. I’m honestly not sure what made someone think this was a good idea, but they really need to do some more ‘thought-showering’ on it.
I watched President Bush’s speech the other night and found it to be pretty good. I don’t really like his speaking style because I don’t think it’s natural or emotional enough. He always comes across as a pseudo-puppet for his speech writing staff as a result. I also didn’t like his reference to 9/11 because that event really has nothing to do with Iraq.
However, his main point (That we are fully committed to winning the war and things are progressing in that direction nicely.) was something with which I absolutely agree, and I’m very glad that he finally got up and defended himself to the national media. They have been beating him up over this issue incessantly and, while I don’t know that it’s really hurting the war efforts all that much, I do think that they are not saying these things because they are looking at the big picture and wanting to make the world a better place. They are quite obviously trying to sell newspapers, tv time, and books. This is what the media does.
I’m also glad he didn’t set a time table for pulling out. That would have been phenominally stupid. I am also glad that he said he’s listening to his military commanders with respect to how many troops are required to achieve their goals. I don’t know why people seem to continually fail to understand that we’re not there to defeat an enemy so much as to create an ally. (If you are anti-Bush, feel free to insert an oil industry joke here.) The people of Iraq have been beaten down both physically and psychologically to believe that they need dictators and terrorists to lead them if they ever want to get somewhere as a nation. If they choose to they can become a powerful nation for freedom. If they choose otherwise, as the people of Vietnam did, then our leaders will have to be willing understand this and accept it without, well, doing what we did in Vietnam.
One more basketball tidbit, Oden is going to Ohio State. Look for them to be in the Final Four in 2007.
Well, the San Antonio Spurs are the NBA Champions again. I think they played just well enough to win. Though, I’m not entirely sure that the Spurs would still win four games if these teams were to play another seven game series. It was really great to see two teams that were actual teams in the finals as opposed to a collection of high paid self absorbed athletes. I’m sure that the NBA brass will be pleased that an international team won again. That’s really going too help their demographics. Now, if only there was a way to hide from all the Spurs fans in Austin for the next few weeks…
Well, it’s anybody’s series now. Honestly, I can’t believe that we’re sitting here in this position. I never thought that we’d get past game six in this series. San Antonio was lucky to win game five and needs to get their act together for game seven. I didn’t watch game six, but I suppose I’ll suffer through game seven.
If you’ve been watching the news lately you’ll have seen several individuals garner national attention for various things. Natalee Holloway missing in Aruba. The 11 year old boy scout found after he was missing for four days. Jennifer Wilbanks incited a national press frenzy when she ran away from her husband and extravagent wedding.
These stories are nothing new to the American public, but there have been a number of them recently and they have left me thinking. What is so important about these individuals that separates them from all the other Americans that get kidnapped, get lost, or run away from their weddings? Why do they receive so much attention?
Fame is something pretty powerful in America today. Jennifer Wilbanks has reportedly got a book deal in the works that will make more money than I would likely make in the next ten years. Does a woman who runs away from her family and lie to the police really deserve a book deal like that? It’s probably going to be ghost written for her too.
I haven’t decided what to think about these so-called human interest stories. I’m not sure what else I would put in the press though, so perhaps I should shut up if I don’t have a better idea.
I didn’t see all of this year’s Finals game 5, but the parts of it that I saw made me glad that I didn’t watch the rest. It seemed like both teams were trying to lose. Tim Duncan in particular seemed lost. I’m not sure there’s been an uglier offensive performance by both teams in the NBA Finals. Robert Horry was basically the only one who could come away from that game with any pride left since he actually played really well. Rasheed Wallace made the blunder of a lifetime by not guarding the inbounds pass and then found a way to make it worse by continuing to leave Horry wide open so that he could hit the game winning three.
Though, I would lay some of the blame for this blunder on Coach Brown, who should have told him to stay in Horry’s face on the inbounds pass. I have never bought into the philosophy that the best way to deny the inbounds pass, particularly from the side, is to guard their four with your five. If you have a guy in the face of the passer, you are not only pressuring the people trying to get open, but you’re cutting down on the passer’s vision. All in all it was a bad move.
One of my good friends recently sent me a link to one of the funniest collections of Charles Barkley quotes on the Internet. Take a look.
Slashdot recently had an article about who’s duty it is to recycle computer parts. One of the comments was an absolutely hilarious parody of Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant.
Another friend passed along a link to Store Wars, which is really quite well done, even if you don’t care whether or not you’re eating organic foods. You’ve got to tip your hat to the folks that put it together.
One of the things that I wanted to talk about but haven’t blogged about is that I went to the LJB Presidential Library last Saturday. It was really, really good. I didn’t realize how much fun I would have there or I would have gone a long time ago. It has prompted me to want to visit a bunch of the other Presidential Libraries. There was a really cool exibit on “The Swinging Sixties” which was very well done. I was also really impressed with the wall of official Presidential portraits and the selection of gifts from various heads of state. There was a lot of information about the JFK Assassination, which has always fascinated me along with millions of others. I even got a book by Max Holland called The Kennedy Assassination Tapes, which is a collection of transcripts of taped conversations during the LBJ administration about the Kennedy Assassination. It’s really well written and quite interesting. All in all it was a really good trip.