Thursday, June 27, 2013

DOMA, Scalia, and fair defeat.

In the Winsor case, Scalia's peroration in his dissent reads:

"Some will rejoice in today’s decision, and some will despair at it; that is the nature of a controversy that matters so much to so many. But the Court has cheated both sides, robbing the winners of an honest victory, and the losers of the peace that comes from a fair defeat."

What an bit of claptrap. The majority of the Supreme Court handed victory to the to the pro-gay marriage side (the end part of Scalia's dissent is largely about how the decision is designed to make sure that states also cannot discriminate). And this in turn means that people will not be allowed to vote on the rights of gay people and thereby deprive them of an honest victory. -- You aren't suppose to vote on the rights of other people, that's what makes them rights. Having victory tied up into a neat little package with a bow already affixed is an honest victory. The idea that we should discriminate until the tyranny of the majority can be prevented by changing minds all the way to Mississippi is idiotic. You don't get to let bigotry delegate people to second class citizenship, and you certainly shouldn't allow people to vote on whether other people have rights or not. And having the courts say that that isn't fair, is an honest victory, you don't need to change the minds of bigots to win the game honestly. Fuck bigots. You don't get to vote on people's rights.

Friday, June 21, 2013

Tat's Trivia Bot 3.69

Tat's Trivia Bot 3.7

I think I found the dialog issue. When you'd open it it would beep due to crashing. I also added in KAOS questions. I didn't know what they were before, but apparently they are like Total: except you don't lose for not getting all the answers. More or less. I also added a hint for the KAOS questions, which similarly works for total as a piggy backed the question type. I also expanded the dialog a nice chunk. Like replaced all the stuff and took up more room. It looked horrible on my system and my system's fairly modern so maybe it sucks other places too.

Latest Version: Tat's Trivia 3.69



Also if you need an eggdrop tcl trivia script for IRC I do recommend:
http://www.mytclscripts.com/bogustrivia/bogustrivia-all-settings.html
Seemed like a pretty reasonable script, and seemed to have pretty clean execution. Runs on an entirely different platform than my mIRC bot (so don't bother if you don't know what it is).

Sunday, June 16, 2013

How to build a pyramid!

There's a lot of speculation as to how the ancients built the pyramids, most use ramps. Some speculate that ramps couldn't hold the really big stones or would collapse. Really the better way to do it would be to mud the entire base. Create a hill of mud up to the top of the pyramid used thus far. So rather than any sort of special ramp, you'd pretty much end up with a mountain of mud, then when you're done, just dig it out. It might require moving a lot of dirt, but it's well within the abilities of peoples and it would never collapse under any amount of weight. Put some rocks in place, build a hill, put some rocks in place, make the hill bigger. You'd largely end up doing that anyway. Especially as you need to lift the stones up higher.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Richard Carrier on Pagans, Progress, and Religion

"The pagans gave us democracy, citizenship, human rights, in fact the entire concepts of rights including freedom of speech, science, medicine, philosophy, formal logic, and mathematics. They also gave us a philosophical defence of moral virtues including philanthropy, generosity, mercy and honesty. Does that make paganism reasonable? No. The reason pagans came up with these things is not because they were pagans it is because they just happened to be pagans at the time that these humans came up with these brilliant, and beautiful, and good ideas and disseminated them. The fact that Christians may have done, and come up with good things, and good ideas, and done good things, is not because they're Christians but because they just happened to be Christians at the time. If they were Muslims or if they were pagans at the time, they might have come up with the same ideas and done the same things. Just as pagans did lots of great things, that we also benefit from tremendously" - Richard Carrier