Radio Free Meredith

The difficult thing about doing business with vendors all over the world is that it's not always easy to tell whether the rep you're dealing with is sending curt replies that don't actually answer your questions because it's a cultural thing, because he's incompetent, or because he's a dick.

The irony is, I might have still used them if he'd been willing to give me a quote on the service I need (machining a production run of PCBs to 14mm diameter circles) even though they can't provide another service I need, since they're cheap, but I have neither the time nor the inclination to beat a quote out of a vendor who doesn't want to give one to me; it's far less effort to take my custom elsewhere.

If you sell any kind of configurable product, you may wish to take this into consideration, especially when a customer says "and the initial production run will be X" where X has multiple zeroes before the decimal point.

Just sayin'.

I recently learned that a disabled friend of mine, who has a connective tissue disorder and gets around with the help of various assistive devices and a service dog, has been getting hassled by neighbours who want everyone to park at one end of the street and walk home during the day when kids are playing (and have gotten a city street permit to this effect, though they're using it inappropriately -- they can't legally block residents from driving to their own homes, but they're doing it anyway.)

That alone is plenty out of line, but when my friend went to talk to her neighbours about why this wasn't going to work for her, they blew her off -- one of the reasons being "well, Mr. So-and-so is 92 and he doesn't mind."

News flash, people: being old and being disabled are not the same thing. Some old people are ridiculously healthy and spry -- my granddad was still climbing ladders to fix stuff in the garage when he was 90, and the first indication that nature wanted him to slow down was stage 4 lung cancer. (He died two months later.) Certainly there are disabilities that are more common among the elderly -- you don't see a lot of young people with Alzheimer's apart from that one poor family in Holland -- and many chronic conditions, such as polycystic kidney disease, tend to worsen over time, but being old does not mean ipso facto being disabled.

Everyone reading this will either get old or die young. Some of you will get old and never slow down; some of you will end up with osteoporosis, or arthritis, or diabetes. Perhaps the correlation between age and disability makes some people uneasy around young people who walk with canes or have motorized chairs -- perhaps it makes them think of their own inevitable mortality someday. But people who are young and disabled are disabled now, and it's inhumane to pretend that their problems don't exist.

Perhaps if we can get people to realise that disability and age aren't as causally linked as people seem to think they are, both the elderly and people like my friend won't have to put up with this kind of rudeness any more.

I did not realise, until evelien mentioned it, that if you are a non-US citizen and are travelling to the US, even if you are a citizen of a country covered by the Visa Waiver Program, you must now apply for entry to the US online at least 72 hours before you travel. Yes, even if you are only there for a short time. Yes, even if you are only transiting through the US on your way to another country -- that's right, even if you never leave the airport.

Seriously, State Department, what the fuck? US-VISIT wasn't enough of a pain in the ass, so you shut it down and put together an even more annoying program?

I do have to wonder how long this is going to last; this will without a doubt increase the number of deportees (thanks to people who don't find out about the need to apply for authorization, or who forget to do it, or who don't realize that infants who are flying without a ticket still have to have an authorization, &c, &c), and the airlines are going to be extremely nonthrilled about having to mule them all back home.

It's not quite clear from the ESTA website what the goals of the program are. The FAQs seem to indicate that they're trying to keep out people who have been convicted of crimes of moral turpitude and people with communicable diseases. Fun fact: six of the eight communicable diseases that are grounds for denying someone entry to the United States are sexually transmitted diseases. This includes HIV.

Now, I don't know about the rest of y'all, but it has never been my experience that foreign nationals view the US as the place to go on mad fucking sprees. Denying an HIV-positive person the ability to enter the US simply because of his or her medical condition is discrimination, plain and simple, and it just isn't right. There is a DHS "final rule", issued last October, which specifically applies to HIV+ folks, under which they can enter the US for a mere 30 days, rather than the 90 days that everyone else gets on a nonimmigrant tourist visa, but this is small comfort: HIV+ foreign nationals are considered second-class persons under these rules.

Here, incidentally, is where things get interesting. The State Department's page on Classes of Immigrants Ineligible to Receive Visas cites Section 212(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Sec. 212(a)(1)(A)(i) states that any alien "who is determined (in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services) to have a communicable disease of public health significance, which shall include infection with the etiologic agent for acquired immune deficiency syndrome" (emphasis mine) is ineligible for admission to the US. HowEVah, if you check out Section 212 on the USCIS website, the bit about AIDS isn't there; it's replaced by a footnote. Turns out that the bit about AIDS was amended out on July 30, 2008.

So, in other words, (1) the State Department isn't keeping its own public information documents up to date (no surprise), and (2) the Department of Homeland Security is issuing its own prejudicial rules, simply because it can. Section 305 of H.R. 5501 removed the language about HIV, passed the House and Senate and was enrolled as Public Law No. 110-293. The jackasses at DHS turned right around and turned it into a rule under colour of their own authority, and that rule affects everyone just as much as a law passed by Congress does.

I bitched a lot during the last eight years about the ridiculous power grabs the executive branch has pulled, and this is just another one of them. AIDS activists, gay-rights activists -- if you aren't pissed off about this, you should be. The DHS's style of thinking is benighted, anti-factual and just plain wrong: they're acting like they think HIV can be contracted from casual contact, which is just as absurd as a frat boy who thinks he can catch "the ghey" from talking to a gay man at a bar. We deserve better from our government.

And just remember, folks: this is a "rule" we know about. The DHS and the TSA have a whole laundry list of "secret rules" which they still enforce, as John Gilmore and others have learned to their peril.

Demand transparency from your government. They're supposed to be of, by and for the people. It's up to us to keep them that way.

Advice to people at concerts who think it's a good idea to chatter away over the music: when the people behind you counsel you to kindly shut up or continue your conversation elsewhere, consider the fact that since they are behind you, they have a perfect shot at the tendon in the back of your knee, and if you have any interest in walking back to your car after the show, you should probably follow their suggestion and shut your fucking cakehole.

I'm just sayin', is all.

For the curious: no, I didn't actually cripple anyone tonight, much as I wanted to. I did, however, wait for the song to end, then lean over the jackass's shoulder and cheer at the top of my lungs directly into his ear. That got the point across.

Dear all developers who are considering writing a language with a "more English-like syntax" because it'll make it easier for people to learn,

Don't. Seriously. Or I will find you and kill you by cramming your own design notes down your throat. (If your design notes are all in your head, I will cram your brains down your throat. Simple enough.)

Any language which purports to be "English-like" but gives totally different semantics to contains and in needs to be put down like Old Yeller.

Also, having a type system doesn't mean we don't need type introspection. Death on toast to whoever came up with that little omission.

That is all.

--mlp, frustrated

cristalia has a call to arms regarding the incident at this year's Hugos wherein Harlan Ellison groped Connie Willis's breast onstage.

I'm not especially involved in the SF community anymore, mainly due to lack of time and effort on my part, but I've also heard reports from thewronghands and other tech women about inappropriate groping/wrist-grabbing/whatever from people in the tech field. Now, I have a standard response to things like this: if someone gropes me, I punch the offending party in the face. I don't care if it's a friend, an acquaintance, or a total stranger. A friend might get the courtesy of me saying "Hey, cut that shit out," but if they keep it up, they're going to get punched. Someone at #s decided it would be funny to tickle me, and ended up getting clocked in the throat. Someone at elegantelbow's New Year's Eve party decided it was okay to fondle the scarification piece on my right shoulder, and got an elbow in the ribs for his trouble. This kind of thing doesn't happen to me often -- perhaps I'm just not the most gropeable person in the world -- but the response by now is just instinct.

However, I know there are a lot of people out there who, for some reason or another, don't feel comfortable punching an assaulter in the face. Maybe you've never hit anybody before and think it wouldn't work. Maybe you're worried about getting hit back. Maybe you were brought up to believe that Nice Girls don't do that sort of thing and haven't trained yourself out of it yet.

Well, I am not a Nice Girl, so here is my offer: if I am in your immediate vicinity and someone gropes you, I will punch them in the face for you. All you have to do is alert me -- quickly -- to the problem and the offending party. A nice loud "$name, get your hands off my $bodypart!" should suffice. This serves two purposes: one, it lets me know who to let have it, and two, it draws attention to the asshat in question and directs the condemnation of the rest of the room straight to the offending party. Shame -- particularly shame in the heat of the moment -- is a powerful disincentive toward sexually offensive behaviour. People grope other people because they think can get away with it. Okay, yes, Harlan has drawn the ire of a large part of the SF community after the fact, but unless some form of lasting censure arises from this groundswell, he has gotten away with it. Had someone raised a ruckus at the time, he would have had to deal with a rather more acute form of embarrassment than what he's being subjected to now; the condemnation of peers who are in front of you is a lot more cutting than the condemnation of peers who are far away.

So, SF folks, do what you can after the fact; I applaud that.

But next time, someone punch the asshat in the face, okay?