There appears to be damning evidence for both sides; be it Google’s internal documents recognizing the possible copyright issue during the development of Android or Oracle’s admission that Oracle management decided it wanted to compete with Android prior to deciding to sue Google or even conflicting testimony from two former CEOs of Sun, the previous owner of Java intellectual property.

According to a report from Alarabiya.net, Egypt is currently debating several bills to move the country toward a more fundamentalist version of Islamic rule. One law will legalize marriage of girls starting from age 14 and another, strangely (at least to this westerner), allows a husband to engage in intercourse with his wife for up to six hours after her death (clearly a cause worth fighting for). Yet another is looking to strip women of divorce rights in the country.

When I moved to Utah 7 months ago, I realized that it was going to be a weird place to live (even for a Texan). So I guess it should be no surprise that amidst serious discussion about the state budget deficit and how to pay for education, Medicaid and other such weighty costs, the Utah Legislature decided to spend time passing a bill to make the Browning M1911 the state firearm of Utah.

A colleague of mine sent me a link to a little flash-based website called Boxcar2D.com. It wasn’t long before pretty much everyone on my five person team had the simulation running in the background on their PCs. After determining that letting it run unfettered wouldn’t affect our bandwidth reports to management, a few of us decided to just let it run all night.

It is a fairly cool simulation that lets you pick a few parameters for the evolution of a simple two dimensional car that has to traverse a randomly generated (and increasingly difficult) track. The best performers out of each generation (20 car types) are sent to the next generation with the most beneficial traits passed on.

Java developers are up in arms today due to the news that Apache has resigned it position on the Java SE/EE Executive Committee.

According to ASF’s news release, they feel Oracle has created a contradictory Java SE 7 specification request and license. Apache says that this will severely inhibit independent implementations’ distribution. The biggest red flag to Apache is that they feel the new Java SE 7 spec will prohibit the distribution of independent open source implementations of the spec.

Are you a moral absolutist or a consequentialist?

A absolutist takes the stance that the morality of a specific act virtually never depends on context or secondary consequences, but on the action being taken. Consequentialists feel that the consequences of the action will determine its moral value. The morality of consequentialism is often summed up as “the ends justify the means,” which automatically presents it in a bad light to most people. Thank you, Machiavelli.

When we talk about life, what do we mean? For every known living organism on Earth that means something that is made up of Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Until now, that is.

NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon has discovered a completely new organism that is, as NASA is saying, “life as we do not know it.” The bacteria, known as GFAJ-1, is capable of using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes. Yeah, that arsenic… the one that is poisonous to almost every organism on the planet, save a few that can breathe it without quickly proceeding to death.

According to a recent New York Times article, a group of researchers at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, have released a study that criticizes the current approach taken to discover the “universals of humanity.”

The premise of the study is that most psychology research is performed in U.S. universities. Consequently:

68 percent of research subjects in a sample of hundreds of studies in leading psychology journals came from the United States, and 96 percent from Western industrialized nations. Of the American subjects, 67 percent were undergraduates studying psychology — making a randomly selected American undergraduate 4,000 times likelier to be a subject than a random non-Westerner.

I was reading up on Rand Paul a little and I came across his stance on gay marriage, one that seems to be pretty standard for Tea Party-leaning candidates. It made me wonder what such a situation would actually be like? What would it actually mean if states actually did “decide for themselves” on the issue of same sex marriage?

If two people got married in one state and moved to a state that did not recognize their marriage… what would happen? It seems like that would require a huge change in how states recognized other states’ laws, and ignoring a piece of the Constitution to boot.

I am sad to admit that I am not a patriotic American. Or at least, I don’t think I am. I see others who are self-avowed patriots and I am not anything like them, nor do I feel that I value the same things.

I used to routinely hear that if I didn’t like insert controversial talking point here, I should just leave and see how I like living outside the USA, without my freedoms. But the thing is, I have lived outside of the US and it was pretty much the same as living here. Only very rarely did the Gestapo break down my door in the middle of the night to drag me in for hours of intense interrogation with little or no reason.