Russell Coker: Logic and Pants
I just read an interesting post about proposed new laws in the US prohibiting exposing underpants [1]. This is not a new thing and is part of a debate that has been taking place in many countries since the trend of “hip hop” saggy pants.
The first thing that occurs to me is to wonder what the difference really is between underpants and bathers. It seems to me that bathers are simply underpants that don’t turn transparent when they get wet (and which are made of materials that don’t degrade easily when exposed to sea water, UV light, and chlorinated water from swimming pools. So it seems that unless there is some clear legal difference between bathers and underpants such laws will not be effective. Could an underwear company produce products that are essentially the same as it’s regular products but which say “swimming attire” on the label to allow it’s customers to escape silly laws? In fact why not label all underwear as “swimming attire” just in case?
Would the prudes who object to a glimpse of underwear want police to go checking the labels of underwear to determine if they are permitted to be seen? The fascist trend in first-world countries is already quite bad, I don’t think we want to add underpants inspection to the list of police powers. Also it should be noted that a small portion of the police officers are corrupt, the idea of corrupt cops inspecting underpants is really not appealing…
It would be possible to define any clothes worn under other clothes as “underwear”, but this has problems too. For example when I was younger I used to often wear jeans over my bathers when on the way to/from a beach (often there were no adequate facilities for changing clothes near a beach). If I was to wear jeans over my bathers while walking to a beach could I get booked for showing a small section of my bathers over the top of my jeans - and then legally entirely display my bathers while swimming? Of course there are legal nude beaches in many localities, but blurring the distinction between a regular beach and a nude beach by permitting activity that would be “indecent exposure” on all beaches seems likely to have results that would not make the prudes happy.
The next logical implication of laws against exposing underpants is that they encourage wearing smaller underpants. My experience is that it is impossible to wear boxer-shorts without them being exposed above the top of my jeans. Should I be essentially prohibited from wearing boxer shorts because of the risk that if my shirt is not tucked in then someone might catch a glimpse of my underwear?
Now if “underwear” was defined to be “anything work beneath the outer layer of clothes” then what about the situation of having multiple layers of clothes? For example when an athlete who wears a track-suit over shorts, are those shorts “underwear”? If so do they cease being “underwear” once the track-suit is removed? Is there a race condition [2] where an athlete can wear shorts on the track, a track-suit on the bench, but they have to remove the track-suit as fast as possible because they are committing indecent exposure while removing the track-suit?
If underwear is defined as being the innermost layer of clothing, then what of the practice of “free-balling” (the practice of a man wearing a track-suit with no underpants) and the Scottish tradition of “nothing is worn under the kilt”? Can a track-suit or kilt be defined as underwear? If so how would it be enforced, would police look up the kilts of all men to ensure that the kilt is not the underwear?
As for “plumber’s crack” the only solution seems to be to compel plumbers to wear overalls. Of course then plumbers would increase their rates to cover the expense and inconvenience involved in a forced change of attire. I think that most people would prefer to hire a cheap plumber who shows some “crack” than an expensive plumber.
Saturday
I've just uploaded a new package for the SPIP content management webapp. SPIP is a very powerfull CMS made by a team of french coders. It is widely used in the french-speaking part of internet, used in thousands of sites, ranging from personal home page to professional publication websites. SPIP is somehow not well known in the eglish-speaking world, probably because most of the things happen in French... However, it's fully translated and documented in English, as well as many other (...)
While all of Belgium is buzzing over the fact that now the 
(occasionally, the poem is one of the better-known poems by
expressionist poet Paul van Ostaijen, my favourite in the Dutch
language)
This is a 
After having it for about two days, I must say I'm quite happy with
it. Reading text on this device is way, way more comfortable
than trying to read anything on my laptop, or something similar. Having
said that, there are a few quirks with it, which I hope future
firmware-updates will fix:
The following is not a joke:
In times where screen resolutions of 1600x… and above are becoming more and more common, I wonder if the maximize window button which enlarges a window to take all the available space on the desktop is still as useful as it used to be.
I noticed that some (if not all, I’m not a Mac user) applications on Mac only maximize their windows depending on the content of the window. For example if you maximize the window of your word processor, the window becomes only as wide as necessary to make the whole page visible. This doesn’t just look better on very large monitors, it is also more usable than a simple maximize since it doesn’t unnecessarily hide other windows.
Is there a window manager for Linux which does something similar, or better: is something like this possible with KDE? I know that QT widgets have a “preferred size” — shouldn’t it be possible to have a maximize to preferred size button? It’s surely not useful for every application, but may applications only need a quite small main window and look very ugly when maximized.
I'm in the process of converting my poor-man's SAN from IDE disks attached
to the host by IDE-USB adapters to SATA disks attached by eSATA to SATA
cables.
I had some spare time tonight, so I thought I'd prepare the new RAID-10 on
brutus. The intent is to then take the 4-port USB 2.0 card out of
minotaur during a lull in recordings on Saturday, and put it in
brutus as well, and do a giant pvmove, then put the
4-port eSATA card back in minotaur with the new disks attached.
So I've got the 4-port eSATA card (a Silicon Image SiI 3124) in
brutus, and I've built the RAID-10 with 
DebConf 8 is approaching and our website is clearly not what we’d like it to
be. It turns out that compiling all the useful stuff that travellers might need
is not easy, so we kindly ask you —dear lazyweb—, to lend us a
hand.
The most important thing we need, is to recognise missing data. When you’re
a local, is difficult to know what foreigners might need to know. So, even if
you don’t know the country, your different point of view could help.
The second thing is to actually get articles written, some stuff ought to be
written by locals, but the majority can be researched from the web (as we
already did!). Proof-reading and checking translation is also appreciated.
Send us your patches, comments and suggestions to the 
New status update!
Here’s what Aptitude looks like:
Some time ago, I added a
Nested functions are probably the closest thing to a closure you
can get with C (I've talked about nested functions and 
Dear 
I've setup several repositories for apt-get in the past, usually using reprepro as the backend. Each time I've come up with a different scheme to maintain them.
Time to make things consistent with a helper tool: