Cav's Place

It appears that England and Wales are considering giving cohabiting couples better inheritance rights, which is certainly a good thing, but lawyers are complaining about it. I really don’t get this. If those people have shared their lives for so long, you should assume that each of them would want the other to have whatever they leave behind after death too. If one of them specifically doesn’t want that to happen, they’re free to write a will and state that fact, but if no such will exists then the default assumption should be that sharing your life includes sharing your wealth.
But this is just one part of the issue. I think that the amount of time spent living together is what should matter when determining what rights should people who are in a relationship have, not a simple piece of paper saying that they’re married! Ideally, married and unmarried people should have the exact same rights if they have been living together for the exact same amount of time. (I’m trying to avoid writing “couples” because I want to take polyamorous relationships into account as well.) That situation may be a long way off, but every step forward helps and every step back harms.

That proposed law appears to state that the surviving partner receives full inheritance rights after five years of living together with the deceased or if they have children together, while having no children and having lived together with the deceased for at least two years, but less than five, entitles the surviving partner to half of that amount. The part about having children really bothers me, as does everything that encourages people to have children, especially when it’s for such selfish reasons, so I wish they’d get rid of that, but the amount of time seems quite correct. I just wish the same law would apply to married couples as well…
Actually, if I were to think about it right now, I could even set ten years as the amount of time people would need to be living together for before getting all these “relationship” rights, though the amount of time should be reduced accordingly if the relationship started when all those involved were already past a certain age, to offer them a reasonable chance of obtaining all these rights before death. In that case, you could even have a few rights obtained after just six months, about half after two years and the vast majority after five years. This is, of course, not just about inheritance rights, but about all the rights and benefits that people who are in a relationship can enjoy.

I see that lawyer being quoted as saying that “there is a fundamental difference between people who are married and not married” and don’t really know what she’s talking about. I mean, yes, those who are married because “that’s how it should be” are more traditionalistic, those who are married just in order to obtain these rights and benefits are more selfish and perhaps more pragmatic, while those who are married for both of these reasons are both more traditionalistic and more selfish than those who are not married, but why would that give them more rights? If anything, those who get married in order to obtain these rights and benefits should be far less entitled to them!
The sort of reasoning that makes people say that the act of marriage carries such weight in itself is basically saying that people share more and become more dedicated to each other after going through a ceremony and signing a piece of paper than after living together and sharing every aspect of their lives for years. Thinking logically for just a fraction of a second should be enough to make everyone realize that such a concept is completely wrong, stop focusing on papers and ceremonies and move on to what really matters in a relationship.
Granted that some sort of evidence is required in order to certify that certain people have moved in together and consider themselves to be in a relationship, but that’s easy to obtain even without marriage. Actually, married people may not even live together at some point, so these requirements would be even more effective in determining who is truly entitled to those rights and benefits. I’m talking about something as simple as adding something to the documents that need to be filled when a person changes their residence, so they’ll be able to specify that they’re doing so in order to move in with their partner (or partners) and provide some contact information for them. The partner(s) would then obviously need to confirm this. And that’s all there is to it. Rights and benefits would automatically be granted as soon as the required amount of time would pass, as long as neither partner would contact the authorities to indicate the termination of the relationship or to change their residence without their partner(s) moving with them and no evidence of a separation would present itself.

I firmly believe that such laws would make people be more responsible and also avoid the situations that currently arise out of marriages of convenience, not to mention messy divorces. After all, we’re talking about obtaining rights and benefits as a result of managing to live together and maintain a relationship for an extended amount of time and not as a result of a ceremony that only requires a few minutes. And if any such individual rights and benefits would be lost by the one who leaves the relationship without having a very serious reason that’s clearly the fault of their partner(s), such as repeated abuse, it could even encourage people to put more effort into working out their differences, which would be another great thing.
It’d actually be better if the concept of legal marriage would be abolished entirely; it certainly would become pointless… Those who desire to get married in a religious setting would still be able to do so and the authorities would keep a record of these marriages for the benefit of the religions that do not allow their followers to have multiple partners at the same time or more than a certain number of partners during their lifetime, so nothing would change in that aspect. It’d just be a far fairer and more effective way of approaching this issue.

I find it rather strange that I didn’t write about this before, since I certainly heard a fair bit of talk about it and find it rather bothersome, not to mention really stupid. I’m talking about the debates regarding hanging clothes out to dry and all the places where doing so is already forbidden. It’s even happening in a few areas here in Romania, so unfortunately I imagine it’s a far worse problem in more “developed” countries.
Actually, I don’t have to imagine. The fact that something like Project Landry List exists reveals how things stand well enough. Sure, that only focuses on the United States, but it’s bad enough even so. It’d be interesting to know if similar movements exist in other countries as well, because I’m quite sure they’re needed… Even in areas where the local authorities don’t currently seem to mean to move in this direction, the residents should still be wary and at least show their support for those who are confronting this situation elsewhere.

I find it interesting that, despite having one themselves, certain people are so offended by the idea of a naked body that they have created these laws that force a person to wear clothes in public at all times. That’d make one believe that those people find clothes quite appealing, or at the very least acceptable at all times. Yet these debates seem to prove that assumption wrong, because they signify that clothes, clean clothes, are not an acceptable sight anymore. The exact degree of cleanliness can’t be the issue either, because clothes tend to be less clean when worn by a person than when they’re on a clothesline. The idea that clothes could only be an acceptable sight if they’re currently being worn or that underwear should never be seen doesn’t explain the situation either, because in that case clothing shops couldn’t exist.
That said, my humble opinion is that we’re talking about snobbery at best. Certain people want to show that they’re so far above the rabble that they can’t even tolerate something that’s not seen as modern anymore, so they attack those who still do that thing as a means of proving their own status. Later, those who aspire to that apparent higher status take after them. But that’s only if we’re to assume the best, such as it is, about these people. Otherwise we can conclude that it’s nothing but pure malice, these people simply creating and using this issue to trample over those around them, to force their will upon everyone else, simply because they realized that it could be possible to do so.

I’ll admit that a dryer can be useful if you truly need something to be dry very quickly, but why use one, why consume all that electricity, when a clothesline would do? Granted that this is a far more significant problem because of all the resources used and all the pollution currently generated in order to create that electricity, but it’d still be an issue even if that electricity would be generated entirely from renewable resources, simply because you shouldn’t use something when there’s absolutely no need to do so.
It’s a matter of taking responsibility for the real consequences of your actions. Using a dryer makes things slightly easier for you, but harms Earth. Also harms your finances, but that’s not what I’m talking about here, especially since those who push for such bans aren’t usually the kind of people who need to pay attention to such matters. Hanging your clothes out to dry, on the other hand, doesn’t harm anyone or anything. Those who claim otherwise just don’t know what they’re talking about, mainly because in order to complain about something like this they’d first need to watch what’s happening on someone else’s private property, which could be taken as a violation of that person’s right to privacy. It’s interesting how people fail to notice this little issue…

I really don’t know what could be so unsightly about a clothesline; seems like a pretty normal sight… Then again, that could be just what the problem is: Certain people have somehow lived without seeing something like this often enough. Maybe if we’d do it even more, they’d get used to it and the problem would be solved? It probably won’t be so easy, but it’s certainly worth a shot, and we’d better do that fast enough, before they manage to make even more people get used to the lack of clotheslines.
But seriously, the presence of a clothesline on someone’s private property shouldn’t be an issue for their neighbors. Or for anyone else. Ever. On the other hand, using a dryer, especially when it’s not really necessary, can and perhaps should be an issue for everyone because the massive amount of electricity used by these appliances has negative consequences for our planet and, if that’s not enough of a reason in itself, we all live on this planet… What’s more, such a significant power consumption can strain the distribution system, which can cause blackouts or power surges, therefore potentially harming the user and many others. As hard as it may sometimes be not to believe that it simply comes out of thin air, we do need to remember that electricity is produced somewhere and transported to us through a system that needs to function properly if we want to be able to enjoy all the benefits it offers when we actually need them.

So make a stand and hang your clothes out to dry! Don’t use dryers, don’t use small drying racks and don’t hang your clothes to dry inside your house or apartment unless you really have to. Put clotheslines in your yard if you have one or in your balcony if you do not and use them. That way, your clothes will dry for free, without using any resources and without causing any harm. And, who knows, maybe you’ll help certain individuals get used to the sight a little more…
The simple fact that clotheslines have been successfully used for so long may not be a good enough reason to keep using them, but snobbery, the desire to be “modern” or pure malice are even worse reasons to stop, especially considering the alternative. You don’t replace something that works well with something that creates more problems than it solves. Or at least you shouldn’t…

I knew of the talks about this for quite some time, but it appears that now they’re no longer just talks. I still think that it’s a leap in the wrong direction, however, because allowing characters that aren’t in the Latin alphabet in domain names encourages people to use their own native languages on the Internet even more and that certainly isn’t going to help improve international communication. Improved international communication requires one main world language, which should be the language that already has the most non-native speakers, which is quite obviously English.
With that in mind, a step in the right direction would be to very strongly encourage all sites that are not aimed at people who speak English but have more than a strictly local scope to add English translations for their content. Later, that strong encouragement could turn into some slight pressure and then perhaps become even more than that. All of this would obviously only apply to the layout and the content posted by the site’s administrators and not to any user-generated content that the site in question might host. This would be the way to help international communication instead of harming it, giving as many people as possible a chance to access information from as many different sources as possible.

But that article does make a good point when it mentions the people who live in countries that use other alphabets and who struggle to type domain names as they currently are because their keyboards don’t even have those characters. That is indeed a real problem, because people must be able to easily use the Internet before we can get to improving international communication through it. But this problem can have solutions that don’t require such changes, solutions that’d allow people to access domains that are named using Latin characters by typing the name using their own alphabet.
The article does mention that workarounds that do just that exist, but that they don’t work on all computers, which leads me to believe that these workarounds are in the form of applications that people can install to translate the domain names they type into those that their DNS can understand. But what if these applications would be moved away from the users and to the ISPs? After all, if the DNS translates the domain name into the appropriate IP address, it shouldn’t be a problem to add another service to translate a domain name written in some other alphabet into the “real” name, which would still use Latin characters. Sites that wish to be accessible like this could register their “secondary” names somewhere and everything would continue as normal, without affecting either individual users or the Internet as a whole in any way.
Of course, such an additional service would cost a little to maintain and some fees would need to be added in order to pay for it. Those fees could be levied on the domain name holders who wish to register such “secondary” names for their domains, so this tax could double as a deterrent, discouraging people from using other languages in this international space a little while also giving them the possibility to do just that in every way if they still desire it.

Some may say that this is much ado about nothing, mainly because it won’t affect them in any way. However, I think it’s a very real issue because it signifies that this fragmentation of the Internet is being accepted at the highest level. It’s one thing when people create non-local sites that are only in their own language and that language is not English or when ISPs allow their customers to access sites by typing domain names using different alphabets, but quite another when ICANN makes significant changes in order to allow people to even register domain names written entirely with characters from other alphabets. It moves the Internet away from the idea of an international space where we all come together and basically says that our differences are more important than our similarities. Someone commented that “there is a danger that the Internet – a tool for culture, information, sharing and dialog on a non-national level – may become irreversibly fragmented” and I agree. Such fragmentation existed before and always will exist, but having it endorsed at the highest level changes things, and that change is not for the best…

You might have noticed that I didn’t say anything about the potential risk of increased illegal activity on sites that have domain names written with characters from other alphabets, especially if they’re hosted on servers from countries where that specific alphabet is not used. Quite a few people seem to be worried about that, apparently mentioning potential terrorist activity more often than not, but I highly doubt that something like this could pose a real problem to any authorities that take their role seriously. This concern seems to be just one more result of the fear that so many people have ended up living in, which is a different issue entirely.
But there is one thing about this idea that is relevant to the matter at hand: It signifies that people would obviously perceive such sites as a separate area of the Internet. That said, one can also assume that those who would primarily use such sites would likely end up perceiving those that use the Latin alphabet as being in a separate area of the Internet as well. And that’s exactly what I’ve been talking about so far, the danger of doing something like this, segregation…

I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens; there’s little else to do at this point. Maybe it’ll really end up being much ado about nothing, though I quite firmly doubt that. On the other hand, if it really will result in people focusing on what sets them apart from each other and rejecting those who are different even more, maybe this could at least serve as a solid argument against any further developments in the same direction…

It’s certainly not better than the first one at least. It passed the first test I put it through, but failed the second. Further tests initially marked 48 bad clusters, then only confirmed six of them, though it struggled through all that 48-cluster area. What’s more, it started making worrying noises after those clusters were found, after initially being very quiet. It now clicks a little every few seconds…
Either way, I installed everything over the weekend and just closed the case and put everything that was left lying around back in the box I use for such things a little while ago, so I plan to see how long it’ll last. I don’t think I could have had it replaced yet again just over this anyway, since it’s not failing in any other way yet and I believe there’s a clause that says HDDs that have bad sectors covering less than 0.1% of their surface are not considered defective. Knowing that there are still problems and that another failure is just a matter of time doesn’t do anything to improve my mood though, especially since there also was an odd moment while copying some things back and my DVD drive didn’t actually recover either.

The DVD drive’s problem are DVD-ROMs, which appears to be the most frequent problem Plextor drives have, because it can read CDs and blank or burned DVDs just fine. I didn’t try to use it to write anything now, but I don’t particularly care about that. Anyway, this means that if I wouldn’t have had legally purchased software I wouldn’t even have noticed the issue, but as it is it did cause a significant amount of frustration right now, when I had to reinstall things, because I need to try a lot of times before it’ll work once and “trying” usually means rebooting with the disk in the drive, because it never worked otherwise. Once it manages to read a disk it’ll keep working for as long as that disk’s in the drive and I don’t reboot again, but that’s the only guarantee. Sometimes it kept working even after I switched disks and once it worked through two consecutive reboots, but trying that seems to be quite a risk… But since it’s no longer under warranty and don’t use it enough to justify replacing it just now, I’ll have to deal with it as it is for as long as I can.

Otherwise, after finishing Two Worlds while wating for the first HDD to be replaced, I decided to get back to Neverwinter Nights as soon as I was back to “normal”. That proves to be quite difficult, as the problems Neverwinter Nights has with Windows Vista are very obvious this time around, refusing to start the vast majority of the time. Still, I just saw that, after changing some settings, it’ll run without any problems if I can just get it to start, which just means trying to run it and ending the process forcefully when it hangs until it’ll eventually start. It didn’t do this the first time around, so I don’t know what’s wrong with it now, but it does seem to be what usually happens when you try to run it on Vista, so I guess I was just lucky the first time around…

I’ll leave you with some translated comments posted about this particular HDD model on the sites of two shops from here, just to emphasize that I really made a really bad choice back when I decided to buy it.

“Meanwhile the HDD went sort of crazy… Read errors, files missing and so on.”

“It functions abnormally! Makes strange noises, typical for a hard disk failure, sometimes it’s detected by the SATA controller and sometimes it’s not and even Windows Vista stops showing it as being in the system: Partitions were vanishing and the HDD itself was vanishing from Device Manager. I’m very unhappy with this product!”

“The first one had its transfer speed (to another SATA drive) drop to at most three megabits per second after two months. I was thankful that I managed to save my 300 GB in three days and it was replaced – it also gave partitioning and formatting errors. The second one has writing and reading errors, also after two months.”

“I bought two almost a year ago, one of which I gave to a friend as a gift. They both failed two days apart: They lost the formatting (becoming RAW) and only about 128 GB out of the 500 are still visible. It started with some random boot errors for which I blamed the operating system, though their inconsistency should have made me realize it was a hardware problem. If you have such a HDD, backup now. Statistically, chances are that it’ll fail after less than a year.”

“I haven’t seen another product with so many complaints. Very praised, expensive, you could easily buy a 1 TB drive instead, and from Seagate too. I wasn’t expecting this. I thought it was an accident when the first one failed two days after I bought it, but now I have to look for the warranty a second time.”

“I bought one nearly three months ago and a week ago it went to hell… It’s no longer detected for more than about two minutes, after which the motherboard can’t find it at all. Booting off it is out of the question. A friend of mine got the 750 GB model (also Barracuda ES.2 32 MB buffer, identical) and the same thing happened to him as well, just that in his case it went to hell even sooner. Conclusion: I’d say you should try another model, though not necessarily another manufacturer… I have two other Seagates that I’ve been using for five years and they’re completely problem-free.”

“It died after a year and a half. The motor that spins the disks got stuck… It buzzed and the system no longer saw it, not even in BIOS. I lost everything I had on it.”

“I couldn’t even use it for seven months! The disks are spinning but the motherboard can’t detect it, plus that I hear a buzz every ten seconds…”

“It burned after nine months, taking my data with it.“

I had planned a rant about this topic for quite some time now and I guess this provides a good opportunity for it. Seriously, how can a more or less regular flu be declared a national emergency? Even if this particular virus originates from another species, it’s not noticeably more severe than those that cause the seasonal flu every year, so why all this panic? Did the powers that be really require yet another thing to frighten people into submission with? I thought they had plenty of means to do that already…
The latest numbers I saw showed a mortality rate of about 0.4% in Europe and 1% elsewhere, which is very little in itself. But even those small numbers are actually inflated, because some people won’t go to the hospital for something like this and a few countries have realized that it’s nothing major and stopped reporting all but the most severe cases. So we’re talking about a pretty regular flu virus, which means that it can admittedly spread very quickly and cause the people it infects to feel awful for about a week, but in the tremendous majority of cases it won’t do anything more than that.
Barring the odd case that basically reflects the fact that you can’t account for luck, complications tend to arise only when the infected person is part of a risk group, such as those who are very young or very old or those who have heart or lung problems. But those are at risk when it comes to all sorts of infections, so there’s really nothing special about this flu. I wonder how many people develop complications as a result of common bacterial infections from food and water or some other kind of widespread ailment… I’d like to see some statistics, if anyone has any, because I think the percentage could actually be higher than it is for the swine flu.

Some time ago I read an article detailing how did the Hong Kong authorities respond to this flu and I think that’d be a good example to follow for the rest of the world. Remember that Hong Kong was hit hard by SARS, so if what I read in that article is the actual truth then they’re worthy of even more praise for being among the first to realize that this flu is not a threat and get back to more important matters.
The article was saying that the expected panic was noticed at first, people remembering SARS and not wanting to take any chances, which resulted in those who appeared to have flu symptoms even being arrested on sight in order to keep them away from the general public and therefore prevent the virus from spreading. But they soon recovered their wits and started analyzing the facts objectively, which resulted in a drastic change in their response to such cases. A rough quote (from memory) would be something along the lines of “if at first you could be arrested on the street for coughing, presently if you go to a doctor and complain of flu symptoms you’re simply told to go back home, wait it out and try not to cough in anyone’s face on the way”.
The fact is that many of those who are infected by this virus could fully recover even without a specific treatment and the vast majority of those who do end up needing some specific treatment will never be in any serious danger either. Under these circumstances, the “go back home and wait it out” approach certainly seems to be the one authorities and doctors everywhere should choose, or at least that’s how I see it…

I wonder where did this start from… Do so many people truly scare so easily or is it just the authorities and pharmaceutical companies that try to make it appear so? It’d be very easy to blame only the powers that be and go into various conspiracy theories, but I’m trying to be objective and see all the facts. The truth is that many “regular people” do scare easily and react impulsively, so they could certainly share the blame for this situation. On the other hand, the authorities and (perhaps even more so) the pharmaceutical companies have certainly made the most of it, so at least some of those conspiracy theories are justified and could even prove to be quite accurate. We can’t really know exactly what’s going on right now so, while I say that anyone who claims that the swine flu is a serious threat is at the very least misguided, I view those who claim that it’s all just one big conspiracy pretty much the same way. A clear head and a balanced attitude are always crucial, yet they’re so very hard to find in this society of ours…

But a good thing could eventually come out of this, if people would only get that message. Such diseases spread from person to person without requiring direct contact, so traveling is a risk. I remember a National Geographic article that said that a localized outbreak of bird flu, which does currently look like a particularly dangerous kind of flu, would spread all around the world in no more than six months due to how often and how far people currently travel.
Of course, my main concern is the major negative impact that traveling has on the environment, but it doesn’t appear that many people would be willing to stay home just to reduce the harm done to the planet. However, they could think again if they’d know that trips can prove to be a significant health risk for themselves and others, even if the World Health Organization shies away from recommending travel restrictions. Either way, the fact that a disease that appeared all the way on the other side of the world could make its way to you so quickly simply because some people keep going wherever they want without caring about the consequences is quite troubling, even if the disease in question won’t prove to be a serious problem in any way.