Oh baby, baby

I found this on the Web today. A hospital in Japan has put in place a “baby hatch” where mothers can anonymously drop off unwanted babies.

You can bet that conservatives everywhere will be foaming at the mouth over this. That it encourages premarital and casual sex amongst singles. That it promotes lack of responsibility among new parents. Even that it destroys the foundations and sanctity of marriage.

In a perfect world perhaps it would do those things — I don't know. But we don't live in a perfect world. We do have have women who get pregnant and don't want to be but have no access to abortion. Maybe they don't want the baby because there is no economic way they will be able to afford, first, taking the time off work and, second, buying everything that new child will need. Then there are those women who could afford it, they just don't want a child at that point. Babies are innocents — they deserve to have the chance at a real chances in life rather than being poor, or the emotional problems of knowing that your mother never wanted you in the first place. And you know what? We do have a stigma in our society against people who give up their children and that stigma can prevent a woman from doing what is right for her baby. Not just adult women, but teenage mothers, too. Perhaps all hospitals should have baby hatches.

Me, I choose that which benefits the innocents in the picture, even if it promotes that which the conservatives fear it does.

Talk about a whiner

Normally I am all for people getting tattoos if that is what they want. I feel it is wrong to to think that all people who get tattoos are drug users, gang members or whatnot — that is hurtful stereotyping.

However, I also think that Rebecca Holdcroft from the UK is a whiner. She has a lot of tattoos, as you can see from the picture on that page, and her employer would like her to cover them up. She says how she's been ask to wear a cardigan and at a previous job “on a hot day I passed out and cracked my head in a toilet cubicle”. Oh poor baby. There are long sleeved shirts that you can buy which can be worn on a warm day, and Britain doesn't even get that hot in the summer! Now if she lived in the Mediterranean area, I might have some sympathy.

Now I say this as a person who has a tattoo — your employer has the right to require that you dress in a fashion which they feel will be presentable and acceptable to their customers and clients. If you don't want to, then your employer has the right to put you in a a non-public facing position, even if it pays less and is in the back broom closet.

Rebecca — give it up. Stop being a whiner. It's not like this is a real issue like freedom of speech or equal rights regardless of age, sex or race.

Whaddya mean not completely?

And according to this How Canadian are you quiz, from the same website as the What American accent do you have quiz, I am only 99% Canadain! Awwwww... :-( :-)

You are 99% Canuck!

You rock, you are an almighty Canadian through and through. You have proven your worthiness and have won the elite prize of living in a country as awesome as Canada. Yes I know other countries think they are better, but we let them have that cuz we know better than they do, eh?

How Canadian Are You?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

No, you're the one with the accent!

Ever wonder what type of accent you have to others? Or are you convinced taht you're the normal speaker and everybody else has an accent? Well, even though I am a Canadian I went and did the What American accent do you have test to see what I sound like.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
North Central
The West
The Inland North
The South
Boston
Philadelphia
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

I figure that this is what almost every anglophone Canadian Ontario and west will get, along with many Maritimers. However, it would be interesting to see what those with a strong Newfie accent would get. What part of the USA would the test place them from? Eh?

Windows Vista Team Blog : News: Revision to Windows Vista retail licensing terms

Well, it looks like the outcry against Microsoft's more restrictive licensing as to how many time you may reinstall Vista was actually heard by the software monopolist giant. A product manager at Microsoft posted this to the Windows Vista team blog yesterday.

Surprises Inside Microsoft Vista's EULA

By now everybody knows that the next version of Microsoft's Windows operating system, Vista, will be out soon. What most people don't know is how restrictive the new End-User License Agreement is for Vista. If you thought that Microsoft's court battles against various governments over its monopolistic desires made them soften up, read this article by Scott Granneman.

As an example, one if things the new EULA restricts is how many time you may reinstall Vista. It used to be that as logn as you only had it running on one computer at a time, you could reinstall it as often as you wanted — like if you bought a new computer. But the new EULA only allows you to install it twice. Yup, only twice. Say you buy Vista in January when it comes out and then you get a new computer a few months later, moving Vista to it. In a few years when you next upgrade your hardware you won't be allowed to install Vista on that one because you all ready used your two times.

This is the first thing that has ever made me think of getting rid of Microsoft software entirely, instead of having it on just one of my 3 computers.

BSD is Dying

I may be trying out Linux on one of my computers, but I am still a BSD snob at heart. :-) This video was pointed out to me be somebody from #userfriendly on Undernet.

A tongue-in-cheek look at the history and future of the BSD movement. Modeled after the presentation styles of Lessig and Hardt, the talk provides a light-hearted introspection of the leaders, technologies, and community that forges ahead despite having been left for dead some 15 years past.

This presentation was given by Jason Dixon at the NYC BSD Conference at Columbia University on October 28, 2006.