Author: matthew

In the news today: Rosa Parks is dead at 92. Sad news for her relatives and fans, but it got me thinking about the law, and how I really love how the Internet has given the common man such an ability to learn. In a lot of discussions with friends and online opponents, I’ve ended up discussing law. Not being a lawyer, of course, I’ve had to go for common-sense answers. Today, finally, I found something online that was really helpful:

Malum in se vs. Malum prohibitum.

In short, Malum in se is something which is illegal because it is inherently recognized as wrong, such as murder, rape, and theft. Malum prohibitum, on the other hand, refers to things which are illegal because they further a policy or doctrine, such as speed limits, immigration policies, and copyright regulations.

I realize that a first-year law student already knows this stuff. Oh, well.

Anyway, it clears up a lot of my confusion for me regarding ethics. I’ve often tried to prove the point that sometimes breaking a law is the correct ethical decision, even though it may land one in jail. For instance, violating the current draconian copyright laws can be, in my opinion, justified in certain circumstances as civil disobedience.

Rosa Parks, who died yesterday, was violating a law by refusing to give up her seat. Yet who today would argue that what she was doing was immoral? I’d submit very few would.

The U.S. Revolutionary War was fought and won “illegally”. And yet, today, the participants are celebrated as heroes. Had they lost, they’d have been vilified as instigators of a civil war.

It’s an interesting thing. It seems like you have to break a law in order to challenge it. At what point is breaking that law justified? It seems as if many of our most bitterly-fought legal battles involve some question as to whether those laws are malum in se or malum prohibitum. The ones that come to mind are abortion laws, church/state separation issues, freedom of speech… core stuff.

So tonight I heard a 45-minute interview with Jason Mraz, who has become famous for his tune on the radio, “Mr. A to Z”.

I was pretty impressed with the song when I heard it, but tonight when I heard more of his stuff, I was floored. That man can sing. And he can play a mean guitar. He’s got this really unique vibe going on, a combination of pop/funk/blues/rap that’s distinctive and really soars when he sings it.

The only thing I really noticed different in the live interview vs. his albums is that his voice is much “saltier”. It’s got a little bit of gravel to it, but it sounds much more like that’s a result of an exhausting touring schedule than his usual timbre.

Anyway, I’ve gotta buy the album now. Maybe for Christmas this year, or something. The surprising thing is, I’ve heard a lot of these “unplugged”-style interviews on Mix, and he’s one of the very few who, IMHO, sounds even better “live” than he does on the heavily-engineered album releases.

It’s refreshing to see a new pop artist who isn’t selected for his pretty face and muscled physique, but instead for his talent. Talent that puts mine to shame.

Buy Mr. A to Z at Amazon.

Ever wondered why there were five kids with the same name in your junior-high class? Ever wondered if you could name your baby by weighing the popularity per million babies of a given name in order to choose one that was unpopular that year?

Well, here ya go:

The Baby Name Wizard. This thing will plot the popularity of a given name over time for you. Very cool.

Of course, I had to type in “Matthew” right off the bat. It was even more interesting, realizing that the variants: “Matt”, “Mat”, “Mathias”, and “Matteo” have variously ranked in the top 1000 at certain times. “Mat” died out in the late 1800’s, and while “Mathias” did, too, it began a resurgence in the 1990s.

What fun!

So from my mailbag today, I present to you three bizarre movie previews and one simply weird video you might be interested in (thanks to Brian and Jena for the links):

Warning: the trailers are movies, so they are kind of large for people on dialup.

First we have the Romantic Comedy “Shining”, looks like a great file to take the wife/girlfriend to. (not at the same time though)

http://waxy.org/random/view.php?type=video&filename=shining_redux.mov

Then the Zombie Horror file “West Side Story”

http://www.ps260.com/Trailer/westsidestorytrailer_small.mov

An to top it off. A real scary movie… “Titanic”

http://www.ps260.com/elfollador/Scary%20Titanic.mov

Happy Halloween (not a movie trailer, but kind of funny):

http://www.zippyvideos.com/3829129851407416/whatwouldyoudo/

I’ve participated in a yearly salary survey sponsored by Usenix, a UNIX-advocacy group every year since it first came out. Usenix runs another group called SAGE, which is dedicated to covering issues related to systems administration.

I’m a sysadmin for a career, so I have a vested interest in participating. Although I’m not a member of SAGE (too expensive!), I like doing the survey and getting the results. This year, they had over 3000 people participate, which is large enough to be statistically significant in various parts of the US.

Here are the results that most interested me from the 2004-2005 salary survey. I’ve mixed in my comments with their statistics, so don’t take it as gospel.

• 96.2% of respondents were male. The rest were female. This jibes with my long-time observation of the industry: about 1 in 20 sysadmins are women.
• 11% of sysadmins had been unemployed at some point during the year. It’s an unfortunate fact: sysadmins get the hatchet early. They are an expense which companies think they can do without, until they can’t.
• The average increase in pay for 2004-2005 vs 2003-2004 was over 6%. This beats inflation!
• National sysadmin average pay: $68,195 for males, $64,016 for females. This average number, of course, does not reflect experience in the industry. Those with more experience may make significantly more, those with less make much less.
• Systems administration is still a young person’s game. Most respondents were in the 25-34 category. Only 15% of respondents were over 40. This, also, jibes with my observations: there are very few sysadmins over 40. On the plus side, those who are and have been playing a while tend to be very good.
• 2/3 of respondents have some kind of informal supervisory duties (like “team lead”), while about a quarter have official management duties.
• SAGE classifies admins as level 1 through 4. Very few respondents called themselves a level “1” (entry-level). IMHO, this means one of the following:
  1. Sysadmins overstate their work experience and/or responsibilities.
  2. Few entry-level admins participate in salary surveys.
  3. There are fewer sysadmins entering the field.
• The mean experience of admins in the survey: 7.91 years.
• What’s weird is, the bell-curve distribution of “amount of time in the field” has stayed at five years since the inception of the survey. You’d expect that to go up! Since it doesn’t, it strongly suggests that there are as many people getting out of the field as getting into it at any given time. Interestingly,the statistic for women is longer than men, suggesting that system administration jobs may represent a “glass ceiling” position for females.
• 53% of sysadmins have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
• Younger admins tend to have college degrees in the field, while older admins don’t. This jibes with my experience: when I was in college, there was no such thing as a degree in systems administration.
• Sysadmins spend about 25% of their time keeping up-to-date on their education and technology developments. This is a HUGE training expense, but IMHO absolutely essential for the good admin. If you are a sysadmin, you live and die by how well you keep up on new technology in your field.
• Sysadmins generally don’t travel much.
• Full-time admins average 45-hour work weeks, with 10% reporting longer than 60-hour work weeks.
• Over a third of admins telecommute at least one day a week.
• Median time at any given job: 3 years.
• Most admins get 15 days off a year.
• The heart of the survey: the salaries!
  • Newbie: $32K
  • 1-2 years: $44K
  • 3-4 years: $48K
  • 5-6 years: $57K
  • 7-8 years: $72K
  • 9-10 years: $78K
  • 11-15 years: $87K
  • 16-19 years: $93K
  • 20+ years: $93K
• Unsurprisingly, major metropolitan areas and technology hubs pay much more than positions out in the boonies. It’s kind of a “duh!” moment, but a position in a large city might pay $94K, while the same position in the country might pay $40K.
• Washington, D.C., New York City, and Silicon Valley positions pay the best out of the major cities in the US. My little town of Salt Lake City wasn’t even listed 🙂
• The sysadmin jobs, in order of pay by best to worst, are:
  1. Management
  2. Security
  3. Tech lead
  4. Database
  5. General
  6. Project Management
  7. Server Management
  8. Networking
  9. Help Desk
  10. Desktop Support
• Sysadmins at big companies get paid much more than sysadmins for small companies. Large companies also employ more admins per user than small ones. It’s kind of a “duh”, but good to know!
• The worst-paying industry with statistically-valid results? Education. Bottom of the barrel, pay-wise. You get more money being a government contractor.
• The top things syadmins like about their jobs:
  1. Casual dress
  2. Challenge
  3. Co-workers
  4. Learning on the job
  5. Flexibility, freedom
  6. Job security (in the sense of everyone needs sysadmins, not the “I’ll have a job with this company tomorrow”, I think!)
  7. Flexible hours
  8. Salary/compensation
  9. Fast internet, nifty high-tech gadgets, cool computers, etc.
  10. Fun
• The top things sysadmins hate about their jobs?
  1. Beaurocracy, paperwork
  2. Poor compensation
  3. Incompetent management
  4. Understaffing
  5. Politics
  6. Poor leadership and communication
  7. Infrequent salary increases
  8. Ceiling on advancement, or low advancement speed
  9. Budget, funding
  10. Salary, benefit issues
  11. Boredom
  12. Conflicting demands
  13. Poor respect or low value placed on job; little visibility
• IT and software development companies far and away lead the pack on creating unemployment in the industry.

Well, I hope that was interesting for you! It was interesting reading for me, for sure. I’m pretty certain this won’t appeal to the average barnson.org reader, but I bet there will be plenty of folks looking for salary info on Google that will find this page helpful 🙂

— Matt B.

So you have a neighbor who is neglecting their dogs: leaving them to sit outside in all kinds of conditions, never allowing them in the house, not feeding or watering them enough. Leaving them to whine outside the house all night long, and then when the pet is noisy enough, they come out to shout at them to “shut up!”.

Thoughts that have crossed my mind are:

• To call animal control and report the abuse
• To wait until they get out of their yard (again) and then get animal control to come get them
• To secretly feed the animals

I dunno, though. I really, really am not interested in having a dog as a pet. I mean, I like dogs, but don’t want to own one. Our neighbor used to secretly feed the dogs before she moved, but now that she’s not there anymore, they do seem to be getting pretty skinny. And it’s winter, with no dog house. Argh. Perhaps we should do nothing, but I hate to see any animal mistreated.

What would you do?

OK, I realize this may upset the sensibilities of people who really like George Bush, but the ragdoll setup and “wow, that looks cool!”-ness of this just kicks:

Left-Wing Political Therapy.

I must have wasted a half hour dragging the doll around earlier. Great fun!

Super Soaker Flamethrower.

Must Make One. Just like the infamous Potato Gun, I must do it because I can. That is all.

Today’s Flaming Moron award goes to Senator Hank Erwin, from an article published in the Birmingham News:

Senator says storms are punishment from God

Wednesday, September 28, 2005 THOMAS SPENCER News staff writer

Hurricane Katrina and other storms that battered the Gulf Coast were God’s judgment of sin, according to state Sen. Hank Erwin, R-Montevallo.

“New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast have always been known for gambling, sin and wickedness,” Erwin wrote this week in a column he distributes to news outlets. “It is the kind of behavior that ultimately brings the judgment of God.”

After touring Gulfport and Biloxi, Miss., and Bayou La Batre, Erwin said he was awed and humbled by the power of the storm. But he wasn’t surprised. “Warnings year after year by godly evangelists and preachers went unheeded. So why were we surprised when finally the hand of judgment fell?” Erwin wrote. “Sadly, innocents suffered along with the guilty. Sin always brings suffering to good people as well as the bad.”

William Willimon, bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church, suggested another response from Christians to the disaster.

“I have no idea what sort of senator or politician Mr. Erwin is, but he’s sure no theologian,” Willimon said. “I’m certainly against gambling and its hold on state government in Mississippi, but I expect there is as much sin, of possibly a different order, in Montevallo as on the Gulf Coast. If God punished all of us for our sin, who could stand?

“Next week, 300 United Methodist clergy from north Alabama are spending a week working together to help folks in trouble on the Gulf Coast,” he added. “That seems to me a much more appropriate Christian response than that of the senator.”

Erwin, a former conservative talk-radio host and now a media consultant and senator, is not alone in seeing God’s wrath at work in the storms.

The al-Qaida in Iraq group hailed the hurricane deaths in America as the “wrath of God,” and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan suggested the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina was divine punishment for the violence America had inflicted on Iraq.

Televangelist Pat Robertson said Katrina might be linked to God’s judgment concerning legalized abortion, and some rabbis suggested Katrina was a retribution for supporting the Israeli pullout from Gaza.

Katrina caused flooding of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, and Erwin said the Baptists knew they had put themselves on the front lines ministering in a sinful place that could be targeted. He said he didn’t think the hard-hit residents of the low-income lower 9th Ward were singled out for especially harsh punishment but were merely in the way, as were the shrimpers in the struggling fishing town of Bayou La Batre on the Alabama coast.

“If you are believer and read the Bible, you know sin has judgment,” Erwin said. “New Orleans has always been know for sin. … The wages of sin is death.” Erwin said hurricanes are part of a pattern that was also in evidence in the Sept. 11 attacks. The increase in abortion, pornography and prostitution have caused God to remove an umbrella of protection from America, he said.

So to sum up, since it was the aged, indigent, and black who were hardest-hit by the storm, Senator Erwin thinks God hates old people, God hates poor people, and God hates black people. Hank Erwin is an [expletive]. — Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. — Aristotle

A preliminary overview of a recent study published by the Journal of Religion and Society claims to have found a strong correlation between levels of “popular religiosity” and various “quantifiable societal health” indicators in 18 prosperous democracies, including the United States.

The most interesting and controversial findings are:

• Higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion.
• Rates of adolescent gonorrhea infection remain six to three hundred times higher in the U.S. than in less theistic, pro-evolution secular developing democracies.
• John Paul II and evolution-deniers claimed that secular cultures aggravate abortion rates. The data indicates they’re completely backwards: abortion rates are highest in the most theistic democracies.
• The least theistic secular developing democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in fostering low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion.

An editorial by Rosa Brooks summarizes the potential effects of this study succinctly:

Although correlation is not causation, Paul’s study offers much food for thought. At a minimum, his findings suggest that contrary to popular belief, lack of religiosity does societies no particular harm. This should offer ammunition to those who maintain that religious belief is a purely private matter and that government should remain neutral, not only among religions but also between religion and lack of religion. It should also give a boost to critics of “faith-based” social services and abstinence-only disease and pregnancy prevention programs….

This in itself does not make religion worthless or dangerous. All humans hold nonrational beliefs, and some of these may have both individual and societal value. But historically, societies run into trouble when powerful religions become imperial and absolutist…

Arguably, Paul’s study invites us to conclude that the most serious threat humanity faces today is religious extremism: nonrational, absolutist belief systems that refuse to tolerate difference and dissent.

I disagree with Ms. Brooks: I think the most serious threat faced by humanity today is environmental. With population growth at an all-time high, we are already experiencing the side-effects of massive population: massive death tolls from natural disasters. I’d rank religious extremism somewhere after that.

But not too far after.