Supreme courts rule sodomy A-OK

The Supreme Court ruled today to strike down the bans on homosexual sex– what some states call “deviate sexual acts.”

Well, it’s about time.

It’s been a big week for minority issues in general– affirmative action survives another attack and sodomy gets a thumbs up from the high courts. Okay, not sodomy, but privacy rights. But it’s not as funny that way.

In general, in the face of homeland security and the daily erosion of privacy rights, this week’s Supreme Court decisions have shown that the original framers of the Constitution set up a pretty good system to allow us to hold true to our ideals and change with the times. As Kennedy said, they knew that “times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress.” A propos considering Kennedy was one of the first people to use the term “affirmative action.” It’s a policy that has its flaws, but like the Constitution, can change as our society changes. The Supreme Court’s ruling proves just that– the undergraduate point system was too heavily weighted toward race, but the graduate system was deemed more fair and acceptable. It shows that we do not have to reject policies, ideas, concepts in their entirety, but make important compromises to achieve the best solution in the end.

As Joe Pesci’s character Simon Wilder says in “With Honors,” “the beauty of the Constitution is that it can always be changed. The beauty of the Constitution is that it makes no set law other than its faith in the wisdom of ordinary people to govern themselves.”

More file-sharing madness…

I just got back from the ResNet conference at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, MI. Yes, that’s right: Big Rapids, not Grand Rapids. Apparently, they jumped the gun when they found Big Rapids and ended up finding even bigger rapids.

During these four days of good ol’ Midwestern fun (if I never see Ranch dressing again, it will be too soon), residential networking/computing groups from colleges and universities all over the country (and a couple world-wide) come to learn from each other, have a little fun and network (no pun intended). Last year’s hot topic was bandwidth and was a pre-cursor to this year’s hot topic: file-sharing and copyright law.

It’s Cartoon Saturday

I’ve spent most of the past few Saturday mornings watching cartoons. They’re still showing the old classics and I know what to expect from newer series like the new Batman, Superman, Justice League or X-Men series– darker, more serious animated series that more closely reflect the flavor of the comic books from which they came. But I have to admit that watching other cartoon series take a different twist when you’re older and have a little more perspective: