Bug Vanquisher: Decontamination

The Reality!

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 11:55:15 GMT

I wrote about the looming danger and entirely incorrect interpretation western media is giving to a Saudi Arabian rape case, here are more details detailing the other side of the picture. [There are four or five edits to change some spellings.]

Qatif Woman's Case and the Saudi Judgment

By Faraz Omar

Link - iNarrators.com

The recent attention to the Qatif court case in which a gang raped victim was penalized with lashes and imprisonment has re-surfaced criticism of the Saudi Judicial system in the media. However the view circulated is to an extent biased and one-sided. Often one gets misled by looking at just one side of the coin. International newspapers carried the story with various headlines but a common theme – A gang rape victim sentenced for lashes and imprisonment. A common reader might be disgusted by the very thought, "How could a victim of a gang rape be penalized? Could there be anything more inhuman than punishing an oppressed victim herself? And all her guilt lies in being with a man she is not related to." These thoughts would be sufficient for most of us to come to a very satisfied conclusion and justify the international media remarks such as 'Barbaric Laws' and 'Inhuman interpretation of laws'.

Having lived in Saudi Arabia and knowing it personally, I attempt to present the other side of the coin. To give a background first, Saudi Arabia's judicial system is largely based on the Islamic Law. The Religious Scholars do accept that it's not purely based on Islamic Law and has its shortcomings, but yet largely and fundamentally it follows the Islamic Law. One of the basics of Islamic Law is that not only are all types of crimes prohibited, but all things which lead to such crimes are also prohibited. And on the other hand, good things which prevent these crimes are much encouraged. For example, Islam prohibits adultery and fornication i.e. sex outside marriage, premarital sex etc. It views them as one of the biggest social crimes. So it prohibits all things that lead to them such as gazing or staring at the opposite sex, immodesty, dating etc. On the other hand it promotes and encourages marriage. It doesn't deny the basic instinct of a human being but it regulates it into a manner that would preserve the well-being of a family; promote modesty and protect the society from sexual crimes.

Having said that let us look at the Qatif Girl's case. She is a young married woman who had an illegal relationship with a man. And this man threatened her that he would publicize her pictures taken with him during the relationship. She was with this man when they were abducted and raped. The pictures were handed over to the police later on. So the Saudi judges first gave 10 months to 5 years imprisonment to the rapists and 90 lashes to the woman as punishment for her involvement in an illicit relationship. The atmosphere of Saudi Arabia is very different than most countries. It is a very conservative and religious country. Rapes are especially unheard of, however, as we see the society become more western, such crimes are now increasing than before. Saudi religious leaders take every step to preserve modesty and stop youth from getting into immoral relationships. We know that most of the sexual crimes are done by 'known people'. 'Date Abuse' and 'Date Rape' where women are subjected to the most sexual abuse is a major problem in the western world. After clear evidence that pointed towards the illegal relationship of the Qatif Woman surfaced which could have also been the cause leading to the horrific gang rape, it became incumbent upon the Saudi authorities that they also punish her for violating the country's well known law. When the appeal for this matter was publicized to create sympathy and draw criticism over the law, the punishment was raised to 200 lashes and 6 months of imprisonment for the girl. [The Appeals court also increased the punishment of the rapists to 2 – 7 years imprisonment]. This raise of punishment, according to official sources, was due to "her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media" which is a pretty valid point.

The punishment by lashes is also misunderstood as 'barbaric'. While lashing the hand should not be raised such that the underarm is seen, which means that one cannot apply do it with force. We see so much from the western hypocrisy that they allow 'the accused' who are not yet convicted to undergo severe torture. Pain, extreme temperature conditions, psychological trauma and more unspeakable tortures in prisons like 'Guantanamo Bay', Abu Ghraib etc are pretty common. And all this is before even being convicted. This is their hypocrisy, they have a law but their practice is different. Islamic Law is direct and straight forward. It has clear described laws and punishments for those who violate it without infringing their rights.

Again everyone may not agree with this side of view, but there are many others who agree to it. We keep talking about tolerating others views and accepting diversity, but in practice we are really forcing our view of liberalization and freedom. So if some differ they are labeled as intolerant and oppressors.

The road not taken

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 13:32:28 GMT

Last night, I was watching SG-1, "The road not taken". There was one dialog which offended me. Rodney Mckay was referred to by Major Lorne as dot-com jerk in the alternate universe Samantha Carter found herself.

Now, the thing is it is due to these dot-com jerks and generations of geniuses before them who enabled the technology to advance to the point where such misinterpretation of science (especially physical science) is possible and series like SG-1 can be made. I am talking about CG environments and animations. You should really compare the quality of some 60's series with that of SG-1 and say your thanks to all those "dot-com jerks" who made it possible in the first place.

What Turing Machines are not!

Thu, 17 May 2007 09:26:01 GMT

I read this on Eric Lippert's blog:

"Because the number of states is so large, it is often more helpful to model machines as "Turing machines", which can have unlimited internal storage"

Immediately, a pain started in my head. I had to write what follows as a comment and on my blog!

A Turing machine is a Turing machine because it can read/write its storage in random order. This makes it recognize languages of type aⁿbⁿcⁿ. Take away the write capability, it reduces to a FSA, capable of only recognizing aⁿ. Strip away the random access, languages recognized reduce to aⁿbⁿ.

Turing machines never have infinite states. No model for a computing machine has infinite states. What can be infinite is

input set (can be infinite in any case)
output set (can be infinite in any case)
memory (aka. internal storage, is infinite only starting from push down automata)

Consider the problem of having infinite states in Raymond style: What would happen if a machine could be constructed which had infinite states?

There would be no way to encode those states in any base. A simple state machine can be encoded in ceil( log2(states) ) number of bits. This number is always infinite for infinite states.
The machine's control would alone require infinite storage.

A facility turning a foul: Day 2

Sat, 14 Apr 2007 15:15:02 GMT

Yesterday, I wrote about how a stupid message is causing chain SMS in even stupider customers. Now, it seems people are coming up with all sorts of funny explanations which lack the elegance of educated nature.

I received a SMS telling me that the sender heard it from his close friend that he talked to two eye witnesses of that phone call death. Quite a short chain of trust, don't you think? Only four hops to the victim! Would you believe that I heard from my second cousin's uncle who heard it from his friend that he worked with an eye witness who saw aliens landing in Mexico? It's the same sort of junk. When I pointed it to him, his story changed and he said he heard it from top RF and Telecom engineers.

Human ears are only capable of hearing from frequencies 20 Hz up to 20-22 kHz. Exact values are different for individuals but these ranges have the most consensus. Infrasonic can only be felt but don't have enough energy to cause any damage. Ultrasonic bounce off various body structures very badly, not imparting much energy during the process. In terms of power (or loudness) we can endure up to 90 dB easily and sounds between 90 dB and 120 dB damage hairs inside inner ear and about 120 dB, all bets are off. No mobile phone can emit even 90 dB during a call which is the level of noise when a jet engine passes overhead. I am not talking about souped up MP3 players which happen to include cellular functionality just by incident. Land lines clip the frequency of captured voice to 4 kHz, the reason your modem cannot go about 64 Kbps. Cell phone have even worst reception and transmission. Note that it is the carrier that is limiting the frequency not the device, this filtering happens in telephone exchanges over which you have no control. Even if you heard 90 dB from a source over which you had total control, you would shut it in a matter of seconds. It annoys that much! Below that level, there is no permanent damage. Therefore, I reject the theory of some voice causing damage.

Turning to the other agent the mobile carrier. I don't have precise data about the frequency ranges used in transmission and receiving, but it isn't enough to cause damage to anything in such a short time period. It is claimed that the caller is bypassing all these filters, but cell phones also have embedded decoders and prefilters which reject everything above a cutoff frequency in the range 4 kHz to 8 kHz. There is no way such an ultra hi-fi (pun intended) frequency could damage neurons or hair cells inside ears. These days, we work in an environment immersed in wireless traffic. Talk about cell phones, garage door openers, TV remote controls, cordless phones, IR file transfer among mobile devices, blue tooth, wireless USB, wireless LANs, IR connected devices, WI-Fi, microwaves, radios, Walkie talkie, satellite communication, microwave background, RFID chips, speed guns for traffic police, advanced burglar alarms and many more. If cell phones are danger to human health some of these things have a much higher potential for causing death than cell phones. If you are so much concerned about it, use a closed user group, a white list for outgoing calls and another white list for incoming calls.