February, 2006 archive

Follow the link for useful information to determine whether your version of Java is vulnerable and to see how to get the fixes. And the author is right: The Sun website is somewhat confusing indecipherable.

Sun Microsystems issued updates to fix seven serious security problems with its Java software that nasty Web sites and online attackers could use to take over machines running the software.

From Security Focus, something to chew on:

The Google subpoena fight isn’t really about the anonymous data at issue here today. It is really about the way the government can “deputize” unwilling private companies who collect and maintain massive databases to act as their agents in the future. Want someone’s credit report? Don’t subscribe to Experian and subject yourself to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, just whip out a subpoena. Want to engage in massive warrantless domestic surveillance of e-mail communications? Don’t mess with FISA, Title III, ECPA, or even any Presidential inherent authority. Just pass a law (like the ones just passed in Europe) mandating that ISPs and phone companies retain such data, and then subpoena not just one person’s emails, but everyone’s – as long as it is relevant to some issue in some litigation somewhere. Let’s just create a single massive database of what everyone is doing all the time, and let anyone “dip” into it whenever it is deemed to be relevant to settling some dispute.

TOKYO (Reuters) – “Welcome home, Master,” says the maid as she bows deeply, hands clasped in front of a starched pinafore worn over a short pink dress.

This maid serves not some aristocrat but a string of pop-culture-mad customers at a “Maid Cafe” in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, long known as a Mecca for electronics buffs but now also the center of the capital’s “nerd culture.”

“When they address you as ‘Master’, the feeling you get is like a high,” says Koji Abei, a 20-year-old student having coffee with a friend at the Royal Milk Cafe and Aromacare.

(As you can see, I’m catching up on my Guardian reading tonight.)

Well worth thinking about:

“We can’t leave Iraq. We simply can’t,” says Colonel Wilkerson. “We’re there, we’ve done it, and we cannot leave.” Kerry’s position is similar. A Pew research survey in December showed that 48% of Americans believe that invading Iraq was wrong. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll last week revealed that 57% of Americans support military intervention if Iran builds itself a nuclear capability.

With each exposé of torture, subjugation, blunder and plunder you keep hearing that Americans have lost their innocence. Somehow they always find it again just in time to buy into the next bad idea.

Isn’t it time to start thinking critically?

From The Guardian, 1865:

From that evening Beethoven would not give another concert. The deaf master could no longer hear his own music. This was particularly remarkable in the first allegro [of Fidelio]. Without knowing it, he was already from 10 to 12 bars in advance of the orchestra when it began the pianissimo. Beethoven, to signify this in his own way, had crept under the desk.

From the New York Times (registration required):

Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers.

America Online and Yahoo, two of the world’s largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.

And the internet falls into the hands of the corporations.

Sheesh.

The Onion’s prediction was wrong.

The Sprint “crime deterrent” ad is the best so far. GoDaddy is number two.

(See the ads here.)

I hope I’m as spry as Mick Jagger when I’m his age. Damn, I must not have had enough sex, drugs, and rock and roll when I was younger.

All the ad agencies in the world can’t make Pepsi taste better than Coke.

The true Mission Impossible: “Earth to Tom Cruise. Earth to Tom Cruise . . .”

Anheuser-Busch has lost its touch (except for any ad involving the Clydesdales). It’s time to bring back the Bud Bowl. Or the frogs, or something.

Ameriquest is under investigation. Their ad agency should be, too.

The Hummer ad had it right. They are monsters. Reminds me of this great old movie.

A razor with five blades? This is getting really silly. One blade was enough for my Granddaddy.

Watching the game reminds me of one of the things that disguishes the Baseball Yankees. The pinstripe jerseys show only numbers, not names.

No football game can live up to the Super Bowl hype, unless the 1958 Giants-Colts game could come again. I have grainy black-and-white snapshot memories of that game from my father’s watching it. Including Alam Ameche’s game-winning touchdown.

This has been a damn good game. Even though no game could live up to the hype.

If Unitas had been quarterbacking Seattle, down 11 with a minute to go, Seattle would have had realistic expectations of actually pulling this one out. Johnny U. could do things like that.

Factcheck.org is an arm of the “Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The APPC was established by publisher and philanthropist Walter Annenberg in 1994 to create a community of scholars within the University of Pennsylvania that would address public policy issues at the local, state, and federal levels.”

Their analysis of what Mr. Bush left unsaid last Tuesday is most interesting:

The President left out a few things when surveying the State of the Union:

He proudly spoke of “writing a new chapter in the story of self-government” in Iraq and Afghanistan and said the number of democracies in the world is growing. He failed to mention that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan yet qualify as democracies according to the very group whose statistics he cited.

Bush called for Congress to pass a line-item veto, failing to mention that the Supreme Court struck down a line-item veto as unconstitutional in 1998. Bills now in Congress would propose a Constitutional amendment, but none have shown signs of life.

The President said the economy gained 4.6 million jobs in the past two-and-a-half years, failing to note that it had lost 2.6 million jobs in his first two-and-a-half years in office. The net gain since Bush took office is just a little more than 2 million.

He talked of cutting spending, but only “non-security discretionary spending.” Actually, total federal spending has increased 42 percent since Bush took office.

He spoke of being “on track” to cut the federal deficit in half by 2009. But the deficit is increasing this year, and according to the Congressional Budget Office it will decline by considerably less than half even if Bush’s tax cuts are allowed to lapse.

Bush spoke of a “goal” of cutting dependence on Middle Eastern oil, failing to mention that US dependence on imported oil and petroleum products increased substantially during his first five years in office, reaching 60 per cent of consumption last year.

Smoke and mirrors.

In a story quoting Donald Rumsfeld as saying we aren’t doing well in Iraq because troops are afraid of media criticism:

“This is an area that we don’t do well — we know we don’t do well,” Rumsfeld told a Pentagon briefing, referring to information operations and psychological warfare aimed at foreign peoples and enemies.

“How do we compete in this struggle in a way that can counter the ability of the enemy to lie, which we can’t do, (and) the ability of the enemy to not have a free media criticizing them? You don’t see much criticizing of them.”

“Which we can’t do”?

They’ve been doing it all along. Why stop now?

My two or three regular readers know I have strong feelings on Intelligent Des Creationism.

The local rag had an interesting story today on String Theory, which some Creationists are attempting to characterize as an issue of faith, rather than of science.

The theory of intelligent design is not only not falsifiable; there is simply no way to test it. But that is not the main reason it is not science. The main reason is, that ID does not actually explain anything. When we ask, “Why is the world the way it is?” it answers, “Because it was designed that way.” The world is the way it is because it is that way. That might be the furthest from a useful, satisfactory explanation you can get.

String theory has problems, too. But while intelligent design is untestable in principle, string theory is just really hard. It is quite possible some clever scientist will devise a way to test it. Physicists have some ideas, but it is not going to be easy. In his new book The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, string theory’s inventor Leonard Susskind writes: “To divine the fundamental laws of nature that govern a world 16 orders of magnitude smaller than any microscope will ever see is a very tall order. It will take not only cleverness and perseverance, but it will also require tremendous quantities of chutzpah.”

Coincidently, in a post on Hullabaloo, the poster tristero takes on Creationism and other pseudo phony sciences. The tone of the post if someone more aggressive and derisive than I like, but the research and reasoning are solid.

Those stories that surface from time-to-time that the auto or oil industry bought up the rights to some great invention that would drastically increase gas mileage, thereby cutting into their sales, are pretty much uniformly bunk.

Nevetheless, this little project at the Philadelphia Auto Show this week is not bunk:

One of the most impressive cars at this week’s Philadelphia Auto Show doesn’t come from Japan, Germany or Detroit.

It came from the auto shop at West Philadelphia High School.

The car – designed and built by students in the school’s Academy for Automotive and Mechanical Engineering – delivers more horsepower than some Porsches and gets gas mileage comparable to a Toyota Prius. It runs on fuel made from soybeans.

(snip)

“This is off-the-shelf technology, and we’re not 180 I.Q. people around here,” said Simon Hauger, a physics teacher who is the West Philadelphia automotive program’s administrator.

“We’re super low-budget,” he said, so automakers “should be cranking them out.

“Who wouldn’t want a cool sports car hybrid?”

You can see a flash presentation on the car here.

I mentioned earlier Mr. Bush’s tendency to say whatever he thinks persons like to hear, then go and do whatever the heck he wants to do, regardless of his word.

Mr. Bush said this Tuesday:

Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. Here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.

The best way to break this addiction is through technology. Since 2001, we have spent nearly $10 billion to develop cleaner, cheaper, more reliable alternative energy sources — and we are on the threshold of incredible advances.

And he did this:

The Energy Department will begin laying off researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the next week or two because of cuts to its budget.

A veteran researcher said the staff had been told that the cuts would be concentrated among researchers in wind and biomass, which includes ethanol. Those are two of the technologies that Mr. Bush cited on Tuesday night as holding the promise to replace part of the nation’s oil imports.

With a tip of the Hat to Suburban Guerrilla.

Afterthought.

From Blinq:

Why did you give away the franchise?

Always a tough question to answer, why old media have allowed the Young Turks such as Yahoo! and Google to take our news headlines and summaries, package them with ads and personalizable add-ons, and make Wall Street shout while we sing the blues.

An effort emerges to stop the freebies.

The Paris-based World Association of Newspapers has launched a global campaign to oppose the aggregators. It says it is exploring ways to “challenge the exploitation of content by search engines without fair compensation to copyright owners,” according to this Reuters article.

Read the full Reuters article here.

Courtesy the Slackware 10.2 login screen:

Jerseywocky
Paul Kieffer

‘Twas Bergen and the Erie road
Did Mahwah into Paterson;
All Jersey were the Ocean Groves
And the Red Bank Bayonne.

“Beware the Hopatcong, my son!
The teeth that bite! The nails that claw!
Beware the Bound Brook bird, and shun
The Kearney Communipaw!”

He took his Belmar blade in hand,
Long time the Folsom foe he sought,
Till rested he by a Bayway tree
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in Nutley thought he stood,
The Hopatcong, with eyes of flame,
Came Whippany through the Englewood
And Garfield as it came.

One two! one two! and through and through
The Belmar blade went Hackensack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went Weehawken back.

“And hast though slain the Hopatcong?
Come to my arms, my Perth Amboy!
Hohokus day! Soho! Rahway!”
He Caldwell in his joy.

‘Twas Bergen and the Erie road
Did Mahwah into Paterson;
All Jersey were the Ocean Groves
And the Red Bank Bayonne.