Today Beth and I have been married for four years. Amazing how time flies when you’re having fun!
Also amazing is how much less of us there is (that picture was me about 80 pounds ago, for example)…
Happy Anniversary Babe… Love ya!
If Peter Wallace’s recent experience with hotel access cards is an indicator, leaving your electronic hotel room key behind when you check out could leave you open to identity theft.
Wallace, IT director at AAA Reading-Berks in Wyomissing, Penn. has been bringing a card reader with him on business trips to see what’s on the magnetic strips of his hotel room access cards. To his dismay, a surprising number have contained his name and credit card information - and in unencrypted form.
What’s scary is how easy it is for even a novice to steal this information. He says he bought a $39 card reader at a local retail store and plugged it into his laptop’s USB port. Now when he scans a card, the device inputs the data directly into an open Excel or Word document.
Wallace does mention that it isn’t all hotels that are doing this, and he declined to name the three that he discovered were, but just a word of caution for you travelling folks out there. You may want to carry a strong magnet with you in your travel bag to wipe out the card when you leave the hotel.
Source: Computerworld via Lifehacker
Admiring babies is wrong in one hospital… Don’t dare ask questions or stare at them…
A statement from Calderdale Royal Hospital in Halifax said staff had held an advice session to highlight the need for respect and dignity for patients.
On one ward there is a doll featuring the message: “What makes you think I want to be looked at?”
[...]
“We often get visitors wandering over to peer into cots but people sometimes touch or talk about the baby like they would if they were examining tins in a supermarket and that should not happen.”
A: People should not be touching any infants that aren’t their own anyway, so why are infants in an area accessible to the general public to begin with?
B: So what if they look!?
This is what pre-occupies people’s minds in hospitals in England.
Source: BBC via Tonguetied
Digital File Check is a simple educational tool that aims to guide computer users, many of whom might be new to the world of online music. Digital File Check helps to show how they, or their families, colleagues and friends, can enjoy music and film legally and responsibly without risking legal action by copyright holders.
Digital File Check helps to remove or block any of the unwanted “file-sharing” programmes commonly used to distribute copyrighted files illegally. It also allows the user to delete copyrighted music and video files from the “shared folders” of the computer from where they are commonly swapped illegally on the internet.
As Boing Boing points out in the link to the article, I wonder if they delete your IM clients, e-mail programs, and web-browsers. It cracks me up that people are suing file-sharing network companies. If you think about it rationally for more than eight seconds, the idea is so ridiculous that only a moron could buy into it.
The idea is that you sue the network operators for the content being exchanged on their networks, the idea being that since a crime is being committed with a perfectly legal application, it must therefore be illegal and regulated. Now imagine if someone were to sue GM because their cars were used in the commission of a crime.
Ridiculous? Sure. But it’s the same thing.
People who steal music should be prosecuted. The punishment should fit the crime. And the music industry should not be acting as a vigilante law enforcement entity. It really is that simple.
Source: IFPI via Boing Boing
A judge in San Francisco has thrown out a lawsuit that targeted Visa and MasterCard for a security breach at CardSystems, a payment processor. Here are some relevant quotes to make your blood sizzle:
A California judge ruled Friday that Visa and MasterCard don’t have to send individual warnings to thousands of consumers whose personal account information was stolen during a high-tech heist uncovered earlier this year.
“I don’t see the emergency,” San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer said in rejecting a request for an order against the nation’s two largest credit card associations. “I don’t think there is an immediate threat of irreparable injury” to consumers.
The ruling represents a setback for a consumer lawsuit targeting Visa and MasterCard for a computer security Security, strength, a lower TCO: find out about all the advantages of IBM Middleware on Linux. breakdown that occurred between August 2004 and May at CardSystems Solutions, a payment processor for merchants.
He doesn’t see an emergency. Let that one sink in. He doesn’t see an emergency and he doesn’t think there’s a possibility of irreparable damage to consumers from having their credit card information stolen from a payment processing firm for the two largest credit card companies in the country. It gets worse:
Both Visa and MasterCard argued they shouldn’t be obligated to send the notices because they don’t have direct relationships with the account holders, whose cards were issued by thousands of banks that belong to the associations.
So Visa and Mastercard both don’t have direct relationships with me, the consumer. I’m sorry, but if you’re passing transactions with my name on them through your systems, that’s direct enough for me. If you contract out the idiots who can’t keep their data safe, that’s direct enough for me. And if you contract someone out who’s retaining data they shouldn’t be, that’s direct enough for me.
Just for a refresher, CardSystems processes card transactions for MasterCard and Visa. The breach in question occured when data that was stored at CardSystems was stolen from their servers. The clincher is that CardSystems was never supposed to have this information beyond the point of the transaction. In fact, they’re supposed to purge their systems after the transaction and not keep any records of it.
They didn’t. And because of it, thousands of cardholders had their information exposed.
This judge seems to think, however, that the information doesn’t present a real problem, and agrees with the card companies that a press release is good enough. The card companies also panicked that…
If individual notices were sent, more customers might request a replacement card — something that could be expensive for the industry. Each replacement account costs about US$35.
So… To recap… A card company’s transaction processing firm screws up and Mastercard and Visa, who don’t have a direct relationship with you despite having all your information, don’t want to cop to the mistake because it’s expensive to fix it. Can you imagine if everyone had that mentality?
In his oral ruling, Kramer criticized the consumer lawsuit for being too vague.
“We have a complex case with complex legal questions that got wrapped into a ball and rolled in here,” Kramer said. “It’s just not presented in a way that a court can rationally deal with at this time.”
Sure. Whatever. This definitely couldn’t have been dealt with. At least not when you have a judge who seems to think stealing credit cards is okay. Hey judge… Why don’t you leave your cards taped to the front of the bench so everyone can read the numbers? I mean, since it’s not a big problem and all, and you have nothing to worry about in the end…
Source: Technews World via Dvorak
Sometimes the obvious can be stated so succinctly that it’s nearly sublime…
Your digital camera does no good sitting on top of your bureau. If your camera is too big or too bulky to take everywhere, consider trading down to a smaller unit. The market is full of “compact” units with excellent optics and resolution. I personally chose a 4-MegaPixel Canon Elph because of its pocket-friendly nature. You can’t snap photos when you don’t have a camera with you.
Amen.
You know, I’ve learned to do that myself. I have a full-sized digital SLR that cost me $1000. I love it. I think it takes amazing pictures. But, for day to day use, I carry a very small Konica Minolta camera. It’s my constant companion and I wouldn’t even think of not having it with me practically at all times. You can’t take a picture if your camera isn’t witcha, and I’ll tell ya; were I not carrying mine as regularly, I’d miss a lot of the shots I’ve enjoyed the most.
It’s something to consider as you purchase a camera, or as you stare at yours across the room wondering when it’ll get up on its own and start taking pictures.
Here’s a hint…
It won’t…
Source: Lifehacker
When it’s a black community doing it to a white lesbian, of course…
ST. PETERSBURG - A town hall meeting with City Council candidate Darden Rice turned ugly after some audience members criticized her for being white and a lesbian.
The meeting, held at the Enoch Davis Center Tuesday night, attracted about 40 people. Among them was Theresa “Momma Tee” Lassiter, an outspoken city activist.
During the question-and-answer session, Lassiter asked Rice if she was gay. When Rice replied that she was, Lassiter stormed out of the building.
“I answered her question, but she didn’t want to listen to what I had to say,” Rice, 35, an organizer for the Sierra Club who is running for the District 6 council seat, said Wednesday.
Lassiter said she didn’t approve of Rice’s answer. “God’s not down with that,” she said.
Had this been Billy Graham’s group, or someone similar, we all know the outrage this would’ve caused… It got kookier there, though. Here’s more from the “imagine if it was a white christian who said it” department:
Also in the audience at the town hall meeting were several members of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement.
Group members believe a white person is unfit to represent District 6, which includes parts of downtown and Midtown and has a predominantly black population.
Karl Nurse, a Rice supporter who was in the audience, said several Uhurus shouted at Rice because of her race.
One person called her family “murderers.”
“This is just straight up racism, and I don’t think we should roll over for it,” Nurse said. “It’s evil. It’s a very offensive argument.”
Dwight “Chimurenga” Waller, the Uhurus’ president who is also running for the District 6 seat, was not at the meeting and said he couldn’t comment on what happened. But he did say he believes Rice should not represent District 6 because of her race.
“She’s part of the attempt to take over the African community,” Waller said. “It’s the same oppressive politic.”
Take over the African community?
*Yawn*
Someone get that moron a compass; he’s on the wrong continent.
Source: St. Petersburg Times
Wal-Mart sucks. They’re about to lay off 4% of their workforce, and they’re citing the increasing costs of minimum wage and other such expenses, bringing their total layoffs for a three year period to six percent of their workforce.
Bastards.
The company also said it expects third-quarter earnings to be in the range of 11 cents to 14 cents a share, compared to 33 cents in the year-ago period. It cited higher-than-expected costs associated with the job reduction announced in May.
Analysts polled by Thomson First Call had been expecting a profit of 25 cents a share.
In September, the company has been faced with a ‘challenging’ advertising environment, said chief executive Janet Robinson, in a statement.
‘To address this, the company is moving aggressively to reduce costs across all its business units,’ she said.
Wait… Janet Robinson… She doesn’t work at Wal-Mart… She works at… Oh… That’s right… She works at the New York Times… No wonder you didn’t hear much about this in our fine media…
And before you lambast me for tricking you, think of your initial reaction when you first read it was Wal-Mart doing this.
You’ve heard of them before. Usually preceded by some ACLU talking head, we hear about how the mere mention of God within twenty miles of Michael Newdow is some strange violation of his constitutional right to live with his head up his ass or something similar. These types of press conferences and announcements usually are the forebearer to some new “all or nothing” policy which ends up being “nothing” because “all” is too difficult.
Either we can salute Che Guevarra, or we can’t have any leaders’ pictures hanging in a classroom.
Either we pray to Mecca and acknowledge the presence and importance of Allah, or we cannot mention a God that might sound Judeo Christian.
But it gets stranger, also. We’ve heard numerous times that not teaching in the language of Spanish is unfair to kids who don’t speak English and who might be from immigrant families, as if no immigrant child has ever had to learn English in school before. The buzz word, of course, is inclusiveness, and we go through great lengths to make sure we are as “inclusive” as possible; inclusive usually meaning suppressing one belief and lauding another.
In Hollister, California, there is a very fair, equitable, and dare I say, inclusive policy in place. You are not allowed to wear a flag of any kind on your clothing at all in school.
Period.
Now, the idea that a student in the United States of America cannot wear an american flag on their clothing in a taxpayer funded public school just puts me over the edge, but I’m willing to accept the policy on fairness grounds. I mean, after all, if we can’t wear the flag of the country that provides that free education, why should we be allowed to wear a Chinese banner?
Well, it seems that the policy, as simple and as universal as it is, isn’t inclusive enough for Hispanic Rabble Rousers Activists who believe that the policy needs to be more inclusive. How you can say a policy that equally applies to all is not inclusive is beyond me, but so be it.
Jean Burns Slater points out that the policy is as fair as fair can be:
SBHS Superintendent Jean Burns Slater said that a student who wore a T-shirt depicting the American flag would be treated the same as a student who wore a Mexican flag T-shirt.
“I would ask them to change their clothes,” she said.
Slater also pointed out that students are allowed to wear the colors of the Mexican flag - or any other flag for that matter - just as they are allowed to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day, but not Irish flags.
So the question is… What does inclusive mean? By citing inclusiveness as their gripe, the “activists” create the impression that Mexican students are being left out of something. I find it hard to see where they’re being segmented from the school population. Frankly, this is America, and if a student can’t wear an American flag, I can’t see one logical reason for them to be able to wear a Mexican one…
Of course, this is California where saying “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance is a constitutional crime, but dressing kids up like Muslims, making them pretend to commit Jihad, and learn the ways of the Koran isn’t, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
Source: Hollister County Free Lance via TongueTied
I should have spent most of my afternoon in the hospital. It all started when I went to the grocery store to pick up some low-carb bread (which is really tasty, although it doesn’t have much of a shelf life). As I was walking down the soup aisle, a can of tomato soup flew off of the shelf and beaned me in the side of the face. As blood started trickling down my cheek and onto my lips, I was able to read the label on the container (which was rolling around on the floor): “Save money if you buy me today!” Fair enough. I kicked it to the side and continued on my journey.
You would think that this is just a sad story of misfortune. It’s not. Go read the rest of it. The payoff is worth it.
Boulders tumbling down an antarctic slope left tracks that weren’t there two years ago. New impact craters formed since the 1970s suggest changes to age-estimating models. And for three arctic summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Earth’s south pole have shrunk from the previous year’s size, suggesting a climate change in progress.
Unbelievable. How much more evidence are we gonna need that we’re destroying our planet? I think it’s high time we stop ignoring the obvious.
So, this morning I didn’t have a chance to read my “newspaper feeds” before I left the house and wrote about Cindy Sheehan gettin’ roughed up by the five-o. Well, turns out one of her supporters is actually the one who “roughed her up.”
Via Newsday:
Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan was roughed up at a Union Square rally on Monday, not by police officers who broke up the event, but by one of her own supporters.
Sheehan — whose eldest son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, 24, was killed in Iraq last year — was ending a speech when a group of officers surrounded 100 or so people attending the event.
As police officers arrested the event’s organizer, several of Sheehan’s assistants rushed to pull her out.
“I was speaking and someone grabbed my backpack and pulled me back pretty roughly,” said Sheehan…
Now… How many of the folks who jumped all over that story do you think are gonna print this followup?
On a related side note, Indymedia was sure to whip out the “repression” tag for this story and created the impression that it was police brutality and so on. So far, no corroborating evidence of these “facts” exists.
Much has been made of the “citizen journalism” movement, and to a degree it’s warranted. However, much of its credit lately seems to be the mainstream morons trying to figure out how capitalize on the free news gathering of the average joe.
Their big chance, however, came over the weekend at the Cindy “I liked the president before I stopped liking him and was brainwashed by Moveon.org” Sheehan “peace rally.” Apparently, the NYPD, who has a reputation of charging into public gatherings they don’t like, busted up the rally because the great one, Cindy Sheehan, didn’t have a permit to use a PA system at Union Square.
THOUSANDS of people were there. THOUSANDS of them with cameras. Video cameras. Still cameras. Digital cameras. Camera phones. Number of pictures that back up the claims of all the articles claiming Sheehan was “roughed up?”
Zero.
John Dvorak posted a story from ABC News on his blog, and asks that very question.
In fact, in the comments of his blog, someone posted a 4 minute video of the police busting up the rally. Every camera around them was trained on the officers, and nothing was captured. Nothing. So what happened? And with all the media outlets that are playing the story that Cindy got roughed up (and in NYC, this was big news, believe me), where is the evidence?
Finally, check out Indymedia, who if there was brutality of any kind would be all over the story like white on rice, had some pictures up, but none of them violent, rampaging, etc. Not one. Rampaging NYPD. Claims of over-aggressive treatment.
Number of photos or videos backing up that statement?
Zero.
And it wasn’t for lack of documentation of the event.
Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? I mean, with all these “citizen journalists” crawling all over the place, why wasn’t there more documentation of the events of the day? Actually, it doesn’t make me wonder. I already know why.
Because it didn’t happen.
Mr Jobs said that by cutting out manufacturing jobs, selling through iTunes was already proving lucrative for record companies.
“So if they want to raise the prices it just means they’re getting a little greedy,” he said.
[...]
“We’re trying to compete with piracy, we’re trying to pull people away from piracy and say ‘you can buy these songs legally for a fair price’.
“But if the price goes up a lot, they’ll go back to piracy. Then everybody loses.”
Steve Jobs is my hero. There is, however, one thing he’s not fully understanding here. The record industry isn’t about satisfying customers, it’s about controlling the means of distribution to the very last possible variable. With iTunes, they don’t have that option, and the distribution model, while perfect for consumers, is scary as hell for them because they have zero control over it.
The other bad part for the record companies is that they can’t jack the prices up as they want. The iTunes music store is what it is because of its flat 99 cent pricing scheme. If you figure it, why would record companies want to charge more than that per song? It costs them nothing to produce a file, the files aren’t freely copyable, and they don’t have to supply the means to distribute it.
One word: greed.
Steve Jobs is my hero.
Source: BBC
Apple Computer Inc.
is on track to ship Intel-based computers as targeted by June 2006, Chief Executive Steve Jobs said on Tuesday. “We are on track to do that,” Jobs told a news conference in Paris, referring to the plan the company announced in June this year.
I cannot wait. Cannot wait at all. Getting rid of my iBook was the worst decision I ever made.
Source: ABC News
Workers are more like to indulge in risky Internet behavior — surfing to unknown or even suspicious sites, for example — when they have an IT department behind them to clean up their mess, a recently released study claims.
According to the July study — which was released Tuesday by Tokyo-based Trend Micro and based on polls of 1,200 users, 400 each in the U.S., Germany, and Japan — 39 percent of enterprise workers believed that their company’s IT department would keep them safe from viruses, worms, spyware, spam, and phishing and pharming attacks.
That confidence, whether on the mark or misplaced, leads workers to do risky, even stupid, things at work, such as opening questionable e-mail messages or clicking on unknown Web site links.
Out of those who admitted to unsafe surfing, 63 percent acknowledged they took the risk because IT had installed security software on their computers, for instance. Meanwhile, 40 percent of risk-takers admitted they did so because IT was available to provide support if problems occurred, essentially providing a backstop.
Say no more. I’ve seen it first hand. “Don’t worry, Vinny can fix it.”
Oh yeah. It’s my life.
Source: Information Week via /.
Jamika Burge is heading back to Virginia Tech this fall to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science, but her research is spiced with anthropology, sociology, psychology, psycholinguistics - as well as observing cranky couples trade barbs in computer instant messages.
“It’s so not programming,” Ms. Burge said. “If I had to sit down and code all day, I never would have continued. This is not traditional computer science.”
For students like Ms. Burge, expanding their expertise beyond computer programming is crucial to future job security as advances in the Internet and low-cost computers make it easier to shift some technology jobs to nations with well-educated engineers and lower wages, like India and China.
“If you have only technical knowledge, you are vulnerable,” said Thomas W. Malone, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of “The Future of Work” (Harvard Business School Press, 2004). “But if you can combine business or scientific knowledge with technical savvy, there are a lot of opportunities. And it’s a lot harder to move that kind of work offshore.”
Ms. Burge’s research, for example, is in a hot niche called computer-supported cooperative work, which studies the ways people use technology to communicate and collaborate in work groups and social networks. She spent the summer as a research intern for I.B.M., and her job prospects seem bright.
On campuses today, the newest technologists have to become renaissance geeks. They have to understand computing, but they also typically need deep knowledge of some other field, from biology to business, Wall Street to Hollywood. And they tend to focus less on the tools of technology than on how technology is used in the search for scientific breakthroughs, the development of new products and services, or the way work is done.
In other words, if your only claim to IT fame is that you’re a great computer guy, well, you’d better get hopping learning another trade. I happen to be an IT field person, but I also have an extensive and reasonably thorough knowledge of my industry, wireless communications. If I didn’t have that, I’d be like so many other people who graduated college with some sort of MIS degree…
…Jobless…
Read the rest of the article. It’s interesting.
Source: NY Times