Reasonably Logical

A great example is the Capital Words project. Every wonder what our politicians are actually talking about in Washington but don’t have the time to read the full transcript? This site will tell you in a single word. I really like how they’ve used technology to simply something really complex (congressional transcripts) down to something really simple (a single word.) The result is easily understood by anyone and gives a good insight into the current hot topics on capital hill. Now if only the had source linking…

I encountered this site through the blog of the Open House Project. As I’ve said before, I enjoy reading their articles for the occasional gems scattered throughout. Most of their posts aren’t that useful, but some really make you stop and think.

It’s not often I get spam that makes me laugh out loud. This one did.

From: Friends at Match (.com)
Subject: What does your hand say about you?
Body: Your answer to this question reveals something about your love life. (snip)

*shakes head* Did they really send that out?

One of the worst things you can do by accident on a Unix/Linux box is run the command above. (DON’T! Or I will not be responsible for the consequences.) If you are running as root - you’re not are you? - this command would delete your entire file system. That is, every file you’ve ever created would be gone.

Suffice to say, this is often considered a “Bad Thing”.

I ran across this interesting account of how to undo some of the damage described above. Note: This is really only for *serious* Linux geeks. Frankly, some of what they describe I didn’t know was possible. Then again, I’m barely a Linux user much less an admin.

As a challenge, can anyone tell me why on some Linux distributions the above command will fail part way through? No, its not a safety measure. I’ll give you a clue, where does the “rm” binary live?

In the last 24 hours or so, I’ve discovered two new Thunderbird extensions that I absolutely love. The first is the new Release Candidate for Lightning 0.8 (the calendar extension). (Warning: This is NOT a final release. I would not recommend using it with real data yet.) For years, I’ve been using Sunbird - the standalone calendar from Mozilla. (Lighting & Calendar are developed in parallel by the same team.) However, the integration features this time around might just be enough to get me to switch over. The task integration was a particular improvement over previous versions.

The other extension is Seek. It adds faceted search to Thunderbird. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about how nice it would be to have something like this. (I actually had an extension I’d started myself to do this, but never got very far.) This will completely change how I sort, save, and search my archived mail. Beautiful. (This one is a full release, but is more features are forthcoming.)

Lightning 0.8 RC1: ftp://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/releases/0.8rc1/

Seek: http://simile.mit.edu/seek/

I recently ran across two articles (see below), which reminded me why I post so little personal information online. Once you’ve put something online, you’re trusting that site to both respect your privacy and be secure enough to protect your information. Given all the counter examples, why on earth would you believe either, much less both, of them? My general policy is that I don’t post *anything* online - be it a blog, facebook, or my bank’s site - which I can’t handle becoming public information. This means I don’t post a lot of personal stuff on this blog; I never include my full address in Facebook, and I damn well don’t use my social security number online more than I *absolutely* have to. (That last one is a whole ‘nother issue. Let’s leave it for now.)

On a related note, I did not “come out” on Facebook until I was okay with people finding out. I’ve never really gotten the whole come out online, but not in real life thing. Do your friends not read your Facebook profile? — Sorry, sorta off topic

How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free
By MARIA ASPAN, New York Times
Published: February 11, 2008

The Anonymity Experiment
During a week of attempting to cloak every aspect of daily life, our correspondent found that in an information age, leaving no trace is nearly impossible
By Catherine Price, Popular Science
Posted 02.08.2008 at 12:51 pm

The study below reveals the (not surprising) fact that social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace are actually one of the safer forms of online interaction for kids. Er, duh? I’m glad to see the research is now available to support what I’ve long suspected.
Let’s just see how the talking “news” heads deal with this. Somehow, I suspect they’ll find a way to twist this too. They always do.

Kids safer in social networks than chat rooms
By Darren Osborne
February 06, 2008 03:26pm

My first reaction to the article below was somewhere between “Are you kidding me?” and “Oy vey!”, but once I started thinking about I realized there’s more to it. This - and as much as I hate to say it the American Idol like shows of the last few years - have really starting changing how ‘talent’ is recognized. It used to be a studio would go out and recruit talent. Anyone who didn’t make the cut, didn’t make it. It didn’t matter how good you were, if you pissed off the studio you were sh*t out of luck. With this new style of porn the studio has no real say. If the audience thinks someone is good, they get paid. That totally changes the power dynamic and puts control in the hands of the consumers and actors. Now take the fact that the porn industry has historically led the rest of the economy by three to five years, then think about the implications of *that*.

Do It Yourself! Amateur Porn Stars Make Bank
Web Site Offers Real People Chance to Make Real Money by Making Pornography
By RUSSELL GOLDMAN, ABC News
Jan. 22, 2008

Just got done reading the article below. On one level, cool - it’ll be nice to be able to settle *that* argument conclusively. On the other hand, I couldn’t help dreading the idea of a gay/anti-gay drug. Am I the only one flashing back to the 3rd X-Men movie? You know someone is going to propose it for real at some point. Why do I think I know what radically anti-gay fundies are going to be proposing in a few years?

One question for those of you who actually read my blog: (there are some) Would you take an anti-gay drug? Or for that matter a gay-for-a-day drug? If so, why? Why not?

Study finds gay gene in fruit flies
SUMMARY: Scientists have found that a gene can turn on and off homosexual impulses in fruit flies.
12/11/07, YahooNews

The EFF has an item in their most recent newsletter that really disturbs me. Apparently, the MPAA has gotten a piece included in a congressional higher education bill that would force universities to filter network traffic and provide a pay-per-use music sharing. All this, in the name of copyright protection. I’m sorry, but *fuck* no. Students are citizens just like everyone else. MPAA (or congress) has NO right to force monitoring on them. If any of you reading this are students, I *strongly* recommend you speak up about this. Talk to your senator/representive. Talk to your campus network security group. Hell, just tell your friends about it. So far, this seems to have gone completely under the radar.

EFF Action Alert

Democrats: Colleges must police copyright, or else
Top congressional Democrats put pressure on colleges and universities to stamp out peer-to-peer piracy or lose financial aid for all their students.
By Anne Broache and Declan McCullagh
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: November 9, 2007, 5:41 PM PST

“Trends in Badware 2007: What internet users need to know.”

I got this out of an Electronic Frontier Foundation newsletter. While this isn’t something really useful to me or other technical folks, I am going to be sending this to several of my non-tech friends. I’ve been looking for something like this for years. I’m constantly getting questions on this stuff.