If you expressed your support to Terri Schiavo and her parents fight to keep her alive, you may begin to receive a steady stream of solicitations, according to a Local 6 News report.
Terri Schiavo’s parents have agreed to sell their list of supporters to a direct-mailing firm, Local 6 News reported.
Now, are you all done using each other? Good.
From the BBC:
Police in Malaysia are hunting for members of a violent gang who chopped off a car owner’s finger to get round the vehicle’s hi-tech security system.
I guess he was lucky it didn’t use iris recognition.
Done so far:
Today we had a guy spec out a home security system. We’re in what they call a ‘transitional’ neighborhood–while it’s all families immediately around us, a block away is one of Austin’s housing projects, and the kids get the bus from the stop at the end of the street. While I don’t want to be a yuppie prick, I’m conscious of the fact that I’m setting up an office full of tempting computer equipment. So, sensors on both of those windows… But I promise not to drive the BMW to Starbucks.
We’ve got quite a lot of stuff to get rid of, annoyingly enough. A microwave (the kitchen came with one built in above the oven), a cafe-style table with two stools, some folding chairs, a rug, that sort of thing. I’m also going to try and simplify a bit, get rid of the rather excessive number of devices for playing shiny silver discs, and get a single universal player.
The train is audible in the evenings; you don’t hear the train itself, but you can hear the horn. Then again, you can hear train horns in most parts of central Austin, and I’d rather have occasional trains in the evening than a constant rumble of traffic. The neighborhood dogs are louder.
Another noise nuisance is the peacocks. I kid you not, a restaurant a block or two away keeps peacocks, and apparently allows them to wander the street. If you’ve never heard a peacock crowing in the morning, it sounds a bit like a distressed kitten with a PA system. Once I dig out the MiniDisc recorder I may make some recordings.
We tried our new oven tonight. I had no idea that food cooked in an expensive oven might actually taste better than food cooked in an old cheap oven–but it does. It was amazing.
I only bought it last year, and already my Netgear WGR614v2 router is crapping out. It worked OK in Cambridge, but the new faster net connection seems to be giving it trouble, and if I open too many HTTP connections–say, to check a whole bunch of RSS feeds, or use BitTorrent–it crashes. This sucks.
About the last thing I want to do is spend more money right now, but it’s really looking like I need a better router. The Linksys WRT54GS seems to be the top choice, as it runs embedded Linux and hence is pretty reliable (plus, Linksys is a division of Cisco). Reviews suggest that the customer support is hopeless and the configuration is arcane, but I can live with those features as long as the damn thing actually works.
From The Jewish Ethicist:
Q. I’m a corporate lawyer new to the Jewish dating scene. My suggested date gave me a lengthy questionnaire. Am I allowed to bill the time it takes to fill out and deduct it from the cost of dinner?
I don’t know where to even begin. But the reply boggles my mind just as much:
[...] singles who use these exclusive screens are able to find many more prospects, go out with many more dates, and are successful in delaying marriage for much longer.
Delaying marriage is the success criterion for dating?
As you are a lawyer, I don’t need to tell you that you should insist that your date sign a non-disclosure agreement regarding the content of the questionnaire. [...] The most ethical solution is to calculate the amount of money people are normally paid to fill out dating questionnaires in the marketplace.
If the questionnaire respondent is a woman, then the same principles apply in reverse. You should demand a more expensive dinner to cover your paperwork expenses.
I can’t help feeling that if someone made a joke about this in a TV show or movie, they’d be lynched for being anti-semitic.
Time Warner turned up yesterday and hooked up the Internet. We now have a nice, reliable high-speed connection again. There seems to be nobody in WiFi range who has a wireless access point; either that or they’re not broadcasting SSIDs. Reception is fabulous throughout the house. The modem and router are in the office, and I have the music server up and running again.
It turned out that Time Warner have some kind of lock on their back-end systems to restrict the allowed set of MAC addresses for cable modems. If your modem isn’t on their approved list and in the MAC range their system knows about, you can’t use it. So, I now have a surplus US Robotics USR6000 cable modem. eBay time…
On the plus side, the Cable Guy tells me that RoadRunner in Austin includes the cable modem in the cost of the service, unlike Comcast who charged an extra monthly rental fee for a modem. We’ll see.
For once I don’t feel too bad about the $40 hook-up fee, as the cable guy had to string coax from pole to pole using a long metal hook and a tall ladder. He says the signal quality is great, and the download speeds certainly seem spiffy–at least 50% better than Comcast for about the same price.
Unfortunately, Time Warner aren’t so reasonable when it comes to TV. To get the essentials–Cartoon Network, Comedy Central and BBC America plus scrolling program guide–we’d have to pay $68.21 a month, plus another $10 for a DVR. Or, $64 a month and put up with decompress/compress artifacts from using the old ReplayTV.
So, we’d already decided DirecTV with TiVo was the way forward. $41.99 plus $4.99 for TiVo, but it records the MPEG stream direct from the satellite to the hard drive so there’s no quality loss, and you can record two shows at once while you watch a third show recorded earlier. Plus, all the channels are digital quality, unlike with cable.
DirecTV presents its own problems, however. To get the full channel lineup for Austin you need two pieces of coax going from the dish to the receiver, and for the TiVo option you need a phone line too.
The phone line thing wasn’t such a problem. I needed a real phone line for the home office anyway, and SBC may be Satan, but they’re cheaper than Verizon. The TiVo could call out on the office line overnight and that would be fine.
So, SBC came out. They also played the game of running wires from pole to pole. Their technician got the phone connection as far as the outside of the house, but then he hit a snag. However he wired things up outside, no phone service inside; and when he put a signal generator into one of the sockets inside, he got signal on all four wires. I’ve wired phone connections, and I know that that ain’t right–the phone signal should end up across exactly 2 wires.
I tracked down the electricians who wired the house. They came out to investigate, and discovered that whichever of their colleagues had done the job had completely botched it. No two sockets downstairs were wired up the same way. In the end, they opened up and rewired every socket. On the plus side, I found out that although the sockets are CAT-3, the wire in the walls is at least CAT-5e. So theoretically at least, I could switch the wall plates to Ethernet one day and switch the entire telephone network to VOIP.
But not today. TiVo needs a real phone line for its modem, and I want to see how reliable the Internet service is before trusting it for my phone calls.
Since the electricians were at the house anyway, I paid them to run a second coax from the living room to the nest of cables on the side of the house, plus another CAT5e phone connection for good measure. To do this they had to drill down from inside the house, because they couldn’t find exactly the right point to drill up from underneath, and obviously nobody wanted to risk drilling up through the beautiful wood floor.
So right now there’s a missing faceplate and some damage to the drywall, but I can patch that up and put in a 4-hole plate, install an RJ-11 and two coax sockets plus a blanking plate, and I’ll have a nice clean DirecTV hookup point exactly where I need it. The DirecTV installer can stick the dish on the roof, run the wires down the side of the house, and hook it all up from outside without having to drill holes in anything or run unsightly cables inside the house. Free installation sounds great, but I’ve seen what happens when free installation involves routing a cable from your living room to the outside world, and it isn’t pretty.
Could I have routed the extra coax myself? Probably, but what I really paid for was not having to spend an hour of my time doing it, and not having to crawl under the house, where there could be poisonous spiders, 6″ centipedes, snakes, or scorpions.
As part of my mission to bring clarity to the world, let me explain the so-called “302 exploit” you may have heard scare stories about.
HTTP, the protocol used to serve web pages, has two numeric codes that can be returned by the web server to direct the client (browser) to a new URL: 301 and 302.
A 301 redirection means “The page you requested has moved permanently. Please go to the new address I am providing you with, and update your bookmarks.”
A 302 redirection means “The page you requested is temporarily being hosted somewhere else; please fetch the content from the URL I am providing you with. This is still the correct URL for future access, however.”
Suppose a malicious person has a spam site they wish to promote; let’s call it SPAMSITE. He looks at Google’s search results for his choice of keywords, and copies the URL of a site listed quite high up; call it GOODSITE.
Next, he sets up his web server to detect when the GoogleBot crawls his web pages. When that happens, he has his web server issue a 302 redirection. That is, SPAMSITE says to GoogleBot: “The page you requested at SPAMSITE is temporarily hosted at GOODSITE. However, SPAMSITE is still the place you should visit in future to get the content.”
The idea is that GoogleBot then indexes SPAMSITE as if it was the real GOODSITE, and GOODSITE gets dumped from the rankings. Users who search for GOODSITE via Google click on the link for SPAMSITE, which looks like it contains the real content from GOODSITE, but instead they get ads for penis enlargers, Texas Hold’em Poker, and Asian amputee lesbians shaving each other.
That’s the nightmare scenario being screamed to the media. Reality is not quite that simple, however.
Google rates sites according to their “pagerank”–a magic number proportional to how many other sites link to them. The more sites with high pagerank link to a particular page, the higher that page’s pagerank.
So, let’s go back to our earlier scenario. Google has been told that SPAMSITE is the proper URL for GOODSITE. However, chances are there are a lot of sites linking to GOODSITE; and if SPAMSITE has just been set up for hijacking, there won’t be anything pointing at it. So, Google will ignore what SPAMSITE told it, and report GOODSITE as the URL, because it has a much higher pagerank. (Or, so the Google guys say.)
This still leaves one problem scenario: if SPAMSITE can somehow get its pagerank to be higher than GOODSITE, it can push GOODSITE off of the listings and take its place. Of course, it could do that anyway, by serving up a copy of GOODSITE’s content, but 302 allows it to do it without actually committing copyright violation.
So that’s the sum total of the “exploit”: there’s a way to spam Google exactly as if you were using other people’s content, without actually copying that content. Whoop-de-doo.
One thing a lot of people ask is, why not just ignore 302s and always index the destination URL?
Answer: Because it would break a lot of links. For example, the canonical URL of my web site is http://www.pobox.com/~meta/. That URL goes issues a 302 redirect to wherever I happen to be hosting my web site at the time.
Similarly, lots of commercial sites have canonical URLs which they publish, and then redirect to some dynamically generated page in a content management system. For example, IBM.
Recent research reveals that if you have a “white-sounding” name like Emily or Brendan, you are 50% more likely to get invited to a job interview than if you have a “black-sounding” name like Latisha or Jamal.
Of course, it’s easy to criticize others—and fun, too—but less easy to evaluate one’s own implicit biases. That’s where implicit association tests come in.
Through the magic of Macromedia Flash and statistical science, you can now measure your own unconscious bigotry in the privacy of your own home! Find out if US propaganda has you automatically suspecting Muslims! Measure whether you have a secret bias against fat people, or whether you automatically hate skinny women! But remember, you might not like what you discover about yourself…
Set the wayback machine for 1963-03-13…
WOMEN TRADE COMMISSSIONERS ?
Even after some deliberation, it is difficult to find reasons to support the appointment of women Trade Commissioners.
In countries where publicity media is well developed, such as North America and England and where there are no other major drawbacks, such as the Islamic attitude towards women, a relatively young attractive woman could operate with some effectiveness, in a subordinate capacity. As she would probably be the only woman Assistant Trade Commissioner in the whole area, as other countries employ women in this capacity hardly at all, she could attract a measure of interest and publicity.
If we had an important trade in women’s clothing and accessories, a woman might promote this more effectively than a man.
Even conceding these points, such an appointee would not stay young and attractive for ever and later on could well become a problem.
It is much easier to find difficulties, some of which spring to mind are:-
Women are not employed, except to an extremely minor degree, as career Trade Commissioners in any known service;
It is difficult to visualise them as Trade Commissioners, firstly because they could not mix nearly as freely with businessmen as men do. Most mens clubs, for instance, do not allow women members;
Relationships with businessmen would tend to be somewhat formal and guarded on both sides. This would make it more difficult for a woman to obtain information;
It is extremely doubtful if a woman could, year after year, under a variety of conditions, stand the fairly severe strains and stresses, mentally and physically, which are part of the life of a Trade Commissioner;
A man normally has his household run efficiently by his wife, who also looks after much of the entertaining. A woman Trade Commissioner would have all this on top of her normal work;
If we engaged single graduates as trainees, most of them would probably marry within five years;
If we recruited from the business world, we would have a much smaller field from which to recruit, as the number of women executives in business is quite small;
A spinster lady can, and very often does, turn into something of a battleaxe with the passing years. A man usually mellows;
A woman would take the place of a man and preclude us from giving practical experience to one mail officer. She could marry at any time and be lost to us. she could not be regarded as a long term investment in the same sense as we regard a man.
CONCLUSION
It would seem that the noes have it.
—Commonwealth of Australia Trade Commissioner Service memo, 1963-03-13.
U.S. Army soldiers in Iraq filmed themselves kicking a gravely wounded prisoner in the face and making the arm of a corpse appear to wave, then titled the effort “Ramadi Madness” after the city where it was made.
The video, made public on Monday, was shot by Florida National Guard soldiers. They edited and compiled it into a DVD in January 2004, with various sections bearing titles such as “Those Crafty Little Bastards” and “Another Day, Another Mission, Another Scumbag.”
[...]
Documents showed that the Army deemed the actions shown on the video “inappropriate” rather than criminal.
“It didn’t rise to the level of criminal abuse, according to the investigations,” said Lt. Col. Jeremy Martin, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon. “Clearly, the soldiers probably exercised poor judgment … and I’m sure that they were admonished by their command for their actions.”
I can just see Apple’s sales pitch…
iMovie makes it easy to work with the footage of your latest atrocities.