Crypto export lawmakers are RETARDED
I just read this on a piece of ipsec software I’m downloading… The web form makes you agree to the following: Do you certify that you are not located in, or a national or resident of, any of the following countries: Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Serbia, Sudan, Syria and the Taliban Occupied Part of Afghanistan?
If I was, would I tell the truth? And if I’m not telling the truth, what would you do about it? Lawmakers: are you freaking retarded?
This is one of the best board games every made; I can’t possibly see how it would work as an online computer game. With the group dynamics gone I don’t see how this would be any fun. I’m gonna have to give a preemptive thumbs down on this one.
Speaking of board games: Peurto Rico is an excellent new game from Rio Grande Games. If you haven’t played it, run out and buy it, you won’t be disappointed.
Beastie Boys speak out against the war
Way to go B-Boys!
Unfortunately The Slate had a much less positive reaction, calling it a “meek protest song.” The Slate and MSNBC has been really pro-war lately (actually that goes for basically all American news sources), I despised their comments they made about the Pope earlier this week, I thought it was totally innappropriate. I’m not surprised they took this opportunity to take a small stab at the Beastie Boys.
It made me happy to hear their song. Their last two tracks they’ve published (“Alive”, and now this song), both have mellow super-positive lyrics. I’ve always been a B-Boys fan, so I can appreciate their progression to where they’re at now, musically speaking. Dip dip dive; so socialize; open up your ears and clean out your eyes; if you learn to love you’re in for a surprise; it can be nice to be alive.
This is the same thing that X11 can do: You set the screen resolution to particular size, say 640×480, but then your desktop larger, say 1024×768, and then use the mouse to move around the display, giving you a “peephole” view of your desktop. This article proposes a technique for implementing this on a PDA, except without the mouse…. 🙂
US INS sitting on 700,000 change-of-address forms backlog
Thanks Ashcroft, for enforcing laws we don’t have the resources to enforce…
Hey! Maybe Total Information Awareness won’t be so bad if we just don’t fund the program… ;-p
US firms fight over post-war Iraq-reconstruction contracts
The American government is on the verge of awarding construction contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild Iraq once Saddam Hussein is deposed.
Halliburton, one of the companies in the running for the deals, was headed by the US vice-president Dick Cheney between 1995 and 2000. Halliburton has already been awarded a lucrative contract, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, to resurrect the Iraqi oilfields if there is a war.
Heading in the wrong direction
IN 1962 the apartheid regime in South Africa, no respecter of civil liberties, picked up a suspected terrorist leader who had just returned from training in bomb-making and guerrilla warfare in Ethiopia. It marked the start of 27 years in jail, but Nelson Mandela was given access to lawyers and his prosecutors had to follow rules of due process. Last year, the world’s foremost democracy, the United States, detained one of its own citizens, Jose Padilla…
If you accept, as most do, that the war on terrorism justifies wider powers of surveillance and detention, then two principles still need to be applied. First, the government’s new powers should, where possible, be enacted in clearly-worded terrorism laws, passed by Congress. Second, wider powers should be balanced by wider review. Spies, now less constrained, should be more answerable for their actions; suspects, deprived of their lawyers for longer periods, should eventually have more opportunity to present their case to a judge and, where possible, a jury; and the whole process should be subject to political and judicial review.
I just finished writing my first MacOS X app! It’s a simple little X11-style load grapher that sits in your dock I like to call dockload. Check it out! 🙂
Macintosh Open Firmware (OFW) boot password
Neat article from O’Reilly about hacking the Mac’s OFW to support a boot password, and other ways to secure your Mac. (Not like I would ever actually use any of these techniques, I hate dealing with security… you can always pull out the CMOS battery to reset the NVRAM).