Ramblings & ephemera
From James Bennett’s “Let’s talk about Python 3.0” (The B-List: 5 December 2008):
There’s an old joke, so old that I don’t even know for certain where it originated, that’s often used to explain why big corporations do things the way they do. It involves some monkeys, a cage, a banana and a fire hose.
You build [...]
Posted on December 7th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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Posted on November 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Christopher M. Fairman’s “Fuck” (bepress Legal Series: 7 March 2006):
The PTC [Parents Television Council] is a perfect example of the way word taboo is perpetuated. The group’s own irrational word fetish - which they try to then impose on others - fuels unhealthy attitudes toward sex that then furthers the taboo [...]
Posted on November 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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Posted on November 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Jared Jacang Maher’s “DIA Conspiracies Take Off” (Denver Westword News: 30 August 2007):
Chris from Indianapolis has heard that the tunnels below DIA [Denver International Airport] were constructed as a kind of Noah’s Ark so that five million people could escape the coming earth change; shaken and earnest, he asks how someone might go about [...]
Posted on November 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Richard Stallman’s “Transcript of Richard Stallman at the 4th international GPLv3 conference; 23rd August 2006” (FSF Europe: 23 August 2006):
I hope to see all proprietary software wiped out. That’s what I aim for. That would be a World in which our freedom is respected. A proprietary program is a program that is not free. [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Richard Stallman’s “Transcript of Richard Stallman at the 4th international GPLv3 conference; 23rd August 2006” (FSF Europe: 23 August 2006):
Specifically, this refers to four essential freedoms, which are the definition of Free Software.
Freedom zero is the freedom to run the program, as you wish, for any purpose.
Freedom one is the freedom to study the [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Ian Urbina’s “High Turnout May Add to Problems at Polling Places” (The New York Times: 3 November 2008):
Two-thirds of voters will mark their choice with a pencil on a paper ballot that is counted by an optical scanning machine, a method considered far more reliable and verifiable than touch screens. But paper ballots bring [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Jill Lepore’s “Bound for Glory” (The New Yorker: 20 October 2008):
The biography was published in 1817 as “The Life of Andrew Jackson.” The next year, Eaton was rewarded with an appointment to a vacant seat in the United States Senate. In 1823, Jackson was elected as the other senator from Tennessee, and followed his [...]
Posted on November 24th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Joshua Green’s “The Amazing Money Machine” (The Atlantic: June 2008):
That early fund-raiser [in February 2007] and others like it were important to Obama in several respects. As someone attempting to build a campaign on the fly, he needed money to operate. As someone who dared challenge Hillary Clinton, he needed a considerable amount of [...]
Posted on November 24th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Vassilis Prevelakis and Diomidis Spinellis’ “The Athens Affair” (IEEE Spectrum: July 2007):
On 9 March 2005, a 38-year-old Greek electrical engineer named Costas Tsalikidis was found hanged in his Athens loft apartment, an apparent suicide. It would prove to be merely the first public news of a scandal that would roil Greece for months.
The next [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Shane Harris’ “China’s Cyber-Militia” (National Journal: 31 May 2008):
Computer hackers in China, including those working on behalf of the Chinese government and military, have penetrated deeply into the information systems of U.S. companies and government agencies, stolen proprietary information from American executives in advance of their business meetings in China, and, in a few [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From James Turner’s interview with Dr. Barbara Simons, past President of the Association for Computing Machinery & recent appointee to the Advisory Board of the Federal Election Assistance Commission, at “A 2008 e-Voting Wrapup with Dr. Barbara Simons” (O’Reilly Media: 7 November 2008):
[Note from Scott: headers added by me]
Optical Scan: Good & Bad
And most of [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Mark Townsend and Anushka Asthana’s “Put young children on DNA list, urge police” (The Guardian: 16 March 2008):
Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain’s most senior police forensics expert.
Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland [...]
Posted on November 22nd, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Charles C. Mann’s “America, Found & Lost” (National Geographic: May 2007):
It is just possible that John Rolfe was responsible for the worms—specifically the common night crawler and the red marsh worm, creatures that did not exist in the Americas before Columbus. Rolfe was a colonist in Jamestown, Virginia, the first successful English colony in [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Ryan Singel’s “Point, Click … Eavesdrop: How the FBI Wiretap Net Operates” (Wired News: 29 August 2007):
The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.
The surveillance system, [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Declan McCullagh’s “E-voting predicament: Not-so-secret ballots” (CNET News: 20 August 2007):
Two Ohio activists have discovered that e-voting machines made by Election Systems and Software and used across the country produce time-stamped paper trails that permit the reconstruction of an election’s results — including allowing voter names to be matched to their actual votes.
…
Ohio [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Heather Knight’s “S.F. public housing cameras no help in homicide arrests” (San Francisco Chronicle: 14 August 2007):
The 178 video cameras that keep watch on San Francisco public housing developments have never helped police officers arrest a homicide suspect even though about a quarter of the city’s homicides occur on or near public housing property, [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “First Responders” (Crypto-Gram: 15 September 2007):
In 2004, the U.S. Conference of Mayors issued a report on communications interoperability. In 25% of the 192 cities surveyed, the police couldn’t communicate with the fire department. In 80% of cities, municipal authorities couldn’t communicate with the FBI, FEMA, and other federal agencies.
The source of the [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From James Fallows’ “The $1.4 Trillion Question” (The Atlantic: January/February 2008):
Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, [...]
Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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