Ramblings & ephemera
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
Filed under: business, history, law, politics | No Comments »
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
Filed under: politics, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
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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From BBC News’ “CCTV boom ‘failing to cut crime’” (6 May 2008):
Huge investment in closed-circuit TV technology has failed to cut UK crime, a senior police officer has warned.
Det Ch Insp Mick Neville said the system was an “utter fiasco” – with only 3% of London’s street robberies being solved using security cameras.
Although Britain had [...]
Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
The phone rings. Denise picks it up.
“Hello? Yes. Yes, I support MoveOn.org. What? Yep! I’ve got my MoveOn dot shirt on right now!”
Related posts
Denise-ism #92
Denise-ism #62
The strictest of teachers
That poor polish sausage
Robin-ism #6
Posted on October 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: language & literature, overheard | No Comments »
From Glenn Greenwald’s “A tragic legacy: How a good vs. evil mentality destroyed the Bush presidency” (Salon: 20 June 2007):
One of the principal dangers of vesting power in a leader who is convinced of his own righteousness — who believes that, by virtue of his ascension to political power, he has been called to a [...]
Posted on October 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, politics | 1 Comment »
From Marc Ambinder’s “HisSpace” (The Atlantic: June 2008):
Improvements to the printing press helped Andrew Jackson form and organize the Democratic Party, and he courted newspaper editors and publishers, some of whom became members of his Cabinet, with a zeal then unknown among political leaders. But the postal service, which was coming into its own as [...]
Posted on October 6th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics, technology | No Comments »
From Jonathan M. Gitlin’s “Does ideology trump facts? Studies say it often does” (Ars Technica: 24 September 2008):
We like to think that people will be well informed before making important decisions, such as who to vote for, but the truth is that’s not always the case. Being uninformed is one thing, but having a population [...]
Posted on October 6th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: education, history, politics, science | No Comments »
From Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “The Florentine” (The New Yorker: 15 September 2008): 92:
… the rules by which conspirators must proceed: confide in absolutely no one except when absolutely necessary, try to leave no one alive who might be able to take revenge, and, above all, never put anything in writing.
Related posts
The Chinese Internet [...]
Posted on September 19th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, history, language & literature, security | No Comments »
According to Mickey Kaus’ Why write about the Edwards scandal? (Slate: 4 August 2008), these are the 6 stages of any political scandal:
… the natural progression in cases like this: 1) Too horrible and shocking; it can’t possibly be true; 2) It’s not true; 3) You can’t prove it’s true; 4) Why are [...]
Posted on September 6th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, politics | No Comments »
I recently posted this to my local Linux Users Group mailing list:
Thought y’all would find this interesting – from http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/05/26/fundraising_excel/index.html:
“A milestone of sorts was reached earlier this year, when Obama, the Illinois senator whose revolutionary online fundraising has overwhelmed Clinton, filed an electronic fundraising report so large it could not be processed by popular basic [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: politics, technology | No Comments »
From George Pendle’s “New Foundlands” (Cabinet: Summer 2005):
Call them micro-nations, model countries, ephemeral states, or new country projects, the world is surprisingly full of entities that display all the trappings of established independent states, yet garner none of the respect. The Republic of Counani, Furstentum Castellania, Palmyra, the Hutt River Province, and the Empire of [...]
Posted on April 13th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, law, politics, weird | No Comments »
