I’m surprised Dick Cheney loves to hunt so much. The five times the government tried to give him a gun, he got a deferment.
—Jay Leno
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Top-Secret World Loses Blogger
In short, a consultant got herself fired because she blogged. Ostensibly for blogging on topics not related to work, practically because she strayed from the party line. Seems like a dumb topic to blog about on a government system, an intelligence one no less.
Hackers Face Prison Time For Boosting Grades
A pair of California college students each face up to a year in prison for hacking into a professor’s computer to give out bogus grades to themselves and other students, Los Angeles prosecutors said Thursday.
Perhaps a bit harsh, but then there’s this:
According to Frank Mateljan, a spokesman for the L.A. city attorney’s office who was quoted in the Los Angeles Times, the Ngan and Chen “felt the professor was unfair, and it was on behalf of all the students” that they hacked his system.
Maybe kids should pass an ethics exam before they can enter college. It’s not so much the cheating that annoys me as the lack of a sense of wrongdoing.
I haven’t read this one, but I might pick it up if I see it ....
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen was once famously described as the “conscience of his profession”. In a career spanning four decades, he has consistently addressed issues such as inequality, poverty and the human costs of economic development.
In his new book, Identity and Violence, Sen questions the concept of human identity, showing how a person’s sense of belonging to a particular ethnic, religious or social group can, in certain circumstances, lead them to behave with otherwise unthinkable murderous venom.
I think I’ll do something similar to the quote tags for signatures. Ideally, this would happen automagically or I’ll add a signature tag…
So…
I have spent time that I didn’t have porting my and GM’s geek-type blogs over to EE. I have to admit that it’s ridiculously easy to pick a template from OpenWebDesign and to port it to EE. I even managed to do it for a wiki, which bypasses EE’s template interface in favor of a flat .php file.
What I learned in the process is that the way EE runs multiple sites off a single install differs in a crucial way from Drupal - EE uses a single database shared between all sites, where Drupal uses a database per site (or at least one set of tables per site). Also, EE’s access control is group-centric, i.e. an account can be a member of a single group only, which governs what that user can get to across all sites. In Drupal, a user can be a member of many groups as you care to set up and between that and the fine-grained access control modules like taxonomy_access or organic groups, you are free to create complex access control schemes.
I’m sure that something like Drupal’s organic groups could be implemented for EE, but it’s a daunting task.
Some of these issues could be resolved by using multiple installs of EE, but I can’t justify the associated cost to myself, particularly so given that I have perfectly functional Drupal sites. I could migrate some of the remaining Drupal sites to the free EE Core, but that free version cleverly lacks a crucial feature or other in most cases. I could add a functional equivalent back in, but that idea lacks appeal.
To make a long story short, what I’ll end up doing is the pointy-haired thing - use EE where I can and finally figure out how to theme Drupal.
Feh.
I was preparing a mostly-pre-assembled dinner from Dream Dinners—apricot-glazed pork chops and corn fritters—when I discovered that the dry part of the fritter batter had somehow gone moldy. Ewww. So I took the separate wet part, and just threw together a new set of dry ingredients without looking up a recipe: two cups of flour, a swoosh of sugar,* a big pinch of salt, a teaspoon of baking powder, and a lump of nuked frozen corn. To my astonishment, the fritters actually came out pretty nice.
I’ve always suffered from a confidence deficit in the cooking department, and have never dared to bake without a recipe. I guess I’ve just been watching enough Alton Brown to understand some of the principles.
*You know—the sound sugar makes when you pour some out of a canister.
Don’t know if anybody else follows the torturous nuisance suit brought by SCO against IBM, asking for relief to the tune of a couple billion bucks. Here’s a gem from SCO’s objection to having their case eviscerated:
SCO’s Objection to Order Granting In Part IBM’s Motion to Limit SCO’s Claims
On page 47, they write:
SCO does not and need not assert that it “owned” the methods and concepts; the non-disclosure restrictions on IBM were independent of any question of ownership….SCO need not show that it “owned” the material disclosed, only that restrictions in the license agreements govern those methods and concepts which it has done.
Here’s what I think about SCO’s case:
Our older daughter attends a summer camp at the local Jewish community association. They set up a slalom course at the entrance, which prompted me to ask the guard if they’re now getting into the driver’s ed business, too. Now, it’s sad enough to have that guard in the first place, but it wasn’t until I cleared the gate that I connected the increased security with the shit hitting the fan in the Middle East.
It’s about time to give this site a face-lift. I’ve decided to customize the SpreadFirefox theme, because it seems to be the least buggy of the candidates on my short list. Anybody who cares to observe a work in progress, please be aware that you can override the default theme in the “my account” settings.
Update: Belay that. I’ve switched the site over to the friendselectric theme. I noticed some cosmetic errors with IE, but hey, this site is optimized for Firefox 
Update2: Does anybody have a preference about which blocks should go where at which sidebar, left or right?
Update3: The shoutbox continues to annoy me. One of these days I’ll have to figure out how to streamline it.
As reported by Wired.
Notable quotes:
In a landmark ruling Thursday, a federal judge forcefully refused to dismiss a civil liberties group’s lawsuit against AT&T for its alleged complicity in widespread warrantless government surveillance, despite the government’s argument that the suit could reveal state secrets—a rarely used claim that nearly always terminates a lawsuit.
I suppose the biggest state secret is the large-scale bypassing of the FISA courts. Once that cat is out of the bag, the technical details of the surveillance tools are of commercial interest to security companies, but the biggest secret ain’t no more.
In a 72-page written ruling, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker rejected the government’s argument that merely allowing the case to proceed would cause critical harm to U.S. national security.
I’d like to make the time to read that ruling. For what it’s worth, I agree with Judge Walker.
The decision marks a significant victory for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and puts a rare limitation on the reach of the president’s “state secrets privilege” to sweep alleged illegal government activities under the cloak of national security.
I’m not familiar with the legal and constitutional issues at stake, but following the Bush administration’s line, it would appear that the government whatever it damn well pleases and stonewall oversight by playing the “national security” card. An unintended consequence here is the perhaps remote possibility of a backlash that threatens legitimate national security concerns.
Walker found that the program was not a secret since “public disclosures by the government and AT&T indicate that AT&T is assisting the government to implement some kind of surveillance program.”
What Judge Walker said.
“Dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security,” Walker wrote.
What Judge Walker said.
Walker also denied AT&T’s motions to dismiss the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs can’t prove they were monitored by the program, and that the company can’t be sued for helping the government in good faith.
This remark made me think of the late Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe. The demolition notice, that is…
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