Flutterby™! From 2013-11-01 to 2013-11-30

Dear Sen. Feinstein: surveilling Angela Merkel is the NSA's job. Surveilling all U.S. citizens, and lying about it, is not.

[ related topics: Heinlein ]

Mike Rogers (R-MI), chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence: "You can't have your privacy violated if you don't know your privacy is violated.".

Via.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Privacy Real Estate Furniture ]

If you can get past the lurid headline, I Met A Convicted Serial Killer, And He Made Me Feel More Loved Than Anyone Else In My Life is an interesting little look back by a Marine who got cruised in San Diego in 1980...

(Also published as Orange Coast.com: Center of the Universe and

But as fascinating: Jay Roberts, the author, showed up in the Metafilter thread, with a number of good comments, including Ivan Fyodorovich's musings on predators, "active listening", love and feelings of betrayal, and Jay Roberts exploring gender issues a bit:

You know, somebody is making a play for you, you are uncomfortable with it at the moment, but really like the person otherwise & despite the hesitation at the moment, you are also at least a little flattered at the attention. You want to stay but know you should go. You know that no matter what you do, everyone is going to get hurt and you already care for this person enough that you really would rather not hurt them. But you don't want to get hurt either. And you feel that much of the blame belongs with you for letting things get as far as they have, into what is already a no-win situation.

And carmicha talking about a friend's experience with a belligerent female hitch-hiker.

And also from that thread, I learned about Typhoon Tip and the Camp Fuji fire, on 19 October 1979, in Camp Fuji, Okinawa Japan.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama History Pyrotechnics ]

So there's a bunch of fallout here in Sonoma County over an incident in southwest Santa Rosa where a 13 year old boy was carrying an "Airsoft" rifle while walking across a vacant lot, and a long-time Sonoma County Sheriff's Deputy pulled up in a patrol cruiser, and within 10 seconds of calling in to the dispatcher had shot the 13 year old 7 times. The coroner's report says:

During Thursday's autopsy, Dr. Arthur Josselson with the Forensic Medical Group determined one of the fatal bullets entered the right side of Lopez's chest and a second fatal wound was caused by a bullet that entered his right hip, Henry said.

Lopez was also wounded on his right wrist, left bicep, right forearm, right buttocks and right hip, all non-fatal injuries, Henry said. The doctor recovered three bullets from the body.

So the kid was apparently shot in the butt, and spun as he fell. The deputy involved has a long history of espousing the militarization of policing:

The Sheriff's Office confirmed Sunday that Deputy Erick Gelhaus, 48, fired the shots. A 24-year veteran of the office, Gelhaus has been a frequent advocate in his writing for a prepared, aggressive stance in law enforcement, a profession he has described as a "calling" and likened to a "contact sport."

And was a regular columnist for S.W.A.T. Magazine, which breaks down "S.W.A.T." as "Survival Weapons And Tactics", and bills itself as "The Nation's Premier Gun Magazine". So: Mall Cop Monthly. And his Photobucket site has this grisly crosshairs and skull and crossbones version of the "Coexist" sticker.

KQED quotes him from S.W.A.T. (and could just be quoting the Press Democrat article above):

"Today is the day you may need to kill someone in order to go home."

And from a 2005-2006 Firing Line forum discussion:

"It's going to come down to YOUR ability to articulate to law enforcement and very likely the Court that you were in fear of death or serious bodily injury. I think we keep coming back to this, articulation — your ability to explain why — will be quite significant."

He's also mentioned on The Sonoma County Sheriff's "about history" web page:

In 1990, the first members of GRIT, the Gang Resources & Investigations Team (a precursor to today’s MAGNET) were detectives and Deputies Mike Ferguson, Bruce Rochester, Lorenzo Duenas, Dennis Smiley, Perry Sparkman, Joe Raya, Kevin Young, Jon Watson, Erick Gelhaus and Leslie Comrack.

Clearly, the dude is someone you want reaching out to the youth in the community in order to establish relationships and divert them from gang membership...

So, a couple of thoughts here: I know a bunch of kids down in Marin who played with Airsoft BB guns, and they report having had talks and interactions with police down there. Lopez's plastic device didn't have the orange tip, but I've gotta say that when I saw the kids in the woods out in Lagunitas there was a paucity of orange tips there. But, of course, those kids were white....

...and Marin police departments are probably also a lot less gung-ho "let's go shoot something" than Sonoma's. For the longest time, the Petaluma Police Department web page had the scariest-ass Flash slideshow of cops all decked out in paramilitary gear. When this was mentioned as a negative, the response was "well, we need that for recruiting", which, frankly, was even scarier.

No matter what, extrajudicial executions seems like a high penalty for open carry.

An AK-47 with a Walnut stock, the gun that the plastic replica somewhat resembled, is not a light weapon. It's hard to believe that a kid casually carrying the plastic version would look like a kid carrying the real thing.

I'm not a firearms expert. I was taught to shoot a rifle at a fairly young age (which is why the weight of the weapon stood out: The bolt-action .22 I learned on was substantially heavier than even my neighbor friend's wood stock Crossman air rifle/pellet gun (without orange tip)). The extent of my "might be downrange" is that in hunting season in rural New York state you assumed that you were always potentially down range; drunk city-dwellers were notoriously bad about differentiating targets.

But it does seem to me that if we allow police departments to be places where an adversarial relationship with the populace is tolerated, we will end up with more of this.

Anyway, this all ended up as a framing for why I found this link so terrifying: Columbia, SC Police Chief: DrugWar WrongThink Creates Reasonable Suspicion To "Find You". In which a police chief responds to a Twitter correspondent who reacts to a drug bust as:

...worrying about a stoner that's not bothering anyone. It'll be legal here one day anyway.

with the response that expressing that sentiment is

... giving us reasonable suspicion to believe you might be a criminal..

We need to get these fuckers out of policing. And it's going to be a huge institutional sea change.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Quotes Interactive Drama Music Health Invention and Design Bay Area Writing Law Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Community Guns Fabrication New York Race Economics Woodworking ]

George Thomas Thornton, the Oregon highway engineer who made the decision that led to the infamous exploding whale video, dead at 84.

(Also)

[ related topics: Video ]

LA Times: Kremlin slips spying gadgets into G20 summit gift bags, newspapers say, the claim is that there were trojan USB sticks and recharging cables:

A Kremlin spokesman denied the allegations reported by Il Corriere della Sera and La Stampa, both of which attributed their stories to findings of technical investigations ordered by the president of the European Council and carried out by German intelligence.

[ related topics: virus ]

This. This is awesome: Captain Justice Responds to Government's Motion to Ban the Word "Government":

Moreover, defense counsel does not wish to be referred to as a "lawyer," or a "defense attorney." Those terms are substantially more prejudicial than probative. See Tenn. R. Evid. 403. Rather, counsel for the Citizen Accused should be referred to primarily as the "Defender of the Innocent." This title seems particularly appropriate, because every Citizen Accused is presumed innocent.

Direct link to the document on Scribd.

[ related topics: moron Law Law Enforcement ]

Take-out place Real Kitchen of Chicago dresses up as Alinea Restaurant for Halloween (Vimeo Video)

[ related topics: Food Video ]

So can we get a coalition of DAs to go after the "Cannonball Run in 29 hours" guy for reckless endangerment? http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10...angeles-cannonball-speed-record/

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

Geez. Ya make one snarky comment about MongoDB on Twitter, ya get inundated with promoted tweets about it. #TargetedAdvertisingFail

The TSA is attracting violence: can we move them out of airports and other places where bystanders are likely to get hurt? #BushIraqTheory

[ related topics: Aviation ]

Back from the Cinnabar production of La Cage Aux Folles. Very fun.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment ]

It's that season when I really don't want to go to a store, and it'll only get worse for the next two months.

Targeted advertising isn't creepy because it knows who we are, it's creepy because despite all the information we give it, it still doesn't.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising ]

Adam Reich: Will you help my parents (Robert Reich and Clare Dalton) get divorced on Google?

Playing with the fill-in motif for the gate, not sure it reads yet.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Turning the half-gallon of expired half-and-half from the square dancing hall fridge into fresh cheese. Do I turn it into ravioli, or...?

Resolved: That a whole wheat version of the Corriher biscuits is a perfectly acceptable way to use excess whey from homemade cheesemaking.

Letter to Governor Christie from the New Jersey Teacher He Screamed At. Or, what happens when you have a genuine expression of ideas rather than attempting to communicate in sound bites.

I asked you one simple question yesterday. I wanted to know why you portray NJ Public Schools as failure factories. Apparently that question struck a nerve. When you swung around at me and raised your voice, asking me what I wanted, my first response “I want more money for my students.” Notice, I did not ask for more money for me. I did not ask for my health benefits, my pension, a raise, my tenure, or even my contract that I have not had for nearly three years.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Erotic Health Invention and Design Currency ]

New York Times: Herbal Supplements Are Often Not What They Seem:

Of 44 herbal supplements tested, one-third showed outright substitution, meaning there was no trace of the plant advertised on the bottle — only another plant in its place.

Many were adulterated with ingredients not listed on the label, like rice, soybean and wheat, which are used as fillers.

The paper is BMC Medicine: DNA barcoding detects contamination and substitution in North American herbal products, Newmaster, Grguric, Shanmughanandhan, Ramalingam and Ragupathy (2013) (doi:10.1186/1741-7015-11-222), which summarises results as:

We recovered DNA barcodes from most herbal products (91%) and all leaf samples (100%), with 95% species resolution using a tiered approach (rbcL + ITS2). Most (59%) of the products tested contained DNA barcodes from plant species not listed on the labels. Although we were able to authenticate almost half (48%) of the products, one-third of these also contained contaminants and or fillers not listed on the label. Product substitution occurred in 30/44 of the products tested and only 2/12 companies had products without any substitution, contamination or fillers. Some of the contaminants we found pose serious health risks to consumers.

[ related topics: Health Invention and Design Consumerism and advertising New York ]

There's an interesting compass rose like structure in aerial photographs of latitude 16.8650100, longitude 11.9537582 (Google Maps). Here's an interesting dive into the UTA Flight 772 memorial: I Noticed This Tiny Thing On Google Maps. When I Zoomed In… Well, Nothing Could Prepare Me. (the pictures on imgur.com)).

Reminiscent of the U.S. Air Mail markers, giant concrete arrows across the U.S..

[ related topics: Photography Aviation Flowers Maps and Mapping ]

I'm looking at an XML file of data, and with no apparent reason time for the same thing is expressed as:

• <timeStamp>2013-11-04T12:12:18</timeStamp>
• <timeStamp>11/4/2013 11:54:40</timeStamp>
• <timeStamp>11/4/2013 11:54:41\nAM</timeStamp>

Yes, there is a line feed in that third example. Note the lack of a timezone reference. I understand it's not XML's fault, but it is the fault of whatever magic XML/SOAP-ish library is creating the data and the monkey using it.

The sad realization comes when you realize that dispite there being multiple timestamps for each snippit of data: RequestDateTime, ReadingDateTime, CompletedDateTime that there is not the timestamp of the actual reading that is being exported, which in a few cases is days or weeks old, which is the only really important timestamp there is.

So I have a time specific value, without knowing what time that value was valid/relevant... from a system designed by Engineers and PhD's using Java and Oracle. or at least Engineering/Computer Science students.

It isn't the tools fault, but certain tools seem to be used mostly by certain types of people. What I am absolutely sure of is: This system not only met the original very detailed specification, but passed a certification test against standards.

[ related topics: Language Web development Books Content Management Software Engineering Clowns Databases ]

Whenever I've worked on stuff in Python, I've gradually come around to thinking that I should have just written whatever it is I'm working on in C++ instead. As I've gotten totally immersed in Perl, I've started to realize that after the initial regex syntactic sugar, there's a lot that can just be solved by having a well defined C++ library. And a lot that's helped by having strongly typed languages.

Average Coder: Creating a simple and fast packet sniffer in C++ makes me think that really what's missing from C++ is CPAN and a good command-line mode.

[ related topics: Language Books Perl Open Source Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Monty Python Python hubris ]

A bunch of people have been passing this around, and if, like me and like most of my friends, you've got some conflicted feelings about reconciling Ender's Game with the attitudes and opinions of its author (and whether or not you should support the film, and...) this is a good dive into it: Grantland: Ender's Game, its controversial author, and a very personal history.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games ]

Doesn't really read, and definitely doesn't read from the other side.

[ related topics: Photography ]

How TSA Policies Reduce Amtrak-California Ridership and increase driving.

[ related topics: California Culture Trains Public Transportation ]

Remember, remember the Fifth of November. Gunpowder something something something...

Those auto bailouts that were so successful? Cost the U.S. Treasury $9.7 billion. http://www.fool.com/investing/...rly-10-billion-loss-on-gm-s.aspx

[ related topics: moron ]

Twitter needs an "I'd block these people for spamming but they're really too dumb to understand that what they're doing is spamming" button.

[ related topics: Handicaps & Disabilities ]

RT Horton Atonto ‏@crushingbort:

"But Jesus I counted three sets of footprints." Jesus' eyes narrowed as he drew his pistol. "Son of a bitch found us." #NaNoWriMoOpeners

H/T nonelvis.

[ related topics: Religion Humor ]

I, for one, welcome our British glowing bike path overlords.

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

I've been thinking recently about "Personal Clouds" and social media, and how we're going to get to that future. I attribute a good portion of the growth of the early internet (and, before, that, the early BBS scene) to the ability to have the sorts of conversations we couldn't have in real-life.

To some extent, that meant that technical conversation was no longer geographically limited; I could talk about the minutiae of polygon rasterization on X86 architectures with people who weren't whitewater guides in Chattanooga TN, but another large portion was about the conversations outside of the social mores of that time and place.

For instance, Usenet groups like alt.sex.bondage (and alt.sex) were a huge step forward in how a sub-group of people found each other and started having conversations that in modern times are pretty mainstream, but at the time were totally revolutionary and subversive.

I have been hanging out with some of the "Internet Identity" crowd, and the "Personal Clouds" folks, and was a "social media" pioneer back when "weblogs" were called "micro portals", and there's a lot of talking about how we're going to take the net back from the FaceTwitSpacePlus centralization forces, and privacy, and all of that. But now that porn and sex are mainstream, and we've lost the filtering mechanism of the technological hurdle to connect that made some of those early forums special, there's nothing driving a social change to some new mechanism that will provide some of those privacy protections that people are talking about.

And privacy for its own sake doesn't seem to be much of a social motivator unless there are taboos.

Unfortunately, for the dark net right now, many of the taboos are ones I really don't want to enable. The driving forces behind things like Freenet seem to be child porn, not privacy for everyday projects, and givenhow much our social mores have relaxed over the past couple of decades, privacy isn't enough of a motivator that the participants on Flutterby would welcome or use such a presence.

So I've been thinking that the next technological and media revolution may very well be the first one that's not driven by porn and taboos.

But then this morning, Gloria Brame has been playing "what classic art conflicts with Facebook's standards?", Rouseau's Leda and the Swan, Salon de Paris.

And a few days ago I snarked on Twitter that:

.@Johannes_Ernst I'm just going to switch to MongoDB. All the features of http://devnull-as-a-service.com/ at a much lower price.

and have been inundated with MongoDB (it's "web scale") references and advertisements since.

I'm wondering if, perhaps, that sort of prudery coupled with the injection of ridiculously badly targeted ads into our conversations can help move us back towards less mediated conversations, and in the process we can find the way to build technological solutions that made those conversations more private.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Privacy Sexual Culture Weblogs Movies Invention and Design History Journalism and Media Art & Culture Chattanooga Net Culture Community Whitewater ]

BitTorrent Sync beta API now available to developers. Distributed backups with an API... There might be something here.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

KOB 4 On Your Side investigates traffic stop nightmare, in which Deming New Mexico police officers subjected one David Eckert, who allegedly rolled through a stop sign while exiting a parking lot, to multiple anal cavity searches, because he appeared to be clenching his buttocks when he was asked to step out of the vehicle.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Law Enforcement ]

listening to @escapepod episode 419: Soviet era security state Kafka-esque centralized economy stories seem so quaint and naive now.

[ related topics: Pop Culture Economics ]

Anagrams for Dan Lyke: "9 found. Displaying all: Nakedly..." Yeah, that'll do. http://www.wordsmith.org/anagr....cgi?anagram=dan+lyke&t=1000&a=n

Cool spam of the moment: Advertising a Nigerian barrister's services to help you recover from 419 scam losses.

[ related topics: Spam moron Consumerism and advertising Monty Python ]

The creepy side of computing: Realizing my MacBook Pro responds to ambient light, even when I haven't turned on the camera.

[ related topics: Photography ]

F St between 4th and 5th. Just saw two bags of household trash tossed from door of dark or black low slung pickup, "for sale" sign rear win.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

And bike racks full on the 48X, waiting on the 80. Wondering, again, what a workable transit system for Sonoma County would look like.

[ related topics: Bicycling Public Transportation ]

Zeros in JavaScript.

Okay, you TV watchers are probably well ahead of me, but I got a kick out of this Honda ad using forced perspective and anamorphic optical illusions (YouTube).

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Movies Television ]

This is why we've lost the Middle East: Rolling Stone: The A-Team Killings: Last spring, the remains of 10 missing Afghan villagers were dug up outside a U.S. Special Forces base – was it a war crime or just another episode in a very dirty war?

(Via MeFi).

[ related topics: History ]

The barrier to deployment is no longer in the compute, it's in the installation costs. W/no way to amortize that over 100k units...

Archive.org Fire early this morning at the scanning center, nobody hurt. But a major hit to a great cause. The Donate Page even accepts bitcoins...

[ related topics: Weblogs Pyrotechnics ]

Nancy and I bought a new (to us) RV recently, and I'm just jonesing for a serious road trip. It's been too long since long one. I'm having fun tweaking out the RV when were are not working on houses and other projects. Just put in a new water pump, a recumbent friendly bike rack is next. I just found a new informative time wasting website: ModMyRV.com.. I've ready done some of the mods: LED lights, uograded electronics, etc.. but nice to see others doing similar things.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Work, productivity and environment Travel Bicycling Real Estate ]

License-plate-less cars have cost the Golden Gate Bridge $1.2 million this year. The Golden Gate Bridge went to license plate scanning rather than manual ticket takers in March, and:

2011. 80,000 no plate violations.
2012. 108,000
2013. 224,000 (through Oct. 31)

[ related topics: Bay Area Current Events ]

Whoah! 10k cars/day is 5.5 lane/hrs/day. 101 widening > $13.8m/mile Hwy 12 to Old Redwood. Not enough impact fees... http://www.petaluma360.com/art...MMUNITY/131109685/1362/community

[ related topics: Nature and environment Community ]

Fascinating: U.S. life expectancy actually does pretty well if you factor out cars and guns. Our healthcare system isn't as bad as the numbers first suggest: http://www.forbes.com/sites/th...-americans-poor-life-expectancy/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Guns ]

Google enables encryption on communications between data centers in order to foil NSA taps that had been watching those private lines.

[ related topics: broadband Cryptography ]

The Atlantic Cities looks at former police officer Dale Carson's book Arrest-Proof Yourself:

"Law enforcement officers now are part of the revenue gathering system," Carson tells me in a phone interview. "The ranks of cops are young and competitive, they’re in competition with one another and intra-departmentally. It becomes a game. Policing isn’t about keeping streets safe, it’s about statistical success. The question for them is, Who can put the most people in jail?"

[ related topics: Politics Books Games Bay Area Law Enforcement Douglas Adams ]

An assertion that Kickstarter backer Encik Farhan is a scammer. He's allegedly backing a lot of projects at the highest level, and then disputing credit card charges after the rewards have shipped.

At the very least, Kickstarter creators should be able to refuse backing from people they have reason to believe will screw them over.

Ordered a pair of Ubiquiti UniFi APs so that we can do seamless roaming with WiFi calling between house and shop. #fingerscrossed

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

The big "no soliciting" sign is pretty clear, you have to be a special sort of asshole to tell us "but I'm not a solicitor, I'm a canvasser"

Door knocker last night was from Environment California: No 990 or donor privacy policy on their web site, no independent financials audit. Hmm...

[ related topics: Privacy ]

Johannes Ernst reviews the Wansview NCB514W net camera. Which saves me from writing up the same observations over the very similar camera I've got in my workshop.

[ related topics: Photography Weblogs Writing LID (Lightweight IDentity) ]

Slate: Why Does Sweden Have So Many Billionaires? High taxes and a generous welfare state are no barrier to Nordic riches.. Apparently they have more billionaires per capita than the U.S.

Despite having a high tax rate and being hostile to job creators and all that stuff.

[ related topics: Politics Heinlein Government ]

There's a line from Reuters: Exclusive: Snowden persuaded other NSA workers to give up passwords - sources. The short version is that Edward Snowden used a little social engineering to get user names and passwords from 20 to 25 of his coworkers, and apparently none of them reported this behavior, which is a huge lapse in training and procedures, but the money quote is (Emphasis mine):

"In the classified world, there is a sharp distinction between insiders and outsiders. If you've been cleared and especially if you've been polygraphed, you're an insider and you are presumed to be trustworthy," said Steven Aftergood, a secrecy expert with the Federation of American Scientists.

So our entire security apparatus is based on something that's roughly got the same scientific credibility as phrenology?

Seriously, y'all, WTF?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Currency ]

CBS Reporter Apologizes To Viewers For False Reporting On Benghazi

.@TerryAndRob's Raising Steam released in UK now, March 25th in US? Is @DoubledayPub trying to kill indie bookstores and encourage piracy?

I mentioned wanting to improve journalism with a browser plug-in so that we could get regular reminders that the people being quoted in the national media had lied to us, or were espousing theories which had been completely discredited.

XKCD Substitutions has a similar idea, and there is a Chrome browser plug-in to implement it.

[ related topics: Quotes Journalism and Media Archival ]

Business majors pick the weakest passwords.

"Maybe the real state secret is that spies aren't very good at their jobs and don't know very much about the world" http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER

[ related topics: Monty Python ]

Remember earlier this year when the panic of the week was people using 3D printers to make guns? Things settled down when it was pointed out that the sub-$5000 hobbyist printers would only produce a sort of plastic zip gun that was more likely to blow your hand off than get a round off.

Except, of course, progress marches on. According to Instapundit, an outfit called Solid Concepts has printed out a metal version of a Colt 45 that has easily handled at least 50 shots. Yes, this is an expensive industrial grade machine using sintered metal, but we know what is to come. I suspect that the only real bar to more printed firearms is that fact that conventionally manufactured guns are so plentiful there's no point to DIY gunsmithing.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Guns ]

So I looked to a UK retailer, and broke down and bought Raising Steam for the same price it would be locally. @DoubledayPub hates bookstores

And a web search finds agreement: Most of the things that would make my Samsung Galaxy S4 better involve turning off or removing features.

The difference between a bubble and growth is whether the competent manage to cram a miracle under the ignorant irrational optimism.

"If I can't do this, I would prefer to find another service that won't force me to use Google sign-in at all..." http://ask.metafilter.com/2515...e-taking-hostages-counts-as-evil

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

For the first time ever, a prosecutor will go to jail for wrongfully convicting an innocent man. For suppressing evidence that would have exonerated Michael Morton, who then spent 25 years in prison, Ken Anderson will give up his law license, perform 500 hours of community service, and spend 10 days in jail.

What's newsworthy and novel about today's plea is that a prosecutor was actually punished in a meaningful way for his transgressions.

Whether 500 hours and 10 days is a meaningful deterrent for other prosecutors who might be tempted to fudge the facts a little bit, or whether maybe in the ensuing 25 years that Anderson continued as a prosecutor and then as a judge similar decisions to get unethical convictions were made that will never be prosecuted, is left as an exercise for the reader.

But... baby steps.

[ related topics: Law Community ]

Stone Nudes. Calendars and a book of nude people rock climbing.

[ related topics: Books Erotic Sexual Culture Nudity ]

Just realized I'm old enough to terrorize a teenager into dangling off a building, and then say "No, I am your father". #itisuselesstoresist

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Needed: Something that turns the cat in your lap into a functional mousepad/controller, so you can pet the cat and get things done at the same time.

Huh: You make lying illegal and and the market becomes more efficient. Go figure. New York Times: The 2009 Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act Cleared Up Credit Cards’ Hidden Costs:

“I went into the project with this sort of conventional wisdom that well-intentioned regulators would force down fees and that other fees and charges would increase in response,” he told me this week, comparing hapless rule makers to the carnival visitors playing the game known as Whac-a-Mole, where a mole springs up somewhere else as soon as one is knocked down.

And yet they found no evidence that interest charges increased or credit became less accessible. Basically, you force vendors to stop lying, and suddenly consumers can make informed decisions. Go figure.

[ related topics: Games Invention and Design Consumerism and advertising New York Economics ]

Hey, you know those backward countries where the police arrest women for wearing the wrong sort of clothing? Like New York City?.

“Any current issue of a fashion magazine would display plenty of women similarly dressed,” wrote Judge Felicia Mennin in her Oct. 15 decision slamming cops for their sartorial arrest rationale. “However, the choice of such outfit hardly demonstrates the wearer’s proclivity to engage in prostitution.”

Via Jezebel.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Invention and Design Law Law Enforcement Fashion Clothing New York ]

"This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free, but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Goodnight." -- Robertson Davies

[ related topics: Language Theater & Plays ]

Vegetable dyes didn't work very well, so trying milk paint

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

thought it'd be nice to have an extra set of square dance checkers for the car, and then things got out of hand...

[ related topics: Photography Automobiles ]

In honor of Veteran's Day: Shipwright took some pictures of the rows and rows of tombstones near Ypres.

[ related topics: Photography Weblogs ]

First time I've seen someone doing laundry in the Santa Rosa creek alongside the greenway...

[ related topics: Nature and environment ]

I had read through NY Times: Is it O.K. to kill cyclists?

“We do not know of a single case of a cyclist fatality in which the driver was prosecuted, except for D.U.I. or hit-and-run,” Leah Shahum, the executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, told me.

but hadn't linked to it for two reasons:

First, "punishment" is complex: Many of you know that a bit over two decades ago I was driving below the speed limit through a mixed residential/industrial area, came around a corner, and there was a toddler standing in the road, in such a way that as I rounded the corner he was obscured by the down tube. I hit him, when I got to him I couldn't find breathing or a pulse. Luckily, the State of Tennessee required that as a professional whitewater guide I have up-to-date Basic Life Support training, which includes CPR for toddlers and infants, and that training kicked in.

Edit: The kid survived, with a hospital stay. Video of me covered in blood appeared on the evening news captioned "hero".

I wasn't charged. I struggled for many years with whether I should have been, but the fact is that even though I was driving below the speed limit and the parents who let their toddler walk out into the street outside of the cement plant had been on TV within the past month bemoaning people speeding around that corner, my driving changed dramatically after that incident. Punishment or not, I changed.

So a few years ago when that sheriff's deputy down in San Mateo county crossed the yellow line and hit a group of cyclists head-on, I was one of the voices suggesting that the real issue was the management of his department that had let him be on-duty for far too long. That he was going to wake up in a cold sweat to the faces of those cyclists impacting his windshield for the rest of his life, and we didn't gain anything by terrorizing him further, but changing the institutional approach to wielding a deadly weapon while tired might be a place to start fixing the system.

And for regular drivers, clamping down hard on basic infringements, rather than only coming down on drivers after they've killed a cyclist or pedestrian, is also a good step forward.

Second, because it appeals to the same tired appeasement that isn't working for us now:

Every time you get on a bike, from this moment forward, obey the letter of the law in every traffic exchange everywhere to help drivers (and police officers) view cyclists as predictable users of the road who deserve respect.

As an exercise, go find yourself a stop sign, and count the cars coming through. Watch the wheels, and make a second tick when those wheels actually come to a full and complete stop. I've done this, and my experience, and this meshes with other studies of driver behavior, is that that's about 20% of the drivers through the intersection that come to a full stop. Yes, that number is lower for cyclists, but I'll bet that if you choose a point before the intersection and a point past the white line, that the transit time there isn't all that different.

I've written before that I've been hit because I stopped at a stop sign. Being good little target cyclist only gets us so far. We need to be aggressively taking our lane and asserting our rights. Yes, sometimes that means slapping hoods and breaking off mirrors. We must aggressively respond to out of control drivers. We can do that with or without law enforcement cooperation, but appeasement only gets more of us killed.

Thanks, Shadow, for forwarding this along and reminding me that it's enough of the zeitgeist that I should respond to it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Technology and Culture Movies Bay Area History Law Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Television Civil Liberties California Culture Chattanooga Guns Douglas Adams Whitewater Pedal Power Race Bicycling Public Transportation ]

"Ender's Game? I guess it's a book?" Why I might sometimes have trouble finding conversation with my coworkers...

[ related topics: Books Games ]

http://www.filther.io/

Search for images and only get the unsafe ones.

Britain's GCHQ targets engineers with fake LinkedIn pages, doing an MiTM attack to deliver malware with altered content.

Simultaneously, I was reading Erotic Scribes.com: Forbes Reports Google’s Illegal Revenue Over $1 Billion which felt a little axe-grindy, but did take on this CNN article that breathlessly talked about how malware via porn sites was a thing, when we all know that church websites are far more likely to be exploit vectors.

But it has gotten me to thinking about man-in-the-middle attacks, and it's made me even more sure that we need to be building personal public key web-of-trust mechanisms to be sure that the packets are actually coming from where we think we're getting them.

[ related topics: Religion Business Erotic Sexual Culture virus Currency ]

On the Media: TL;DR Episode #6: Ghost Town is about M-Net, a dial-up BBS that's still running. It made me think about the awesomeness that was The Ghost Ship East:

YOU'VE BEEN SITTING IN FRONT OF YOUR TERMINAL NOT DOING MUCH OF ANYTHING WHEN SOMETHING LEADS YOU TO CALL A NUMBER ON THE 775 EXCHANGE. YOUR MIND, WHICH IS WEAKENED FROM AN OVERDOSE OF COCA COLA AND FRITOS, GIVES IN TO THE OVERWHELMING URGE. YOUR TRUSTY MODEM CONNECTS, ALL OF A SUDDEN YOUR BEING IS ENVELOPED BY THE TERMINAL AND YOU BECOME PART OF ITS ELECTRONIC MORASS. YOU SCREAM, BUT ITS HOPELESS........ THE FUN'S ONLY STARTING. WELCOME TO MONGO'S T H E G H O S T S H I P E A S T

(Of course you have to imagine that appearing on a TI Silent700 thermal printer, where the paper roll has been around long enough that it's faded from the previous session and is being re-used, at 300 baud). And then, of course, the later FidoNet years, in which I ran the "point" 1:362/101.2, and later 1:362/1203 aka "The Society of Independent People".

We've lost something in the grand march of progress that is the Internet...

[ related topics: Journalism and Media Sports Net Culture Machinery ]

Forbes: Why Is The New York Times Breathlessly Promoting A Kooky Science Book It Panned?.

I know we've delved several times here into the notion of editorial stance, and how publications hide behind the "we're just reporting what was said" and "balance" to foist hogwash off on people. This is a look at how the New York Times ran a review that eviscerated Moises Velasquez-Manoff's book An Epidemic of Absence, and then ran 3 excerpts/editorials by Velasquez-Manoff pushing the thesis.

[ related topics: Books Invention and Design New York ]

Jon Udell: The Internet of Things That Used To Work Better.

Almost two decades later that vision is coming into focus. It’ll happen, I’m sure. My vacuum cleaner, microwave, and stove will all be able to phone home. What worries me, though, is that the news they report is unlikely to be good news. Embedded chips won’t compensate for the crummy quality of today’s appliances. Things fail and break at an alarming rate.

Yes.

[ related topics: Weblogs Robotics Current Events Work, productivity and environment Net Culture Embedded Devices ]

Business Insider: Here's David Cameron Calling For Permanent Austerity In Front Of All Kinds Of Ridiculous Gold Things.

It's like Marie Antoinette going "no cake? Okay, how about some of those delightful tartlettes, then?"

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Food - Cake ]

Woman writes negative review of Kleargear.com, receives claim that she owes $3.5k, and that it'll be reported to credit bureaus:

That was the end of it, Jen thought, until three years later when Jen's husband got an email from Kleargear.com demanding the post be removed or they would be fined. Kleargear.com says Jen violated a non-disparagement clause. It turns out that, hidden within the terms of sale on Kleargear.com there is a clause that reads:

"In an effort to ensure fair and honest public feedback, and to prevent the publishing of libelous content in any form, your acceptance of this sales contract prohibits you from taking any action that negatively impacts kleargear.com, its reputation, products, services, management or employees."

[ related topics: Current Events Work, productivity and environment Marriage ]

Whoah! $250M still needed to add 13.5 miles of carpool lane? How does $18.5m/lane/mile ever pay back? http://www.petaluma360.com/art...1119897/1362/community?p=2&tc=pg

[ related topics: Community ]

Bike Law Blog: Take That, Contributory Negligence. In which a driver who right-turned-on-red in front of a bicyclist is taken to court.

Interesting that the defense argument was that riding on a Multi-Use Path (MUP) is "riding on a sidewalk".

[ related topics: Weblogs Bicycling ]

Productive home day reminding me that there's something about the office that's just sucking the life from me. Shouldn't be that way. Hmm...

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Dear Google: my password is long and I don't have it memorized. Every time my phone is logged out and doesn't autofill, you lose ad views.

Tumblr idea: pictures of cars blasting through crosswalks with visible white "walk" signs. The volume would crash the Internet.

[ related topics: Photography Net Culture Race ]

Ugh. I *want* to support local stores, but at some point it's easier for me to order it online, and now I have to go get my deposit back.

2 cycle motor scooter on the Joe Rodota Trail. Another thing that makes me question my opposition to capital punishment.

[ related topics: Pedal Power Bicycling ]

As I learn about the history of U.S. foreign policy, I ponder pretending to be a psychopath with a twitchy finger vs actually being one.

Scientific American: What happens to Google maps when tectonic plates move? I don't think there's much here that y'all don't already know, but I did find this quote a good reminder:

... “We’re fast approaching the day when people will expect accuracies of centimeters in real time out of their handheld devices and then we’ll see a lot of head scratching as things no longer line up,” says Dru Smith of the National Geodetic Survey in Silver Spring, Md., the nation’s civilian chief geodesist—the go-to guy for the precise shape and size of our planet.

I remember talking recently with someone bemoaning the lack of positional accuracy for some sort of San Francisco Bay mapping autonomous vehicle. First off, he was ignorant of actual commercial solutions that were deployed and available, especially for someone as far along with his project as he was, but second, he didn't really know anything about mapping if he thought that knowing "exactly" where his measurement device was in any of these coordinate spaces would solve the problem of stitching all of the measurements he was hoping to take back together into a map.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area Space & Astronomy California Culture Maps and Mapping Global Warming ]

MI6 spy Gareth Williams death was "probably an accident". The coroner suggested that it was unlikely that he had managed to zip himself into a duffel bag and attach a padlock to the outside, while in the bathtub, but police seem to think that this was an example of autoerotic asphyxiation.

[ related topics: Current Events Monty Python Law Enforcement ]

The Next Big Thing in JavaScript Evolution: js2js is a revolutionary open-source compiler from JavaScript to JavaScript:

JavaScript is the new Assembly. There are dozens of tools that compile some programming language to JavaScript. You can do it with C++, Java, C#, Python, Scala or Ruby. But there's one language that remains to be covered for JavaScript to dominate the world: JavaScript.

Or, how to over-complexify writing "cp" in a scripting language....

The sad thing is that I went and dug through the code a bit, because a super-strict "lint" like tool that helped clean up some of the worst bits of JavaScript would actually be a super handy tool.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Software Engineering Writing Monty Python Python ]

Mother Jones: Meet the Punk Rocker [Ryan Shapiro] Who Can Liberate Your FBI File. The FBI has sued to prevent the release of 350k pages that he's after:

Invoking a legal strategy that had its heyday during the Bush administration, the FBI claims that Shapiro's multitudinous requests, taken together, constitute a "mosaic" of information whose release could "significantly and irreparably damage national security" and would have "significant deleterious effects" on the bureau's "ongoing efforts to investigate and combat domestic terrorism."

Awww... The poor FBI. Payback's a bitch, ain't it?

[ related topics: Politics Law Law Enforcement ]

If you're outraged about government fraud and waste, note that the DHS spent a billion dollars on junk science.

Congress should consider the absence of scientifically validated evidence for using behavioral indicators to identify threats to aviation security when assessing the potential benefits and cost in making future funding decisions for aviation security. GAO included this matter because DHS did not concur with GAO’s recommendation that TSA limit future funding for these activities until it can provide such evidence, in part because DHS disagreed with GAO’s analysis of indicators. GAO continues to believe the report findings and recommendation are valid.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Cool Science Aviation moron ]

Tim Kovach: There's no such thing as a natural disaster:

But a tropical storm or a tornado does not a disaster make. Rather, the risk of a disaster is a product of three variables: a natural hazard (e.g. a fault line or damaging winds), physical and economic exposure to the hazard, and socioeconomic vulnerability.

[ related topics: Economics ]

RT Dean Burnett ‏@garwboy

"Half of adult society should ensure their bodies conform to my preferences, in case I have to look at them" - an alarming number of people

[ related topics: Law ]

The revolution will be gamified and A/B tested to maximize impressions for the sponsoring organizations.

HTTP 2.0 may be SSL only, but unless we have a better trust model than Certificate Authorities that doesn't help much.

Okay, I'm not usually much on posting infographics, but this one: The Grid: How much does a street cost?. Great breakdown of what an intersection and street furniture costs, although what I'd really like to see is an amortized cost plus maintenance breakdown.

This is important as we look at spending $115M to build the Rainier over/undercrossing, and almost a quarter of a billion bucks to widen 101 between Novato and Petaluma: Car use declining, no longer linked to wealth creation.

[ related topics: Automobiles Currency Archival ]

This will probably be important shortly: http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book

Why my home automation projects have stalled: this is the working card key install at work...

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

Would have preferred to spend this locally, but Doubleday hates indie bookstores.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Wow. Gmail is getting *way* too aggressive with their spam filtering and false positives. Time to move that email to another provider. Sigh.

[ related topics: Spam Monty Python ]

Signed up for the Squeeze The Hive square dance convention in Salt Lake City next year, and working on registering for caller school.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Work, productivity and environment ]

This is how you control the lane: Cyclist Shows Serious Drafting Skills Behind a Truck (YouTube).

[ related topics: Movies Robotics Television Machinery Embedded Devices ]

Shadow forwarded along this fluff piece on some lightweight Yamaha electric motorcycles that may or may not be vaporware. But a 200lb scooter with a 60 mile range could be an immensely useful vehicle...

So I had a conversation on Twitter this morning with Lisa Rokusek. Lisa opened with:

I hate it when I read awful comments about recruiters said by people I like/want to respect who also are demanding nuance in other areas.

And I think this link opens up most of the rest of the thread, but basically I allowed as how I understood, and it seemed that, much like that lawyer joke, that "90% of recruiters give the other 10% a bad name" might be appropriate.

But Lisa deserves a little more nuance, and when she asked "...why do you follow me?", I thought she deserved a little more explanation.

So I've recently been getting a spate of LinkedIn recruiters. I have tried engaging them, and these conversations inevitably go "Hey, I saw that you've got lots of endorsements for Python, can you send me a resume in .doc format?"

And I will reply "I'm only interested in very small dynamic technology companies, any company I'm willing to work for will eschew .doc and prefer .txt". And I get back a very huffy "Well, I'm hoping to submit your resume to Amazon and Yahoo, are those leading edge technology companies for you?"

Thereby proving that I've not only wasted my time in engaging with this person, they're an asshole who hasn't bothered to take the time to understand the technology landscape, and definitely hasn't taken the time to understand what I'm looking for.

The best exchange I've ever had was with a recruiter who was trying to get me to work for Amazon (yes, Amazon has come up a number of times) who called up and said "I Googled you, and know that you just moved to the wine country and are doing embedded things and I can't imagine that you're interested, but my boss said I had to call, so I did."

Nothing ever came of that call but I do not for a moment begrudge the time spent with that recruiter because he made the effort to be knowledgeable about the field, understand me, and think about how my actual skills and wants might fit in to the positions he had available.

But my long experience with recruiters is not that way, and so, yes, unless you show an amazing amount of clue in that first contact email, it's better for both of us if I just ignore your messages.

Which brings me to Lisa's question: "...Why do you follow me?" I don't know how I started following Lisa on Twitter. I tend to follow people back if they appear to be actually interested in real conversation. I don't think of Lisa's Twitter personality as a recruiter first (and I follow a fellow Petaluma resident, who shall remain nameless, whose Twitter personality is definitely recruiter first), I see those interactions as someone who is trying to have real human conversations first.

Or, I guess: Recruiting is something Lisa does, but her identity in my head is not "a recruiter". Whereas if I see someone as "a recruiter", then it also means that my perception is that they view me as a potential statistic, not as a human being. Lisa has mentioned that she's a recruiter, but she's never approached me in that context.

And reading through Lisa's blog reinforces that if she did approach me, she probably wouldn't just be the sort of person who's trying to pry a CV out of me so that she can spam the living crap out of HR directors who are similarly ill suited to narrow down candidates, and who mean even more time having conversations in which I realize that I really don't want to work in that position.

So... "recruiter" as a self-described label is kind of like... well... there are lots of examples, and I don't want to insult any particular one because I know people I respect who use all of these labels for themselves, but for Lisa's benefit let's choose "Tea Partier". My experience with people who identify themselves first by that label has not been that my interactions will them will be rewarding, but I do know some people who self-identify like that with whom I've had really good relationships (and there was a time when I might have claimed that label myself).

Which means that, as a recruiter, or, in fact, in any role, we need to approach our relationships with a view towards how they can be beneficial to all the parties involved. If you're the sort of scattershot recruiter who isn't actually reading and understanding my qualifications and is just gathering CVs to dump on the desk of some hapless HR person who is no better suited to sift through them then you, then you're not adding value, and shouldn't be surprised when I point this out.

Thank you, Lisa, for taking the time to not be that person, and to challenge my experiences with recruiters.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Weblogs Spam Robotics Bay Area Law Wines and Spirits Work, productivity and environment Monty Python Embedded Devices Python Woodworking ]

Brilliant: @Atmel, @MouserElec and Sir Mix-A-Lot @therealmix, on Twitter: http://imgur.com/ehTpiqF

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Robotics Embedded Devices ]

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/.../11/flying-boats-by-luigi-prina/ http://www.navivolanti.it/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP8LRC1q2vM

[ related topics: Aviation Boats Machinery ]

Every time I read "stable condition" I think "kicked by a horse", not "isn't changing". #hatemybrain

Terminal Cornucopia: in which Evan “treefort” Booth builds explosive devices solely with items that can be purchased or carried through airport "security".

Terminal Cornucopia :: FRAGGuccino :: Frag Grenade, in which he builds and explodes a grenade built from airport parts.

[ related topics: Movies Aviation ]

USENIX.org November 2013: The Night Watch - James Mickens (PDF):

... As a systems hacker, you must be prepared to do savage things, unspeakable things, to kill runaway threads with your bare hands, to write directly to network ports using telnet and an old copy of an RFC that you found in the Vatican. When you debug systems code, there are no high-level debates about font choices and the best kind of turquoise, because this is the Old Testament, an angry and monochromatic world, and it doesn’t matter whether your Arial is Bold or Condensed when people are covered in boils and pestilence and Egyptian pharaoh oppression. HCI people discover bugs by receiving a concerned email from their therapist. Systems people discover bugs by waking up and discovering that their first-born children are missing and “ETIMEDOUT ” has been written in blood on the wall.

[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Humor Microsoft Movies broadband moron Net Culture Typography Graphic Design ]

Nailed it, on the California District 2 state senate race: BOYFIGHT II: The Rise of McGuire!!!:

McGuire’s platform, as we see, is not markedly different from the other two contenders. All three stand as strong advocates for:

1. Dark sports jacket.
2. Blue and white patterned shirt.
3. No tie.
4. Teeth for days.

[ related topics: Politics California Culture Clothing Race ]

designate the first Tues after the first Mon in Nov--Election Day--as a federal holiday (replacing Columbus Day) https://petitions.whitehouse.g...-replacing-columbus-day/wMLqNYqH

Stopped on the way home to walk through the new casino. Faith in humanity diminished immensely.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Gambling ]

A way snow crash people through .docx and .pptx files would let us double our GDP overnight. #txt4ever #htmlwenttoofar

[ related topics: Economics ]

People who can report on the Petaluma Trojans vs Analy High football game with a straight face have a cleaner mind than me.

[ related topics: Games Sports ]

Via Shadow: Pogies for your motor scooter: Chinese Snuggies For Scooters Warm Up Winter Electric Bike Commuters

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

Really, @ubnt? ""Admin Password" has to start with A-Z, a-z, or 0-9 and the others can only be printable ASCII characters" #fail

a good little example of why we eye-roll at recruiters: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1555056.html

Thanks for the recommendation, @jonathan_windle, house and shop are now covered with multi-AP @ubnt single-SSID WiFi, with AP roaming.

[ related topics: Real Estate ]

All these years and ridiculous trivia lodged in my brain, and I still have to look up the colors when wiring up Cat5 connectors.

http://www.masswerk.at/googleBBS/ - Complete with modem noises. It's awesome. Note: menu option 0 takes to you back to top.

Dear lazy web: Given CNC router with TTL stepper inputs, what's the easiest way to feed that gcode? Arduino+??? Some other device?

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

Reuters: UNACCOUNTABLE: The Pentagon's Bad Bookkeeping:

In its annual report of department-wide finances for 2012 [PDF], the Pentagon reported $9.22 billion in “reconciling amounts” to make its own numbers match the Treasury’s, up from $7.41 billion a year earlier. It said that $585.6 million of the 2012 figure was attributable to missing records. The remaining $8 billion-plus represented what Pentagon officials say are legitimate discrepancies. However, a source with knowledge of the Pentagon's accounting processes said that because the report and others like it aren’t audited, they may conceal large amounts of additional plugs and other accounting problems.

Shadow forwarded along two interesting map links. The first is Texas overlaid on a few different countries: http://imgur.com/gallery/Mbz5JJe

But the second lets you trace an outline, and then projection corrects it for other places. This lets you do the "how big really is Alaska compared to Texas?" visually (about 2x by square miles). http://mapfrappe.com/?show=14243

[ related topics: Maps and Mapping Alaska ]

Driver hits bicyclist, bicyclist charged with vandalism, assault and battery. http://www.smmirror.com/articl...ing-Up--Down-On-Top-Of-Car/38884

[ related topics: Current Events Automobiles ]

Among "Changes to YouTube comments" claims: "Meaningful conversations". YouTube. LOL.

RT if you believe passing around memes rather than generating ideas of your own is a meaningful way of generating connections between people

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Media Matters: Is There A Bigger Problem At CBS News? Debunked Obamacare, Disability and Benghazi Reports Raise Doubts.

Quite simply: I suspect that CBS saw the income potential being lost to Fox and decided to adopt their model.

[ related topics: Weblogs Current Events Journalism and Media Woodworking ]

RT Tim Chevalier ‏@eassumption:

You may have been wondering what the French translation of "cheese-tastic" was... http://pic.twitter.com/4CuQon0LXG

Best response: Rose ‏@yarnivore:

@haineux Says right on it that it is "sans nom"!!

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Photography Robotics Embedded Devices Flowers Archival ]

Long overdue to mention this is on my truck

[ related topics: Photography Machinery ]

Android voice recognition just replaced "talk" with "f***" (asterisks and all). My day has been accomplished.

LG Smart TVs are logging USB filenames and TV shows watched and sending that data back to LG servers. The response:

The advice we have been given is that unfortunately as you accepted the Terms and Conditions on your TV, your concerns would be best directed to the retailer. We understand you feel you should have been made aware of these T's and C's at the point of sale, and for obvious reasons LG are unable to pass comment on their actions.

[ related topics: Technology and Culture Movies Television ]

Slate has a run-down on Whitehouse support of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty, and how this runs counter to policies on cellphone unlocking that the Whitehouse claims to support.

[ related topics: California Culture Race Real Estate ]

I met a woman recently who was part of the "WiFi makes me feel sick" crowd, so for future reference Guardian: Wi-Fi: are there any health risks? is a good rundown, including the WHO rundown on exposure to EMF:

In the area of biological effects and medical applications of non-ionizing radiation approximately 25,000 articles have been published over the past 30 years. Despite the feeling of some people that more research needs to be done, scientific knowledge in this area is now more extensive than for most chemicals. Based on a recent in-depth review of the scientific literature, the WHO concluded that current evidence does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low level electromagnetic fields. However, some gaps in knowledge about biological effects exist and need further research.

[ related topics: Health History ]

If history were a movie, which are the worst holes in the plot?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies ]

Picture of a guy who stole a Petaluma BevMo employee's wallet and keys. Please help bust this scum: http://imgur.com/CBY99D4

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

LyX for the cloud, or: an online LaTeX word processor: https://www.writelatex.com/

Dear @KMart customer loyalty program: You know I just spent mumbledy thousand on that appliance, don't be offering me discounts on it now!

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

When I was young I was totally entranced by airplanes, and one of my very fond memories was seeing Bob Hoover put a Rockwell Shrike Commander high wing twin turboprop through its paces, including the "shut off the engines and do aerobatics" thing.

MetaFilter thread about trying to find a post with impossible jet maneuvers brought up this old BBC video of Bob Hoover pouring iced tea during a barrel roll (YouTube), in which he observes that the hard part was pouring the iced tea back-handed.

[ related topics: Movies Aviation Monty Python Video ]

US and UK struck secret deal to allow NSA to 'unmask' Britons' personal data:

A separate draft memo, marked top-secret and dated from 2005, reveals a proposed NSA procedure for spying on the citizens of the UK and other Five-Eyes nations, even where the partner government has explicitly denied the US permission to do so. The memo makes clear that partner countries must not be informed about this surveillance, or even the procedure itself.

Seems pretty likely that the NSA is using the GCHQ or other intelligence agencies to get around similar legal restrictions on them spying on U.S. citizens (where they're not just doing that anyway).

[ related topics: moron Law ]

BP accused of 'trolling' its Facebook critics over the gulf oil spill. Read through the whole thing, it's not just the Facebook death threats, it's also the attempts to bribe and coerce researchers.

Amtrak wants to know how NYC-bound train got lost in Philadelphia suburb.

Amtrak Investigates How Train Headed To NYC Ends Up In Bala Cynwyd.

It sounds wild, but Amtrak officials confirm it did happen and what they can tell us so far is this: Amtrak Train 644 that left 30th Street Station for New York City accidentally ended up on the SEPTA tracks. The train actually traveled several miles before the mistake was finally caught and the train stopped at the Bala Cynwyd station.

What. The. Everloving. Fuck? I mean, I know that rail signalling is caught back in the 1800s, but I am told by reliable sources that pretty much all modern buses have location transponders on them, how could they not have them on trains? Given that, how could they not have some sort of warning system which says "hey, this train doesn't seem to be hitting its checkpoints, something may be wrong!"

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Machinery Trains New York Public Transportation ]

RT Mariusz Ciesla ‏@dotmariusz:

Best image about this entire Google+ YouTube situation I've seen so far: http://asset-8.soup.io/asset/6161/0909_8801.gif

[ related topics: Photography ]

Oh hell yes! Valencia Street Driver Booked For Assaulting Cyclist With A Deadly Weapon (His Sedan) http://sfist.com/2013/11/13/va...ia_street_bike_lane_violator.php

[ related topics: Guns Bicycling ]

These 4wd Van Conversions are an engineering marvel. I was looking for options for some rear-end lift on our new RV and found this website. I'm not looking to take "Star" (the RV) off-road, but could use some more ground clearance at times. I was impressed with the engineering in these vans. In theory, just like a truck, but with most of the mechanical parts crammed in half the space. with limited access.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Space & Astronomy Machinery Aviation - Helicopters ]

The details are still fuzzy, and of course, getting tickets might be an issue. But part of the 2014 goals is a long enjoyable road trip to Burning Man. Nancy wants to camp with a group at "Spiritual Playa", which won't be the first time I've been Mr. Geek/Fixit with a bunch of spiritualists at Burning Man. I'm posting this here so we might be able to plan to visit along the trip, or in Black Rock City.

[ related topics: Religion Burning Man Travel ]

One of those rare awesome days when I managed to grope through the business processes & legacy systems, and make *one* user extremely happy.

Lunch discussion today was about some of the ways in which misconfigured BGP and misplaced trust can result in MitM scanning of large quantities of Internet traffic. Which, apparently, someone is doing.

Renesys has the run-down on the man-in-the-middle Internet hijacking that's been throwing a lot of data through Iceland and Belarus (among others):

This year, that potential has become reality. We have actually observed live Man-In-the-Middle (MITM) hijacks on more than 60 days so far this year. About 1,500 individual IP blocks have been hijacked, in events lasting from minutes to days, by attackers working from various countries.

And various people have written run-downs on that:

• Techdirt: Massive Man-in-the-Middle Attacks Have Been Hijacking Huge Amounts Of Internet Traffic And Almost No One Noticed
• All Things D: How Somebody Forced the World’s Internet Traffic Through Belarus and Iceland

The lunch conversation was with people who work with BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), and who pointed out that the routes through those countries don't necessarily mean that the sniffing was happening there, but was an artifact of that a bad route means data coming out goes into the sniffer, and then has to be dumped somewhere that doesn't have the bad route so that it can be pushed back to the real destination without creating a loop.

It was also recommended that I watch DEF CON 16 Hacking Conference Presentation By Kapela - Pilosov - Stealing the Internet - Video and Slides (YouTube) to understand this, and to see a live demonstration of it happening.

The other thing of note: If the attacker mucks with the TTL of traceroute packages, the only way to detect this is to be detecting timing differences between the traceroute packet TTL and the actual return trip, and building some heuristics based on those few milliseconds...

[ related topics: Movies Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Net Culture Community Video Conferences ]

Switch to e-books was 'an unmitigated disaster', says Mountrath Community College in Laois Ireland school principal:

“The HP Elite Pad has proved to be an unmitigated disaster. We have met with HP representatives on a number of occasions to address the issues.

“To ensure stability and continuity of education I have ordered a full set of books for all the students.”

The number of "e-..." buzzwords spewed in the quotes of that article is truly epic. I'm guessing the HP account manager in question has fantastic legs.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Quotes Books tolkien Community Education ]

Miami police harassing people in a store in a low-income area, to the point where they've arrested a clerk who works there for "trespassing" at that store 62 times:

So how can he be trespassing when he works there?

It’s a question the store’s owner, Alex Saleh, 36, has been asking for more than a year as he watched Sampson, his other employees and his customers, day after day, being stopped and frisked by Miami Gardens police. Most of them, like Sampson, are poor and black.

The great thing about the surveillance society is that Mr. Saleh has installed cameras to document these abuses and gone to the press.

[ related topics: Photography Movies Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Video Gambling Gardening ]

Google Play offered 10 free tracks of 90s music, so I clicked "buy" on all of them. Should completely muck up recommendation services.

[ related topics: Music ]

Looking at the permissions the upgrades of various pre-installed apps on my phone want, and realizing I don't trust my phone any more.

Back in the late 1980s I tossed this idea around while I was in college, and had it scoffed at by various faculty members. Part of why I decided to drop out.

Users ID'ed through typing, mouse movements:

A series of 90 minute typing tests carried out on 2000 people at Iowa State University found users could be identified with a half percent margin of error based on the way they hit keys.

Capturing Keystroke Dynamics for Active User Authentication (PDF). Via /..

[ related topics: Current Events Education ]

So I know transportation is a hobby of Dan's. What if we attacked the problem in a different way(at least part of the problem). 3rd world and disaster relief applications are obvious and it's possible to envision a Jettson/Futurama city with corridors of drones from Fedex/Amazon et al

http://www.ted.com/talks/andre...ads_there_s_a_drone_for_that.htm l

[ related topics: Automobiles Cool Technology Aviation - Helicopters ]

Interesting: Meet the Filmmaker Convincing America That Virginity Doesn't Exist. An interview with the director of the documentary How To Lose Your Virginity. Looks fascinating.

Bonus link: Erika Moen's "which virgnity?" clip from that cartooning reality show "Strip Search" (YouTube)? The setup was "See how the contestants deal with reporters", so they had some tech reporter come in and ask various questions, including "when did you lose your virginity" which was supposed to be the "how does contestant shut down a reporter going too far"...

And if you're not familiar with Erika, http://ohjoysextoy.com/

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sexual Culture Movies ]

Cause for optimism: Digby: Baby steps to a taser ban?

Help: I saw and lost an article about someone who'd built an open hardware gigabit over 100m class 1 laser transceiver. Anyone?

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

NY Times: NSA report outlined goals for more power. Anti-news, but they basically want to monitor and store all the internets.

Yet the paper also shows how the agency believes it can influence and shape trends in high-tech industries in other ways to suit its needs. One of the agency’s goals is to “continue to invest in the industrial base and drive the state of the art for high performance computing to maintain pre-eminent cryptanalytic capability for the nation.” The paper added that the N.S.A. must seek to “identify new access, collection and exploitation methods by leveraging global business trends in data and communications services.”

[ related topics: Politics Invention and Design Theater & Plays Current Events Art & Culture Television ]

To make it easier to respond to all of those new language features, and keep up with all of the language design wankery: Programming Language Checklist.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Software Engineering Graphic Design ]

Playing with a little Maple box to mount a coffee grinder mechanism in

[ related topics: Photography Nature and environment ]

New sign for our square dancing club's hall

[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design ]

More compact crank for the router table with the high fence

[ related topics: Photography Furniture Woodworking ]

Rubik's Cube has been provably solved in 20 moves or less for all positions:

With about 35 CPU-years of idle computer time donated by Google, a team of researchers has essentially solved every position of the Rubik's Cube™, and shown that no position requires more than twenty moves. We consider any twist of any face to be one move (this is known as the half-turn metric.)

The @Rockler coffee grinder mechanism on my box. Should be a good coffee at work resource.

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment ]

New York Times: Signs of Change in News Mission at Bloomberg, wherein we see the conflict between data sales and journalism:

Bloomberg suddenly faces newsroom layoffs, a shift in emphasis back to financial news and skepticism from the business side that investigative journalism might not be worth the potential problems it could create for terminal sales.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Journalism and Media New York ]

I have seen this tale on two online publications:

• XO Jane: Charlotte Laws: I've Been Called the "Erin Brockovich" of Revenge Porn, and For the First Time Ever, Here is My Entire Uncensored Story of Death Threats, Anonymous and the FBI
• Jezebel: One Woman's Dangerous War Against the Most Hated Man on the Internet.

Both are about how Charlotte Laws got involved in going after Hunter Moore. Worth a read, but what struck me most was not how horrendously misogynistic an asshole Hunter Moore is, but how he's really just a reflection of a tremendously hateful society. These things wouldn't have nearly the power they did if the masses of people didn't essentially agree with Hunter Moore's view of women.

And that's the real crime.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture History Law Enforcement Net Culture Government ]

Forward secrecy at Twitter. A good little ramble on how to configure HTTPS right, and on how Twitter is protecting your interactions from the NSA.

[ related topics: Weblogs ]

I didn't rationalize buying a TIG welder and making it all myself from scratch, but I did recycle a lot of parts from the venerable Fiesta Trailer and do a fair job of bolting it all together. The only part I bought was the tool box and some bolts. All of the rest of the project was from the old rig, and stuff I had laying around (yes, I have lots of 1" aluminum square t-slot frame laying around). I re-enforced the top mount side door aluminum tool box, and placed it on an aluminum frame that replaced the bumper and bumper mounts. It only sticks out 12" more than the original bumper. There is a support rail behind the bikes to keep them from rubbing against the RV. The rear view camera is recessed in the tool box lid, and I added two 10watt backup/work lights and a license plate light to the box. Problem solved, total out of pocket about $475, and it adds a lot of storage for grungier outdoor things to the RV without them being in the way. And I think it all weighs less than the factor bumper, but it's not as sturdy either. We'll just have to be careful backing up, but adding the rear view camera (part of the "stereo" upgrade) should help.

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Trains Fabrication Bicycling Archival LID (Lightweight IDentity) ]

RT Shannon Prickett ‏@bindr:

OH: oh no, these are elder goths; they don't dance, they just show up.

Bla bla bla Beastie Boys bla bla bla lawsuit bla bla bla Goldie Blox: Need an inspirational video? How about one that shows kids making, not selling.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Television Video ]

It's easy to feel sorry for 23andme, until you read the FDA's letter... http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/Enfor...arningLetters/2013/ucm376296.htm

Google finds and turns in child molester/porn collector - While I'm glad this guy got caught, it's an eye opener to what happens to the images on Google servers, and apparently on your phone as well. Again, in some ways, Google and friends are the new "evil", as well as the new "good".

And while I have a technical interest in "darknets" and encryption, as well as a personal interest in them. I also have a fear of associating with socially irresponsible people that they often are used by (child porn, etc..).

[ related topics: Erotic Privacy Sexual Culture Cryptography Gambling ]

A guide to understanding and writing Death Metal English:

Normal English: “Commuting to work”

Death Metal English: “TRANSPORTATION OF THE WAGEBOUND UNTO THE NEXUS OF PERPETUAL QUOTIDIAN ENSLAVEMENT”

Via JWZ.

[ related topics: Writing Work, productivity and environment Douglas Adams ]

EPIC FOIA Request Shows Postal Machines Take, Store Photos. Yep. Those self-service package shipping machines take a picture of you, store it for 30 days. Via Forbes talking about how a Delaware doctor was busted for Silk Road bitcoin marketplace drug sales.

[ related topics: Photography Privacy Health tolkien Television Fashion ]

Hey y'all Chattanooga area folk, seen this? Wreckless Conduct Lookout Mountain Tn raw run (YouTube). A skateboard run down Rt 148/Lookout Mountain Scenic Highway. Cringe as they struggle to make the turn over the Incline, shudder as they blast past Ruby Falls...

Hat tip to Larry

[ related topics: Weblogs Movies Nature and environment History Chattanooga ]

Oldest Javelins Predate Modern Humans, Raise Questions on Evolution:

The oldest known stone-tipped projectiles have been discovered in Ethiopia. The javelins are roughly 280,000 years old and predate the earliest known fossils of our species, Homo sapiens, by about 80,000 years.

Heck, I had no idea that the fossil record for stoned tipped spears (with marks consistent with thrusting) went back half a millenium.

[ related topics: Drugs Current Events Guns ]

That frantic feeling of "What can I buy tonight and tomorrow so that I don't have to go anywhere near a store again until 2014".

Dear industrial designers: The wall wart comes off the side of the plug. Always. You do not get 3 sockets on the power strip. Stop it!

Not totally happy with the milk paint finish, but comes a time

[ related topics: Photography ]

The future of DRM is the pay-per-swing hammer http://www.metafilter.com/1009...lf-destruct-in-5-seconds#3543957

You know what the real revelation of This is a motherfucking web site is? Just how little we've gained from CSS and HTML3/4/5.

Via MeFi

I'm gonna start right now on my project to distribute containers of multiple VMs that can run in a VM. VMs are the new static linking.

[ related topics: Invention and Design ]

I hate taxes as an individual having to pay them. As we build some very very complex tax and levy structures into or main application to support some french west african governments with inane and insane fee logic, and being told that the reason they are trashing the old software and "upgrading" is the old system can't do these legally required complex things, part of me wants to shout "Vive! la bureaucratie de gouvernement!". Sadly, I am a hypocrite.

[ related topics: Politics Software Engineering Race Government ]

Hey there fellow radicalizers:

• Huffington Post: Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied On Porn Habits As Part Of Plan To Discredit 'Radicalizers'
• BBC: NSA 'planned to discredit radicals over web-porn use'
• Guardian: NSA 'collected details of online sexual activity' of Islamist radicals

Via /..

Remember when the FBI was attempting to blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr.? Yeah, it sounds a lot like that.

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Current Events Monty Python Law Enforcement ]

Good morning boys and girls. Today's word is "mise en place". Can you say "where the heck did all the bowls and available surfaces go?"

If the NSA is gonna try this hard to get spyware onto my Windows box, you'd think they could hire domestic call center workers.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Microsoft ]

In reading those articles about Charlotte Laws going after Hunter Moore that I linked to I was reminded of how much the problem wasn't Hunter Moore and his revenge porn, but the fact that under the thin veneer of civilization, most people agree with that sort of hatred.

Mormon Women Bare is an attempt to address that misogyny head on. As about the project notes:

A young girl is shamed by her friends for not dressing “modestly” enough. A BYU student is chastised via note from a male student for wearing leggings. A BYU-Idaho student is not allowed to take a test because her jeans are “form fitting”. After hearing these stories and others in 2012, I threw up my hands in exasperation. What on earth is going on in this culture? I don’t remember it being like this when I was a child and teen growing up in the church. Why has the modesty culture of the LDS church gotten so extreme and what can we do about it?

Via Carina Kolodny ‏@carinakolodny:

This is jaw-droppingly beautiful, breathtaking, bold, brash, gutsy just go see. click. now. NOW. http://mormonwomenbare.com

[ related topics: Religion Nostalgia Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology California Culture Pop Culture Archival Woodworking Government ]

I was seriously considering a steering wheel desk for (non-driving use only) for the RV.. saw this one on Amazon for less than I could probably make one (although I may still make my own, just because) and was blown away by the reviews. The #1 review (of over 1000) is from George Takei. Go read the reviews, they are hilarious. I'm tempted to buy one of these and print out a bunch of reviews to attach to it, just to show them off and be the guy that actually bought one.

Kudos to Amazon and the vendor for leaving them...

[ related topics: Books Woodworking ]

wishes "Quality Is Contagious: John Economaki & Bridge City Tool Works, 36 Years Through the Lens of Joe Felzman", was available as an ebook

In honor of Black Friday, I made myself a honing guide rather than spending $35 on one

[ related topics: Photography Heinlein Douglas Adams ]

Bottom of honing guide

[ related topics: Photography Douglas Adams ]

Milling some cheap cedar to 1/8"for some experiments in shower wall technology

[ related topics: Photography ]

My vices have outnumbered my vises, but I'm working to correct that.

[ related topics: Photography Work, productivity and environment Databases ]

Why does every Post Office transaction seem to take more than 10 minutes per customer? Just need to mail a flat rate box& machine is broken.