The most valuable supply of worthlessness on the web
Man, if I ever have a chance to set my self up with another future ex-Mrs. RagManX, I’m so totally chasing Jessica Alba until she says yes or gets a restraining order. I think I’m in love. And this time, it’s real. Oh, and yes these pictures are large. That’s because there’s too much “I’m in love with her” in these to make the pictures smaller.
Continue reading “Eye candy – please smile for us you beautiful woman”
I’m trying to be properly outraged by the Foley scandal. Yes, Foley should go. That’s easy to my eyes to decide. Even if he was abused himself as a child, or an alcoholic, or had a neighbor’s dog telling him this was what he was supposed to do, it doesn’t excuse his behavior. But I’m having trouble seeing the same treatment as necessary for some of the other politicians involved, so I’m asking anyone who knows more than I do about politics (and that would be most people, I’m afraid) to help me understand some of the current calls against others.
The latest thing that caught my attention and I’m trying to understand is in this post at Americanblog. Part of the post has this quote from Rep Kolbe:
Sometime after leaving the Page program, an individual I had appointed contacted my office to say that he had received emails from Rep. Foley that made him uncomfortable. I was not shown the content of the messages and was not told they were sexually explicit. It was my recommendation that this complaint be passed along to Rep. Foley’s office and the Clerk [of the House, Hastert’s staffer] who supervised the Page program.
The person who posted the article then posted this as one of his response:
We’re to believe that a recent former staffer of Kolbe’s, who is a child, came to him and said he thinks he’s being sexually harassed by a fellow member of Congress who Kolbe knows extremely well, and Kolbe’s response is to tell the child victim to confront his adult abuser? You have got to be kidding. Kolbe should consider resigning now, before his term ends, just on that basis alone – if this allegation is even true.
And I don’t see those two logically tying together. Kolbe specifically says he was not informed what the nature of the emails was. Then the blog article’s author says since Kolbe knew the victim was receiving sexually harrassing emails he should resign. He follows this with several other responses to the quote. And none of them seem to naturally follow based on what was said.
So can anyone tell me how “I was not shown the content of the messages and was not told they were sexually explicit.” naturally leads to “…a child, came to him and said he thinks he’s being sexually harassed by a fellow member of Congress …” in a way that I can understand? Because no matter how many times I read the article I’ve linked above, I still don’t follow the author’s point.
Understand I’m all for clearing out politicians who have done wrong. I’m not trying to say Kolbe should still keep his job if he knew what was happening. I’m saying I don’t see how we can say he knew what was happening based on what he has said.
[tags]Kolbe comments on Foley situation[/tags]
Sometimes, even I am amazed at how many stupid decisions the people charged with security make. And given how low an expectation I have of intelligence showing up in security procedures, it probably amazes people who know me that I can be amazed by this idiotic occurences. Continue reading “More fear based stupidity in the name of anti-terrorism”
This image comes from Chris Pirillo. For those who have ever doubted that ninjas are the real ultimate power, here is proof:
[tags]Killed by ninjas, The trouble with ninjas, RealUltimatePower[/tags]
But I kinda have a thing for Ms. Alba. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of looking at her pictures.
[tags]Eye Candy, Jessica Alba, Stuff I want[/tags]
Family Circus cartoons matched with Nietzsche quotes (Thanks Bill).
Is profiling such a bad thing? “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” and all that. Is it wrong to judge based on appearances?
In same cases, actually, it makes sense. Bruce Schneier wrote an article last year discussing some of the good and bad of profiling. It’s still a valuable read. In the end, if profiles are based on good indicators, it can be an effective security tool. Profiles based on bad indicators are not only not effective security tools, but can lead to security problems in retaliation for bad profiling.
On 14 December 1999, Ahmed Ressam tried to enter the U.S. by ferryboat from Victoria Island, British Columbia. In the trunk of his car, he had a suitcase bomb. His plan was to drive to Los Angeles International Airport, put his suitcase on a luggage cart in the terminal, set the timer, and then leave. The plan would have worked had someone not been vigilant.
Ressam had to clear customs before boarding the ferry. He had fake ID, in the name of Benni Antoine Noris, and the computer cleared him based on this ID. He was allowed to go through after a routine check of his car’s trunk, even though he was wanted by the Canadian police. On the other side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, at Port Angeles, Washington, Ressam was approached by U.S. customs agent Diana Dean, who asked some routine questions and then decided that he looked suspicious. He was fidgeting, sweaty, and jittery. He avoided eye contact. In Dean’s own words, he was acting “hinky.”
. . .
There’s a dirty word for what Dean did that chilly afternoon in December, and it’s profiling. Everyone does it all the time. When you see someone lurking in a dark alley and change your direction to avoid him, you’re profiling. When a storeowner sees someone furtively looking around as she fiddles inside her jacket, that storeowner is profiling. People profile based on someone’s dress, mannerisms, tone of voice … and yes, also on their race and ethnicity. When you see someone running toward you on the street with a bloody ax, you don’t know for sure that he’s a crazed ax murderer. Perhaps he’s a butcher who’s actually running after the person next to you to give her the change she forgot. But you’re going to make a guess one way or another. That guess is an example of profiling.
Yes, “hinky” there is the indication of Ms. Dean’s profiling of the suspect. And it’s a case of good profiling – she didn’t pick this person because of his clothers or his accent or his skin tone, or any of hundreds of other little things I’m sure someone somewhere thinks would be a sure way to tell. She picked him out because he acted in an abnormal way. Killing all the arabs won’t solve terrorism problems, as much as my brother and some folks I’ve worked with might think it will. Stopping all arabs from boarding planes won’t prevent hijackings. That’s bad profiling based on bad indicators. And that doesn’t do anything but generate animosity between ethnic groups (which, by the way is a good way to heighten hostilities, if that’s what you are going for).
Despite what many people think, terrorism is not confined to young Arab males. Shoe-bomber Richard Reid was British. Germaine Lindsay, one of the 7/7 London bombers, was Afro-Caribbean. Here are some more examples:
- In 1986, a 32-year-old Irish woman, pregnant at the time, was about to board an El Al flight from London to Tel Aviv when El Al security agents discovered an explosive device hidden in the false bottom of her bag. The woman’s boyfriend–the father of her unborn child–had hidden the bomb.
- In 1987, a 70-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman–neither of whom were Middle Eastern–posed as father and daughter and brought a bomb aboard a Korean Air flight from Baghdad to Thailand. En route to Bangkok, the bomb exploded, killing all on board.
- In 1999, men dressed as businessmen (and one dressed as a Catholic priest) turned out to be terrorist hijackers, who forced an Avianca flight to divert to an airstrip in Colombia, where some passengers were held as hostages for more than a year-and-half.
The 2002 Bali terrorists were Indonesian. The Chechnyan terrorists who downed the Russian planes were women. Timothy McVeigh and the Unibomber were Americans. The Basque terrorists are Basque, and Irish terrorists are Irish. Tha Tamil Tigers are Sri Lankan.
And many Muslims are not Arabs. Even worse, almost everyone who is Arab is not a terrorist — many people who look Arab are not even Muslims. So not only are there an large number of false negatives — terrorists who don’t meet the profile — but there an enormous number of false positives: innocents that do meet the profile.
Don’t give in to bad profiling. Look for more than just skin color or style of dress.
[tags]The good and bad of profiling, Bruce Schneier on profiling[/tags]
What do you do to deal with running a company which spewed $400 million into the vast netherspace of nothingness in just a few years? How do you handle the pressure of something like this? And for that matter, how do you go from European jail cell to multi-million dollar earning executive in just a few years? Well, besides somehow getting a job (or at least a title) as a counter-terrorism expert for an unknown transit police force in California. All these details and more can be gleaned from the in-depth Wired article on the life, times, and secret life of Bo Stefan Eriksson.
THE BUMP IN THE ROAD that ended Bo Stefan Eriksson’s fantastic ride is practically invisible. From 10 feet away, all you can see is the ragged edge of a tar-seamed crack in an otherwise smooth sheet of pavement. Only the location is impressive – a sweet stretch of straightaway on California’s Pacific Coast Highway near El Pescador state beach, just past the eucalyptus-shaded mansions of the Malibu hills. On that patch of broken asphalt, there’s barely enough lip to stub a toe. Of course, when you hit it at close to 200 miles per hour, as police say Eriksson did in the predawn light last February 21, while behind the wheel of a 660-horsepower Ferrari Enzo, consequences magnify.
. . .
WHEN LOS ANGELES COUNTY sheriff’s deputy David Huelsen arrived at the scene of the accident, he thought Eriksson must be the luckiest person alive. That the man was standing by the side of the road after a crash of such intensity was an astonishing testament to Ferrari craftsmanship. The cherry red Enzo had sheared in half on impact with the pole, its back end blasting apart like a roadside bomb. “Multiple pieces of what appeared to be a vehicle,” as Huelsen put it, were spread across the length of four football fields. The chaparral and creosote along the shoulder of the road were riddled with fragments of smoking auto parts, and the shattered power pole dangled from sagging wires like the stiffened corpse of a hanged man. The Enzo’s carbon-fiber passenger compartment, though, was perfectly intact, a protective womb of inflated airbags from which the 44-year-old Eriksson had emerged with nothing but a split lip.
. . .
Huelsen was trying to get the story straight when Eriksson reached into his wallet and pulled out a card with an official state seal that said he was a member of an antiterrorism task force. Then an SUV and another car pulled alongside Huelsen’s police cruiser. Two men climbed out, quickly flashed what appeared to be badges, and identified themselves as homeland security officials. The men said they needed to speak to Eriksson immediately. The thoroughly boggled Huelsen radioed his sergeant at the Lost Hills station and asked what the hell he should do. Keep Eriksson at the scene, said the sergeant, who then dispatched helicopter and mountain rescue units to look for this Dietrich character. The helicopter crew soon reported that it saw no sign of anyone fleeing into the hills. With two men but no drivers, the whole thing was sounding fishy.
The article runs a bit long, at 6 pages, but it is quite interesting. If you already knew about Gizmondo and its spectacular crash, this will just reinforce the ideas you probably already had about the unlikelihood of Gizmondo’s success. If you aren’t familiar with the company, you’ll learn how not to run a tech company and why one shouldn’t fight the big guys (Sony and Nintendo, in this case) via the media until you actually have something to back up your bravado.
I think there may be some worse than these, but it’s a good starting point for some of the biggest IT problems we’ve seen.
 
[tags]Peter Coffer’s worst IT mistakes gallery, Worst IT mistakes ever?[/tags]
Guess what? I’m not going to gripe about this one. I’m not going to bad-mouth President Bush over this. I think if we are going to work on controlling illegal immigration, this is a necessary step, and I don’t see how this infringes on American citizens’ rights. Unless someone can show me good reason to oppose this, I’m buying in to the plan to build a fence between the U.S. and Mexico.
U.S. President George Bush has signed legislation that provides roughly $1.2 billion for fencing and other enhanced security measures along the border with Mexico.
. . .
U.S. President George Bush has signed legislation that provides roughly $1.2 billion for fencing and other enhanced security measures along the border with Mexico.
. . .
The White House had hoped for a wide-raging immigration reform bill. Instead, the U.S. Congress approved money to erect fencing in some of the most porous border areas and added it to legislation funding the Department of Homeland Security.
This is a good start. Of course, my fencing the most porous border areas, initially all we’re doing is pushing those who would enter illegally to find new places to come in. Eventually, for this to be of real value, it needs to be fence running the entire length of the border. Some people call me insensitive or a jerk for suggesting this, but I think we might want to consider getting the East Germans to help with this project.
Senator Kennedy said pushing money for the fence is only a campaign ploy and not a real solution to the problem.
Just in case you thought something good could be done without a Kennedy telling us what’s wrong. True, it’s not a real solution, but it is a start. And I’ll be optimistic (which I’ll grant is unusual for me) and say I expect more work to be done on limiting illegal immigration in the near future.
[tags]Bush authorizes fence for U.S.-Mexico border, Making a run for the border about to get more challenging[/tags]
With output of 714 W of continuous wavelength operation, Newport’s Spectra-Physics division seems to have set a diode laser power record using its ProLight diode laser.
The result was achieved in a non-destructive test with 940 nm diode laser bars that incorporate Spectra Physics’ latest epitaxial design and a “start-of-the-art” growth process.
“Our diode laser performance has shattered previously recorded data. As well as the output, we have observed peak power conversion efficiency of more than 65% from our diode laser bars,” said Franck Leibreich, marketing director at Spectra-Physics. “Even at 714 W efficiency was above 57%. Temperature sensitivity was low: 714 W at 15ºC, 702 W at 25ºC and 680 W at 35ºC.”
Now I don’t know what a lot of that means, but I’m guessing to a real laser specialist that’s pretty impressive. I just see 714 W at 15ºC and know that’s a lot of power at an easily achievable temperature. I also understand the importance of the efficiency rating – the higher that is, the less power needed on the input side to achieve these results.
Granted, this probably isn’t enough power to fill a house with popcorn yet, but give the scientists time and I’m sure we’ll have those results. And naturally, once we get that power level, we need to strap these suckers to frikkin’ sharks.
[tags]The latest laser news, New diode laser power record set by Spectra-Physics[/tags]
So what can you do when you make a product for electronic voting that security experts have shown to be bad for voting due to insecurity? Well, the best possible thing might not be to make sure the touch screens on those devices will cause them to fail poorly when touched, wouldn’t you think? Yet that’s what happens to the Diebold e-voting machines right now. Thankfully Diebold has a fix – don’t touch the touchscreen. And the company will provide a mouse for every machine.
After a daylong test of the state’s retrofitted voter check-in computers, it remained unclear yesterday whether the $18 million system works well enough for the state’s elections chief to deploy it in the November general election.
. . .
One reason for the relatively smooth test was the addition of a computer mouse to each of the touch-screen terminals, bypassing a software flaw first identified during the Sept. 12 primary and which remained unsolved throughout the day yesterday.
. . .
The e-poll books are supposed to be operated by tapping a small plastic stylus against the computer screens. The terminals are linked together and are used to register, among other things, whether a voter has shown up at the polls.
But during last month’s primary election, on occasion, one machine in a precinct would show voters as having cast ballots, while another would say they had not come to the polls.
To fix the problem, Diebold officials said yesterday the units could be operated with computer mouses and that they could provide the state with 5,500 of them in time for the general election. Or they could install new software and allow election judges to touch the screens.
Yes, you are reading that right. To use the touch-screen based e-voting machines, one has to use a mouse and not touch the touch-screen. If someone does use the touchscreen, well, the device could lose connectivity with the rest of the systems and require a reboot. After the reboot, the user might still be able to vote, but apparently their vote from before the reboot will still be kept in the system. Instant doubling of votes, just by touching the touchscreen after voting!
Lamone’s deputy, Ross Goldstein, said yesterday that elections officials would hear from their quality-assurance consultants and Diebold about whether the underlying software flaw causing the machines to lose sync could be fixed before a mid-October deadline to return the improved units to local election boards.
. . .
When the e-poll books fail to communicate with each other, or “lose sync,” the lists of who has voted in that precinct, which are stored on the e-poll books, don’t match. Should someone try to vote again, an out-of-sync system wouldn’t flag the double vote until the system had been corrected.
A spokesman for Diebold said yesterday that likelihood of such fraud would be low. If the system requires mouses, poll workers would be instructed repeatedly not to touch the screens and to check whether the system is communicating properly.
They also said that yesterday’s test proved that the system works smoothly and that the mouses would not interrupt an election.
OK, I’ll grant – the mouse probably won’t interrupt the election. But I bet all the people touching the touchscreens will. I wonder if anyone else worries about that?
County elections directors, many of whom came to the event, heaped praise on the machines, saying that they eliminated days of work updating voter histories after the election.
“Your instinct is to touch the screens,” said Sandra M. Logan, elections director in Caroline County, as she checked in a voter. “But I think my judges are used to using mouses and would like them.”
Nope. Or at least the elections director isn’t. Because people trained to not use the systems the wrong way after 2 test runs have mostly learned how to not use the systems the wrong way. Which I’m sure will translate into 100% non-misuse in a real election.
The likelihood for fraud if this problem stays in is high. Anyone saying otherwise is flat out lying to anyone that listens. There are groups of people who will do anything to tamper with an election (and no, I’m not talking about liberals). Once they know about a flaw this easily exploitable, they will take advantage of it. Saying the likelihood of fraud is low is akin to saying you trust the criminals will not try to take advantage of a flaw once they are made aware of it. And that would be laughable if it weren’t such a serious issue.
[tags]Diebold voter machines work great as long as not used in manner designed for,Easily exploitable flaw in Diebold e-voting systems no cause for concern according to Diebold[/tags]