Apparently Supreme Court nominee Elana Kagan was asked which Twilight team she is on, as Senator Amy Klobuchar asked:

The senator jokingly asked Kagan’s thoughts on ”the vampire versus the werewolf.”

…

Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, said she realized Kagan ”can’t comment on future cases. So I’ll leave that alone.”

Of course she couldn’t answer that. (Team Edward)

p.s And this is posted in the NYTimes under Politics?

Some notes I am still compiling. Source for information on custom reports.

Version 2010-02-10

Corporation Says It Will Run for Congress – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com.

Clever challenging of the recent SCOTUS decision that confers some rights of citizens upon corporations.  The ad, itself, I don’t find very clever, but the concept, definitely.

It’s too obviously satirical, and yet Murray Hill Inc. actually set up a paypal “support” link with the text “Murray Hill Inc. video program. This is NOT a federal campaign account or a tax-exempt donation.”.  So, they *will* accept money, but admit it’s *not* a campaign. Odd.

Links:  Murray Hill Inc. is launching the campaign with a website, Facebook page and YouTube video, products.

Paypal Images:

Murray Hill Inc PayPal

Murray Hill Inc, Support Paypal

Posted to the PragProg January Magazine (PDF epub mobi) forum

re: Andy Lester’s NY Resolutions
I find that my sense of contentment rests on having a combination of hope for a brighter future, a reasonable plan for getting there, and and reasonable standards in what I consider success at any given stage.

Let’s say I hope and plan on having my dream job by the end of this year. But, by relying on an idea of ‘dream job’, I am setting myself up for disappointment. My standards are too high and not well-enough defined. I would better serve myself by making a goal that is more specific and attainable. For example, I may decide that my goal is to have a new job or be in a more marketable place through developing my Ruby on Rails skills and getting involved in my local community. And so forth.

I may then say, that I would prefer a place that is more challenging, more social, has more room for creativity, and is good for my career, at an acceptable salary increase. But of these wishes, how much can I ‘settle for’ or achieve and still be happy? Setting reasonable goals and standards is key to feeling content about my progress.

Lastly, the well-known axiom “How does a project get behind? One day at a time” has a reverse corollary—that I should try to make regular progress towards my goal before time slips away, one day at a time.

Note: This applies to any kind of goal, not just vocational goals. Having reasonable standards is the key.

Far too many people still use easy-to-guess passwords. Admittedly, keeping track of multiple passwords for every occasion is difficult, but at least one’s universal password should not be easily guessable!

A lot of people like KeePass (portable) to securely manage their passwords, though I have my own system.

Back at the dawn of the Web, the most popular account password was “12345.”

Today, it’s one digit longer but hardly safer: “123456.”

…

Mr. Shulman and his company examined a list of 32 million passwords that an unknown hacker stole last month from RockYou…  The list was briefly posted on the Web, and hackers and security researchers downloaded it.

…

Imperva found that nearly 1 percent of the 32 million people it studied had used “123456” as a password. The second-most-popular password was “12345.” Others in the top 20 included “qwerty,” “abc123” and “princess.”

More disturbing, said Mr. Shulman, was that about 20 percent of people on the RockYou list picked from the same, relatively small pool of 5,000 passwords.

That suggests that hackers could easily break into many accounts just by trying the most common passwords. Because of the prevalence of fast computers and speedy networks, hackers can fire off thousands of password guesses per minute.

One commenter also suggested this tool:  http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/

January 12, 2010

On how Google Wave surprisingly changed my life

I use google wave every single day. I start off the day by checking gmail. Then I look at a few news sites to see if anything of interest happened. Then I open google wave: because that's where my business lives. That's how I run a complicated network of collaborators, make hundreds of decisions every day and organise the various sites that made me $14.000 in december.

via On how Google Wave surprisingly changed my life – This is so Meta.

I’ve noticed this as well, that Google Wave is excellent for collaboration.  A well used wave is hard to describe in comparison to email, IM, or other electronic communications.  A persistent asynchronous chat that can be played back or edited at any time.

However, Google Wave is still in preview and has serious Access Control issues.  Right now, anyone can edit any part of a wave and invite anyone else, or even make it public.  This makes it dangerous for any sensitive communications.

Have you tried ‘Mingle’ by Thoughtworks?

“As the focus on climate increases in the public’s mind, it can’t help but be a part of people’s planning about the future,” said Thomas Joseph Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Ore., who has a practice that focuses on environmental issues. “It touches every part of how they live: what they eat, whether they want to fly, what kind of vacation they want.”

While no study has documented how frequent these clashes have become, therapists agree that the green issue can quickly become poisonous because it is so morally charged. Friends or family members who are not devoted to the environmental cause can become irritated by life choices they view as ostentatiously self-denying or politically correct.

via When Trying to Preserve the Planet Strains the Relationship – NYTimes.com.

Wow, a clinical psychologist that focuses on environmental issues.  I suppose I’m not surprised as my first experience of meeting a vegan was getting yelled at.

Mikey Hicks is 8-years old, was born shortly before 9/11/01, and is on the terrorist selectee list for extra screening when flying. Story: Meet Mikey, 8: U.S. Has Him on Watch List

There are two problems with this type of screening that are well-illustrated in the article.

1) That the list’s only criterium for flagging a person is a name match. There are no other factors taken in account: not history, demographics, nor other intelligence. In one case, someone managed to avoid the list by changing his name. In effect, this renders the list totally useless in that it captures very high false positives and can easily made to result in false negatives.

2) There is no reason that this child has spent eight years, his entire life, on this list without some sort of effective recourse.

It points to a complete lack or interest or inability of our government to design an intelligent system.

My guess, is that it is designed this way so that no one actually needs to be trained. A computer flags the kids, and a TSA staff member does the computer’s bidding. There is no apparent place for the assessment of the TSA agent him or herself.

What a poorly thought-out use case.

Yehuda Katz recently posted “The Maximal Usage Doctrine for Open Source“. His take on preferring MIT/BSD-type licenses over GPL-type licenses is interesting in its own right, but it is well-worth delving into the discussion in the comments.  Yehuda writes:

Starting out with the easiest, my first desire, to have my software used as much as possible, is most easily satisfied by an extremely liberal usage policy. Adding restrictions on the use of software I write reduces its adoption almost by definition.

Much more importantly, the same can be said about exposing code to real world stresses. By far the most important way to achieve this goal is to make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to use the code.

If only 1% of all proprietary users of the source ever report bugs, that’s 1% of potentially thousands of users, as opposed to 100% of the zero proprietary users who were able to use the software under a more restrictive usage scheme. In practice, this number is much more than 1%, as proprietary users of software experience and report bugs just like open source users do.

The only real counter-argument to this is that by forcing users to contribute, some number of proprietary users will be forced to become open source users, and their contributions will outweigh the smaller contributions of proprietary users. In practice, proprietary users choose proprietary solutions instead when they are forced to choose between restrictive open source usage schemes and other proprietary software.

There is also much to be said for exposing open source tools into proprietary environments.

An article in the New York Times today battles a common meme that it is more ethical to eat plants than animals because they don’t feel pain.

Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too

“Even if you have quite a bit of knowledge about plants,” Dr. De Moraes said, “it’s still surprising to see how sophisticated they can be.”

It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive. Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun. Don’t expect them to boast: they’re too busy fighting to survive.

I, personally, find arguments regarding sustainability and environmental impact as more convincing arguments for vegetarianism than the ‘animals feel pain’ argument. Perhaps it’s the scientist in me that daily remembers that that I exist in an animal body and have animal needs, and that, regardless of ‘higher’ impulses, I am constrained by my physical being and my evolutionary nature.

I am an omnivore. I have nutritional needs that perhaps can be met on a vegan diet, but it requires effort that I consider unnatural. However, I think people eat too much meat, and I still do not understand how a burger at McDonald’s can cost less than a salad.

Historically, for most people, meat-eating was reserved for special occasions. For better and sometimes worse, refrigeration and mass transit have changed the immediacy of eating a just-slaughtered full animal.

I think I would feel better about eating meat if I slaughtered my own animal, but until I get there, I am comfortable eating it rarely, but for health and other reasons.  It does not make sense to elevate one animal kingdom above another as more worthy to live just because we belong to it.

An ancient thought that captures the difficulty of our duality as self-conscious animals.  Psalm 8:

5 What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that Thou thinkest of him?
6 Yet Thou hast made him but little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.
7 Thou hast made him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet:
8 Sheep and oxen, all of them, yea, and the beasts of the field;
9 The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea; whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.