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Holidays and whatnot
I'm home for winter break (got home late Thursday night) after visiting Claremont people and saklani2 on the way down. I'll be driving back up to school the day after New Year's. Who's at the e ( Read more... ) -
Republican shenanigans
Wow.
In Maryland, Republican Governor Ehrlich is up for re-election. Steele, his lieutenant governor, is running for Senate.
The shenanigan: Their campaign went to Philly and recruited a bunch of homeless people to do a job for them, offering them $100 and meals. The job? Getting bused out to Maryland to hand out pamphlets - with sample Democratic ( Read more... ) -
U.S. tax law is officially on crack
When tax law is so complex that people are taking out patents on tax-saving strategies, something's seriously wrong.
From the article: "...the mind boggles at the possibilities. Could I get a patent on taking a deduction for dependents, so that every parent in America would have to pay a royalty to me to take advantage of the tax law passed by ( Read more... ) -
Some Microsoft Ridiculousness
Background:
(a) Microsoft's been deploying Windows Genuine Advantage for Windows XP as a "critical" update. If you don't have a "Genuine" copy of Windows, WGA continually pesters you to cough up the cash for a "genuine" copy.
(On a side note, calling a borrowed or bootleg copy non-"genuine" is deceptive. It implies that your copy is an inferior ( Read more... ) -
Geeky torture analogy
There's a blog post at Wired saying that the "logic" of those who voted for the torture bill is like a common programming error:
if (person = terrorist) { punish_severely(); }
else { exit(-1); }
Those of you who know C/C++ should get it instantly.
( Solution ) -
Voting machine thoughts
A recent Princeton report on the Diebold Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine got me thinking about voting security in general ( Read more... ) -
Airline security, continued
Bruce Schneier says more or less what I was trying to say, but much more comprehensibly: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/terrorism_secur.html -
Airline security thoughts
As you can see here if you haven't heard already, there was some airline bombing plot that involved mixing a couple of liquids together to form an explosive and blowing some airplanes out of the sky. The solution involved temporarily banning all liquids on carry-on flights, which was probably the best thing to do on short notice (except that ( Read more... ) -
Oh, my ailing laptop...
My laptop's having a problem that's fixable under warranty. However, as those of you who have had such repairs will know, they make you give them permission to indiscriminately wipe your hard drive. Obviously, I need to back up the laptop ( Read more... ) -
Road trip!
Oh noes! An update! The world has ended!
I got to Laura's house last night, and I think I've adjusted to the time zone change now. We're leaving on Monday morning. We're going from New York to L.A. We've not decided our route in its entirety, but we're definitely having lunch with mimeinashoebox at the beginning and going to Vegas at the end.