Credit to Tom Scott. H/T to Michael O’Connor Clarke.
May 15, 2012
November 29, 2011
Megan McArdle: Barney Frank will be missed
Yeah, read that title again. She’s not kidding at all:
Guess which Democrat now becomes the ranking member on the financial services committee? That’s right, none other than our favorite batty aunt, Maxine Waters. The woman who, during a major hearing with the cameras on her, asked the heads of Goldman Sachs and State Street bizarre questions about how they set the limits on their consumer credit cards*. She asked Ken Lewis, the head of Bank of America, a question about “offshore loss mitigation caps” (a term of which I — and also, clearly, Ken Lewis — had never heard) that was so bizarre — and garbled — that he was flummoxed into silence; he sat there squirming like a third grader being picked on by the teacher.
When he finally got the courage to ask what she meant, it became clear that Maxine Waters had no idea what she meant; I assume she’d either taken hasty and incomplete notes when her staffers briefed her about what to ask, or had flubbed reading the question, and couldn’t bring herself to admit on C-SPAN that she hadn’t really bothered preparing for the hearing to the extent, of, say, familiarizing herself with the institutions whose heads she was grilling, or actually bothering to understand the questions she was going to ask. It was kind of hilarious, until you realized that this was her job, and that she voted on critical financial regulatory questions.
Nor is this an isolated pattern; every time I see Maxine Waters at a hearing I know that the questions are going to be bizarre, and that Congresswoman Waters will make them even stranger with garbled readings and off-topic follow-ups.
* If I actually have to tell you this, these financial institutions do not really deal with consumers, much less their credit cards. I’m not picking on you — you have an excuse. You’re not a member of the financial services committee.
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October 29, 2011
The Halloween fun-snatchers
Tristin Hopper has a scary list of all the folks who are out to prevent any fun from happening this October 31st:
This Halloween, some Barrie, Ont., elementary students will not go to school dressed as witches, goblins or zombies — but in simple shades of orange and black. The dress code is “an effort to respect the diverse value of … families,” according to a letter sent out by one school.
Similar ”orange-and-black” days have been decreed around Ottawa schools this year by parents and teachers. In parts of Quebec, costumes are permitted — but junk food restrictions have barred teachers and administrators from distributing candy to students.
[. . .]
Since the 1970s, Halloween fears have mostly involved tainted treats; razor blades in apples and chocolate bars injected with rat poison. Spooked by rumours of sabotaged Halloween candy, dozens of municipal councils enacted trick-or-treating bans, and home-baked treats quickly became a quaint relic. But to date, the only confirmed case of tainted Halloween candy occurred in 1974 when Houston dad Ronald Clark O’Bryan murdered his eight-year-old son as part of a life insurance scam by spiking a package of Pixy Stix with cyanide.
[. . .]
Halloween’s pagan origins have earned it official scorn from most major religions, and when trick-or-treaters come to the door of Calgary-area pastor Paul Ade, they walk away not with candy, but with a Bible.
Mr. Ade is the founder of JesusWeen, a Christian alternative to Halloween gaining traction in Canada, the United States and the U.K. Instead of chocolate bars and lollipops, JesusWeen participants hand out Bibles, pieces of scripture or other Christian-themed gifts. JesusWeen participants can even dress up — although as superheroes and princesses rather than witches or ghosts. “We as Christians believe in life, not death,” Mr. Ade explains.
[. . .]
In the United States, religious calls to ban Halloween reached a boiling in the 1990s as a retaliation to efforts by the American Civil Liberties Union to scrub any mention of religion from the school system. In 1989, a small county in Florida banned Halloween on the grounds that it was a pagan religious holiday. By century’s end, dozens of school boards across the country had followed suit. Anti-Halloween sentiment soon spread to Canada. In 1998, three Thunder Bay Catholic schools banned Halloween for promoting “evil” values.
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May 28, 2011
Feeling optimistic about peoples’ common sense?
A few visits to this site will quickly disabuse you of that feeling.
It’s how some folks on Facebook react to stories from The Onion as if it was real news.
May 3, 2011
The lawfare threat to bloggers (and anyone else who posts on the web)
Box Turtle Bulletin lays out the details of a very disturbing development:
By providing blockquotes, we let the source material speak for itself without any inadvertent inaccuracies or biases which may creep in if we were to paraphrase it. And by providing links, we allow you, the reader, to click through for more information. Of course, we cannot copy the source material in its entirety, nor can we copy major portions of it. That would violate copyright laws, which is a very serious issue. But copyright laws do allow us to copy small portions of source material for commentary and discussion purposes.
As I said, copyright laws — or more specifically, copyright lawsuits — are serious business. And now, three newspaper chains have discovered that filing copyright lawsuits can become yet another profit center. The problem is, their definition of copyright infringement not only contradicts copyright law, but also poses a serious threat to bloggers and other online outlets everywhere.
Righthaven LLC is a copyright holding company which acquires “rights” to newspaper content after finding the content published on other web sites without permission, and files lawsuits against those web site. Righthaven was created as a partnership with Stephens Media, publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and their business model rests entirely on suing web site owners and operators for extravagant “damages” as a shakedown exercise. (“Rights” are in quotes, because, contrary to what is required under copyright law, Righthaven doesn’t actually acquire any legitimate copyright “rights,” which is yet another problem with their business model.) Two other newspaper chains, WEHCO Media and Media News Group have entered into agreements with Righthaven to split the profits from lawsuits stemming from their respective newspapers’ contents.
The three newspaper chains partnering with Righthaven represent some very important voices in the newspaper industry, including the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Denver Post, Salt Lake Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, Oakland Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Detroit News, El Paso Times, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and Charleston Daily Mail.
I had already heard that the Las Vegas Review-Journal had some unusual views on quoting from their website, so I’ve avoided using that site for years. I didn’t know that the St. Paul Pioneer Press had also adopted that highly restrictive view of copyright, and they were one of the newspapers I read regularly for Minnesota Vikings information. I’m going to have to avoid quoting from them, however. Here is how Box Turtle Bulletin will be handling the situation in future:
And so to protect ourselves and this web site, we will no longer cite any content from Denver Post, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Salt Lake Tribune, or any of the other news sources listed no linkhere. There will be no links, no blockquotes, nothing. For the most part, it will be as if these sources simply don’t exist.
But if it happens that, for example, the Denver Post has an exclusive story that no one else has, we will do what the Associated Press does whenever the New York Times breaks a story. We will write about the story by paraphrasing the Post’s article, but we will not quote from it or provide a link to it — just like the Associated Press does. There will be however one tweak from standard AP practice: we will provide a link, but it will be to an explanation as to why there is no link. It will look something like this:
“The Denver Post (no link) reports blah, blah, blah…”
H/T to Walter Olson for the link.
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May 2, 2011
I think I’ll hold off on buying a PlayStation for a little while longer
I actually was considering buying a PS3 in the near future, as our existing Blu-Ray player doesn’t play nicely with Netflix, while my domestic gaming advisor tells me that PS3′s do. Sony’s security problems are enough to give me pause:
“It’s really scary,” said Marsh Ray, a researcher and software developer at two-factor authentication service PhoneFactor, who fleshed out the doomsday scenario more thoroughly on Monday. “It’s justification for Sony freaking out. They could lose control of their whole PS3 network.”
Ray’s speculation is fueled in part by chat transcripts that appear to show unknown hackers discussing serious weaknesses in the PSN authentication system. In it, purported hackers going by the handles trixter and SKFU discuss how to connect to PSN servers using consoles with older firmware that contain bugs susceptible to jailbreaking exploits, even though Sony takes great pains to prevent that from happening.
“I just finished decrypting 100% of all PSN functions,” SKFU claimed.
There’s no evidence the participants had anything to do with the massive security breach that plundered names, addresses, email addresses, passwords and other sensitive information from some 77 million PSN users. But the log did raise questions about the security of the network, since it claimed it was possible to fool the PSN’s authentication system into permitting rogue consoles.
On this reading, arrogance on the part of Sony executives, and complacency on the part of developers and testers are key elements of the security failure:
“If you can’t jailbreak it, then I can see a developer assuming that they don’t need a particular authorization check on what’s coming across the wire because a user can’t do that,” said WhiteHat Security CTO Jeremiah Grossman, an expert in web application security. “So if somebody managed to jailbreak their device and pop a flaw, I can see something major happening there.”
Hotz, the PS3 jailbreaker who recently settled the copyright lawsuit Sony brought against him, said in a recent blog post that the theory is plausible and that responsibility for the hack lay squarely on the shoulders of Sony executives who placed too much trust in the invulnerability of the PS3.
“Since everyone knows the PS3 is unhackable, why waste money adding pointless security between the client and the server?” Hotz, aka GeoHot, wrote. “This arrogance undermines a basic security principle, never trust the client. Sony needs to accept that they no longer own and control the PS3 when they sell it to you.”
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April 14, 2011
From supercar to superscrap
This is what it looked like before the owner’s son took it for a drive:
And this is after the drive got stopped a bit early:
The good news is that the driver and passenger were able to walk away from the wreck, leaving £275,000 of scrap metal behind.
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February 18, 2011
Red light cameras
Some frightening footage of traffic accidents from a few years ago, posted to one of the mailing lists I’m moderately active on.
Note that most of these accidents would not be prevented by red light cameras: you can’t stop inattentive idiots from being idiots just by taking photos of the license plate on the vehicle. However, several of the accidents could have been avoided if the non-infringing drivers were a bit more attentive. Dennis Lippert responded to this video and the pro-red light camera fans thusly:
As usual, the majority of the crashes on the video probably would have been avoided if the “innocent” driver had been paying attention to his surroundings. Proving, again, that driving is not to be taken lightly… not to be done while texting… or talking… or doing anything else, really…
I’m all for this sort of camera… just a video overview of the intersection… which can be used to let law enforcement see what happened after a crash.
I’m staunchly against red-light-cameras as they’ve been implemented as revenue devices…. from which some 75% of the revenue comes from folks who innocently slipped thru a red-light a second or so after it changed… and before the cross traffic started into the intersection.
It has been proven that lengthening the yellow light by a second
decreases the incidence of red-light-running by something like 50%
per second of extra time…Red-light-cameras will not stop the folks who simply aren’t paying attention at all… or who are wantonly disobeying. All they do is generate revenue from harmless slight-offenders.
Since they generally sent most of the profits to the company that
installs the system, rather than to the municipality, this makes
perfect sense. More tickets = more money. So the systems are designed for maximum revenue… not optimal safety.
As Dennis points out, red light cameras are like speed traps in that they’re revenue generators first and only public safety enforcement a distant second.
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December 6, 2010
Reindeer determined to shed that pesky “child-friendly” reputation
Joe Fay reports on an unpleasant meeting between rambler and reindeer:
Children are advised to hide under the duvet if they hear sleighbells this Christmas Eve, after it emerged that reindeers appear to have developed a taste for human flesh.
The reindeer’s ability to transform from Santa’s little helper to ravening maneater was illustrated by the tale of a 57-year-old woman who was subjected to a terrifying two-hour assault from a juvenile male last month.
Pat Cook was walking in the Cromdale Hills near Grantown-on-Spey when the juvenile bull separated himself from the rest of the UK’s only reindeer herd and began stalking her.
As she reached the summit of the hill, he pounced, knocking her to the ground.
Cook told The Scotsman: “One of my walking poles was thrown into the air. The reindeer kept trying to stick its antlers into me, but I managed to brace my feet on them.”
You’d really better watch out!
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November 12, 2010
New book for kids about to fly for the first time
Mark Frauenfelder has the book to give to your child before going to the airport:
Got to start ‘em early . . . by the time they’re full-grown, they’ll accept any intrusion from government officials as a matter of course.
The original version (in French) is here.
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March 1, 2010
Christopher Hitchens’ retrospective on the life of Alexander Haig
Christopher Hitchens does not come to praise (a would-be) Caesar, but to bury him . . . good and deep:
“Nobody has a higher opinion of General Alexander Haig than I do,” I once wrote. “And I think he is a homicidal buffoon.” I did not then realize that this view of mine was at least partly shared by so many senior figures on the American right.
When I moved to Washington in the very early years of Ronald Reagan’s tenure, I was pretty sure that Haig, then secretary of state, was delusional (and not even in a good way). What I would not have believed then was what has become apparent since — that his boss, Ronald Reagan, often felt the same way.
And this is the nice part of the biography. Go read the whole thing.
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February 7, 2010
Philippine music critics over-react to “My Way” karaoke
I’m not a karaoke fan, but even I think that this is a bit of over-reaction to bad singing:
The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”
The killings have produced urban legends about the song and left Filipinos groping for answers. Are the killings the natural byproduct of the country’s culture of violence, drinking and machismo? Or is there something inherently sinister in the song?
Whatever the reason, many karaoke bars have removed the song from their playbooks. And the country’s many Sinatra lovers, like Mr. Gregorio here in this city in the southernmost Philippines, are practicing self-censorship out of perceived self-preservation.
Karaoke-related killings are not limited to the Philippines. In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” Karaoke-related assaults have also occurred in the United States, including at a Seattle bar where a woman punched a man for singing Coldplay’s “Yellow” after criticizing his version.
H/T to Walter Olsen for the link.
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November 3, 2009
When they say “Don’t touch anything”, they mean it
This man didn’t pay attention, and took a more exciting ride than he expected:
It probably is best not to fiddle with switches or controls when riding in the back seat of an air force plane.
A man who failed to obey that principle found himself hurtling out of the cockpit, smashing through the Perspex canopy and into space after grabbing the black- and yellow-striped handle between his legs. He had inadvertently pulled the eject lever and found himself blasted 100 metres into the sky on his rocket-powered seat.
The South African air force has confirmed the incident that took place last Wednesday, when the passenger took off for a flight with an experienced pilot from South Africa’s Silver Falcons air display team. Investigators are assuming that the passenger tried to steady himself while the pilot was putting the Pilatus PC-7 Mk II through its paces by grabbing the eject lever.
The passenger survived, with only minor injuries. That’s more than a little surprising:
“We train for this and if you don’t get it right, and are not in the correct ejection posture, you can sustain severe spinal cord injuries or even worse.”
H/T to Jeff Scarbrough for the link.
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September 8, 2009
Follow-up on the Fire Chief who was shot in court . . . by the police
The situation isn’t any less surreal than the original report. Kevin Drum provides an update:
He’s OK, but the police department, which was already in deep trouble for its habit of ticketing everything on wheels that rolled through Jericho, has been disbanded and all outstanding tickets have been voided. The town’s part-time judge has quit too. And nobody knows what’s happened to all the ticket revenue.
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September 4, 2009
“They shot him. Right there in court.”
Radley Balko links to the weirdest “cops gone wild” story I’ve encountered in quite a while:
It was just too much, having to return to court twice on the same day to contest yet another traffic ticket, and Fire Chief Don Payne didn’t hesitate to tell the judge what he thought of the police and their speed traps.
The response from cops? They shot him. Right there in court.
Note also the fascinating fact that there are 7 police officers watching over a population of 174 people. That’s an amazing level of “protection” those folks are getting.
Original story here.
Update: Bonus story from Radley’s site, Feds bust doctor for . . . meeting women on the internet. Amazing. Just freakin’ amazing.
