Quotulatiousness

March 20, 2011

Hacking a secure WiFi connection not illegal, says Dutch court

Filed under: Europe, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

An interesting legal precedent may not be as far-reaching as the headline might imply:

Breaking in to an encrypted router and using the WiFi connection is not an criminal offence, a Dutch court ruled. WiFi hackers can not be prosecuted for breaching router security.

A court in The Hague ruled earlier this month that it is legal to break WiFi security to use the internet connection. The court also decided that piggybacking on open WiFi networks in bars and hotels can not be prosecuted. In many countries both actions are illegal and often can be fined.

[. . .]

The Judge reasoned that the student didn’t gain access to the computer connected to the router, but only used the routers internet connection. Under Dutch law breaking in to a computer is forbidden.

A computer in The Netherlands is defined as a machine that is used for three things: the storage, processing and transmission of data. A router can therefore not be described as a computer because it is only used to transfer or process data and not for storing bits and bytes. Hacking a device that is no computer by law is not illegal, and can not be prosecuted, the court concluded.

The key here is the definition of a computer under the law: I expect the Dutch to update this definition in response to the outcome of this case.

A different way to visualize the proposed US budget cuts

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

Jon sent me an interesting link on a different way to visualize the relative size of the proposed budget cuts:

That struck me as a pretty good analogy. I wondered: if you do the math, what part of a Big Mac Extra Value Meal would a $6 billion budget cut represent?

The arithmetic is pretty simple, due to the extensive nutrition information that McDonalds makes available online. A Big Mac Extra Value Meal has three components: a Big Mac, a large order of french fries, and a medium soda. The McDonalds site tells us that a Big Mac has 540 calories, a large fries has 570 and a medium Coke has 210, for a total of 1,320 calories.

Meanwhile, the federal budget is currently around $3.8 trillion, which means that a $6 billion cut represents one 633rd of the total. What would be an equivalent cut in a Big Mac Extra Value Meal?

One variable is not readily available online; that is, how many french fries are there in a large order? To answer that question, I went to a nearby McDonalds at lunch time, paid for a large order of fries, and counted them. There were 87. (I counted fries regardless of size, but did not count the hard bits in the bottom of the container.)

This allows us to complete the calculation. If there are 570 calories in a large order of fries, and 87 fries per order, each french fry, on the average, contains 6.5 calories. One 633rd of the total calorie content of a Big Mac Extra Value Meal is 1,320/633, or 2.1 calories. That equals almost exactly one-third of an average sized french fry.

March 19, 2011

Trying to sort out truth from speculation at Fukushima

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Environment, Government, Japan, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

The only thing that is certain about the Fukushima situation right now is that both the operating company (Tokyo Electric Power Co. aka TEPCO) and the Japanese government have been ridiculously slow to provide information. They may or may not be actively concealing what they know, but they’re taking far too long to share what they do know with the rest of the world.

Inline update: New Scientist has a timeline of Japanese nuclear cover-ups and accidents. [end update]

wormme is a radiological control technician, so he’s very well informed about the overall picture — in a way non-specialists are not — and he’s had an epiphany about Fukushima:

See the light bulb above my head? Lesson Learned!

My first post on Fukushima is still the most widely read. Alas. I’m a radiological control technician who wasn’t paranoid about a radiological situation. Never good. Never acceptable. So I’ve been “hotwashing” myself ever since.

Where did I go wrong? What was the first cause, the primary mistake? I had to know in order to answer the most important question of all:

How do I never make that mistake again?

I turned a nifty phrase in “incalculable danger”, got generous links . . . then steam began venting and cores melting and hydrogen exploding and fuel pools leaking and spent fuel smoldering, all at once, with my brain sprinting like a hamster on a wheel and making about as much progress.

How did Fukushima have several quiet days after the event and only then have the Hellmouth open?

No lesson learned.

Then a couple of days ago we learned the site went six days without electricity. That monstrous tsunami took out the electrical backups, the backup-backups, and the backup-backup-backups in one fell swoop.

And I thought, ”well, that explains most everything”.

But still, no lesson learned.

It’s only now, right now, the realization: I wrote the post assuming that they had electrical power.

Not even an assumption, really. It wasn’t even a consideration. Of course they had power. They couldn’t possibly not have power.

But they did not have power.

Lesson Learned: the Japanese are different from Americans.

He also has interesting and highly informative posts (earlier than the one quoted above, so perhaps to be read with that in mind) on radiation poisoning, stuff that can cause a meltdown, some crappy radiological terminology, characteristics of radiation(s) and shielding(s), why the spent fuel is a bigger problem than the reactors, nuclear triage, time, distance, and shielding, spent fuel pools, first notes on the “Event Summary” file, and how NOT to wear a respirator.

Andrew Sullivan: It’s time to rein in the Imperial Presidency

Filed under: Africa, Government, Law, Military, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:32

I stopped reading Andrew Sullivan a long time ago, when he seemed to lose his mind over Sarah Palin and her family. If this is typical of his writing these days, perhaps he’s recovered from his temporary obsession:

The president’s speech was disturbingly empty. There are, it appears, only two reasons the US is going to war, without any Congressional vote, or any real public debate. The first is that the US cannot stand idly by while atrocities take place. Yet we have done nothing in Burma or the Congo and are actively supporting governments in Yemen and Bahrain that are doing almost exactly — if less noisily — what Qaddafi is doing. Obama made no attempt to reconcile these inconsistencies because, one suspects, there is no rational reconciliation to be made.

Secondly, the president argued that the ghastly violence in Libya is destabilizing the region, and threatening world peace. Really? More than Qaddafi’s meddling throughout Africa for years? More than the brutal repression in Iran? And even if it is destabilizing, Libya is not, according to the Obama administration itself, a “vital national interest”. So why should the US go to war over this?

So what is to be done? Sullivan has an answer:

The proper response to this presidential power-grab is a Congressional vote — as soon as possible.

That will reveal the factions that support this kind of return to the role of global policeman, and force the GOP to go on the record. I also look forward to the statements of the various Republican candidates in support of this president.

But it seems clear enough: exactly the same alliance that gave us Iraq is giving us Libya: the neocons who want to see the US military deployed across the globe in the defense of freedom and the liberal interventionists who believe that the US should intervene whenever atrocities are occurring. What these two groups have in common is an unrelenting focus on the reason for intervention along with indifference to the vast array of unintended consequences their moralism could lead us into. I do not doubt their good intentions and motives. No human being can easily watch a massacre and stand by. Yet we did so with Iran; and we are doing so in Yemen and Bahrain as we speak, and have done so for decades because we rightly make judgments based on more than feeling.

American Digest: This is why Kodak is withering away

Filed under: Bureaucracy, History, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:11

Tell me that this simple idea has never occurred to anyone at Kodak:

If the company that calls itself Kodak today had a brain, it would copy the “Instamatic 100” from Kodak’s greatest hits, drop a first rate lens in it, add some great chips, a view screen as big as the back of the camera, and rebrand it as the “Kodak Digimatic 100.” Instant win.

Kodak Instamatic

They’ll never be cool enough to do it. Somewhere in the 1990s, Kodak lost the ability to design and innovate. Once the king of the camera world, Kodak’s now just the place where bad designs and worse marketing go to die. Today, Kodak needs a brain the same way Scarecrow needed one in the first reel of “Wizard of Oz.” Like Scarecrow, there’s a long brick road awinding into the land of its dreams.

It wasn’t always that way. There was a time when it seemed that everyone in America owned an Instamatic. It was a camera that, in its simplicity, elegance and rock-bottom cost, was an icon of its age

Of course, doing it now would be far too late: this was a winning strategy for 2001, not 2011. If they do it now, it’ll flop because they’ve squandered all the immense goodwill that used to be associated with the company name. It was the “everyman” camera and film: professionals had their specialized cameras and even more specialized film, but everyone else just bought Kodak. Kodak was “good enough”, dependable, predictable.

It takes immense lack of talent to fumble that much potential so thoroughly and so consistently. Almost a genius level of anti-talent at the corporate level.

This week in Guild Wars 2 news

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:08

I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community.

Part 1: Discussion of previous news

  • Rubi asks if ArenaNet’s introduction of Mercenary Heroes to Guild Wars is approaching the pay-to-win line.

Part 2: Guild Wars news

  • There was a game update on Thursday to fix a bug that ended the “lucky weekend” early. The event will now end on Friday.
  • Skill update preview. “In an update next week, we will address some PvP issues that came up as a result of our latest Dervish update. To give our tournament players time to plan ahead, we’re releasing all the skill-related update notes in advance. After the last MAT, we decided to tone down several Dervish skills that proved to be stronger than intended. Additionally, this update will address the power of Blood Magic Necromancers and some other builds that have gotten a little out of line. Finally, we will make a few small buffs to Mesmers and Elementalists.”

Part 3: Guild Wars 2 news

  • Here’s a thought for you, especially if you use one of the Guild Wars wikis for more than just looking up stats: if Guild Wars 2 is going to be non-mission/non-quest in the traditional style (that is, pretty much everything in PvE play is driven by dynamic event chains), will you still find the wiki to be as useful?
  • Fifteen things we learned from last week’s Guild Wars 2 combat footage: “Last week we posted a massive 10-minute long video of pure, unadulterated carnage in Guild Wars 2. Of course, the GW2 fan communities rabidly analyzed every tiny detail of the video in the hunt for new info, and we were right there in the trenches with them. In particular, we chatted with the the fans over at Guild Wars 2 Guru as they discussed and debated everything they found in our video.”
  • I already mailed this one out separately: a series of Twitter updates by the GuildMag folks, and a video of the panel from which they were sending the Tweets – http://quotulatiousness.ca/blog/2011/03/13/twitter-updates-from-a-guild-wars-2-panel-at-pax-east/
  • Ravious at Kill Ten Rats tries to consolidate all the information we’ve been given about the Thief class. “The best thieves are going to live on the razor’s edge having a sustained skill barrage with going as close to zero initiative as possible.”
  • Randomessa pores over all the videos to discover clues to things that haven’t been directly discussed by ArenaNet. “New dynamic events will be added on the fly after the game’s release, and not publicized, for explorers to discover on their own. I have no intention of wiki-ing these.”
  • “Dynamic Events” a Guild Wars 2 comic.
  • Hands-on preview of the Guardian class. “The guardian is easily going to be a class that will be for masters of the game. High leveled dungeons and the hardest of missions will put the pressure on this class and make him a needed commodity. I only got a taste of this class and I am already dead set on having him as my primary character when the game arrives.”
  • PAX East interview and demo. “I would be a bloody liar if I said that Guild Wars 2 wasn’t one of my major reasons for going to PAX East. I’ve been playing the original Guild Wars since the launch of GW: Factions back on April, 2006. Guild Wars is the game I always fall back on when I’m in-between games, and as a result, I’ve logged over 2,000 hours in the game. It’s safe to say I’m pretty darn excited about the sequel.”
  • Martin Kerstein’s wrap-up of PAX East on the official site. “We’ve safely returned from PAX East to ArenaNet World Headquarters here in Seattle, weary but exhilarated after such an incredible show. I wanted to take a moment to share some of the highlights of our PAX East experience with you.”
  • Ravious had a fascinating interview with ArenaNet staff at PAX East: “there was one dominant theme in my talks with Peters and Sharp, they are still iterating on nearly every mechanical feature in Guild Wars 2. It is important to keep in mind that even things fans “know” now because of the demo, interviews, or official articles might be obsolete on launch.”
  • Top honours for two ArenaNet artists in the Spectrum 18 awards.

March 18, 2011

Adrian Peterson changes the tone, but not in a good way

Filed under: Football, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:01

Tom Powers thinks that Adrian Peterson has accomplished what many thought to have been impossible: improving the public view of the NFL owners.

With one slip of the tongue, Adrian Peterson irrevocably has altered public perception with regard to the NFL labor situation. A.P. has accomplished the seemingly impossible: He has made the bad guys look good. Or at least better.

Suddenly, NFL owners, the greediest group of cutthroat, self-indulgent operators since Al Capone’s gang ran roughshod over Chicago, stand in a more favorable public light. And they can wave a disapproving finger at the players and announce to the fans: “Now do you see what we’re dealing with here?”

The other day, Peterson called the owners’ treatment of the players “modern-day slavery.” He was making a lot of sense right up until he uttered those magic words. He had talked about the unmitigated greed of the owners and about how they were trying to wring more money from their employees. Then he made the slavery comparison. Since A.P. is due a base salary of close to $11 million next season, it’s not hard to imagine how all the working stiffs out there viewed those comments.

Because of the impasse, Powers now thinks the best solution is pretty drastic:

It’s too bad because, make no mistake about it, if NFL football goes missing this fall, it’s the owners’ doing and not the players.’ The players are the good guys in these negotiations.

Their careers are short. They get beat up more than any other athletes. They have lingering injuries that hamper them for the rest of their lives. Meanwhile, the filthy-rich owners want a bigger percentage of the revenue pie. In fact, they want a big fat slice right off the top.

OK, what’s done is done. Now everybody looks bad. And just like the 1994 negotiations that almost killed baseball, both sides are so busy trying to gouge each other that they are displaying precious little regard for the cash customers who, in reality, fund the whole damn operation. They are the ones who buy the tickets and merchandise. They are the ones who send the TV ratings — and thus the advertising revenue — through the roof.

So now I think the best thing that could possibly happen is for the NFL to disappear for a year. I hope the labor negotiations reach an impasse and the season is canceled. Then maybe reality will set in for all concerned. The mighty need to be humbled. In a year, with luck, they’ll all realize that the sun doesn’t rise and set on their fannies. They’ll realize that everyone survived just fine without them. And then maybe they won’t take it all for granted anymore.

Tim Harford: The management lessons from the war in Iraq

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

Ignoring death threats to politicians (but only on the right)

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:16

An interesting article at the Huffington Post on the relative media silence on the spate of death threats against Wisconsin politicians:

Why isn’t the mainstream media talking about the death threats against Republican politicians in Wisconsin?

Try to set aside whatever biases or preconceptions you might have for a moment and ask yourself why death threats against politicians aren’t considered national news, especially in the wake of the all too fresh shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and other bystanders. And there hasn’t just been one death threat, but a number of them.

Here’s an example and it’s real. According to Wisconsin State Department of Justice, authorities have found a suspect who admitted to sending the following email:

I want to make this perfectly clear. Because of your actions today and in the past couple of weeks I and the group of people that are working with me have decided that we’ve had enough. We feel that you and your republican dictators have to die. This is how it’s going to happen: I as well as many others know where you and your family live, it’s a matter of public records. We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head. However, this isn’t enough. We also have decided that this may not be enough to send the message. So we have built several bombs that we have placed in various locations around the areas in which we know that you frequent. This includes, your house, your car, the state capitol, and well I won’t tell you all of them because that’s just no fun. Since we know that you are not smart enough to figure out why this is happening to you we have decided to make it perfectly clear to you. If you and your goonies feel that it’s necessary to strip the rights of 300,000 people and ruin their lives, making them unable to feed, clothe, and provide the necessities to their families and themselves then We will “get rid of” (in which I mean kill) the 8 of you. Please understand that this does not include the heroic Senator that risked everything to go aganist what you and your goonies wanted him to do. The 8 includes the 7 senators and the dictator. We feel that it’s worth our lives becasue we would be saving the lives of 300,000 people. Please make your peace with God as soon as possible and say goodbye to your loved ones we will not wait any longer. Goodbye ASSHOLE!!!!

After the Giffords shooting, authorities have to take this sort of threat seriously. The media should too, even if the disturbed person who sent that email was motivated by exactly the kind of rhetoric that’s been used by many liberals against GOP officials over and over again during the Madison protests. And there are more threats floating around the internet, in varying degrees of scary and credible.

The Google search for the string “Wisconsin death threats” only returned 704 results for me this morning, and the only major media outlets represented on the first page were the Chicago Sun-Times and Fox News.

Old Spice Man – marketing hits and misses

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:04

Gary Vaynerchuk reviews the Old Spice Man campaign:

Unless you were living under a rock, you probably saw at least one of the Old Spice commercials starring Isaiah Mustafa that began airing the day after the 2010 Super Bowl. With this campaign, Procter & Gamble, Old Spice’s parent company, showed the world how a brand can play a kick-ass game of media Ping-Pong.

First, it started with outstanding content, spoofing every stereotype of masculinity they could come up with through clever writing and picture-perfect casting. As soon as a bare-chested Mustafa finished gliding around from one paperback-romance scenario to another, reassuring women that even if their man didn’t look like him, they could smell like him if they stopped using lady-scented body wash, millions of people rewound their DVRs and watched the ad again. And again. Then they started talking about it on Facebook and Twitter and making spoof videos on YouTube.

[. . .]

Did the Campaign Work?
It depends on whom you ask. For example, sales of Old Spice Body Wash, which were already on the rise, rose sharply — by 55 percent — over the three months following the first aired TV commercial, then soared by 107 percent (a statistic that included me, because I bought my first stick of Old Spice during that time) around the time the response videos began showing, but some seem to question whether the uptick might have been due to a two-for-one coupon promotion rather than a well-integrated social media campaign.

[. . .]

The Huge Miss
The Old Spice campaign is considered a huge social media win, one that hundreds of social media experts have praised, but here’s where the story takes a bit of a surprising turn. I was sure that Old Spice planned to use the information it has on its almost 120,000 Twitter followers to start engaging with each and every one of them on a personal, meaningful level. Every one of those people should have received an email, thanking the followers for watching the videos and offering them a reason to keep checking in. I’d love to be proven wrong, but I don’t think that happened. As of September 2010, almost two months after Old Spice ambushed Twitter, the Old Spice account has tweeted only twenty-three times, and not one of the tweets talks or interacts with an actual person or user of the brand. Ad Age published an article that begins “Old Spice Fades Into History . . .”

West coast earthquake zones

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

According to an article in The Economist, the well-known San Andreas fault in California is not the most likely to cause an earthquake of the magnitude of last week’s quake in Japan. The most likely source is the Cascadia subduction zone:

wikimedia.org - Cascadia subduction zone The most likely megaquake on the West Coast would be much further north — in fact, 50 miles off the coast between Cape Mendocino in northern California and Vancouver Island in southern British Columbia. This 680-mile strip of seabed is home to the Cascadia subduction zone, where oceanic crust known as the Juan de Fuca plate is forced under the ancient North American plate that forms the continent. For much of its length, the two sides of this huge subduction zone are locked together, accumulating stresses that are capable of triggering megaquakes in excess of magnitude 9.0 when they eventually slip. As such, Cascadia is more than a match for anything off the coast of Japan.

What makes Cascadia such a monster is not just its length, but also the shallowness of the angle with which the encroaching tectonic plate dives under the continental mass. The descending plate has to travel 40 miles down the incline before it softens enough from the Earth’s internal heat to slide without accumulating further frictional stresses. Could the fault unzip from end to end and trigger a megaquake — along with the mother of all tsunamis? You bet. By one account, it has done so at least seven times over the past 3,500 years. Another study suggests there have been around 20 such events over the past 10,000 years. Whatever, the “return time” would seem to be within 200 to 600 years.

And the last time Cascadia let go? Just 311 years ago.

Cascadia subduction zone image from wikimedia.org.

Tweet of the day

Filed under: Africa, Europe, France, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:32

From Jonnynexus:

France keen to act against Gaddafi, US hesitant. Should we start joking about “burger eating surrender monkeys”?

March 17, 2011

Rick Mercer on “the Harper Government”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Humour, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 14:02

Police and fire unions threaten to “boycott” businesses that support Wisconsin governor

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

You’ve got a nice office here, guv. Shame if anything were to happen to it, y’know?

Here is another reason public unions should not be allowed to collectively bargain with politicians running a local or state government. Union leadership — including those from law enforcement and firefighters — have sent letters out to local businesses demanding they publicly oppose the efforts of Wisconsin’s legislature and governor or face the consequences.

Not only are they suggesting they publicly oppose the fiscal-sanity measures in Wisconsin, they are flat out telling them they will publicly boycott businesses who do not proactively do so. From James Taranto’s opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday.

In the letter to Wisconsin businessmen, however, we see why so-called collective bargaining is particularly corrupting to the police. Although the letter explicitly threatens only an economic boycott, when it is written on behalf of the police — of those on whom all citizens depend to protect their safety — it invariably raises the prospect of another kind of boycott. Can a businessman who declines this heavy-handed “request” be confident that the police will do their job if he is the victim of a crime — particularly if the crime itself is in retaliation for his refusal to support “the dedicated public employees who serve our communities”?

LauraW clarifies the message here:

We’re the Police and Firefighters Unions.

If you don’t accede to our demand, we’ll put you on The Naughty List. And, um….boycott you. That’s our threat. We’ll boycott you. That’s all.

Right.

…did we forget to mention that we are cops and firefighters?
Just checking. Making sure you caught that.

H/T to Jon for the link.

Steam narrowboat

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

H/T to Eric Kirkland, who noted:

Please note the compulsory requisites for ‘proper’ canal cruising:
1) The flat cap
2) The grey beard
3) The mucky overalls
4) Bloomin’ great boots
Prior to the current ‘Elf and Safety regime there would also be
5) Roll ups permanently attached to the lower lip or a blazing briar full of Ogdens’ Flake

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