A report on what causes it and advice on how to avoid spam.

I’ve seen a couple of articles on this concept.  The basic story is that, due to the relatively large number of innocent versus guilty people, anything other than a 100% correct database (checked your credit report lately?) will wrongly punish a much larger number of innocent people than wrongly allow guilty ones to go free.

Example 3: Assume a 1% error rate — one in a hundred — and the same one in 10,000 ratio of guilty people. The results are very different. For every 100 guilty people the database correctly identifies, it will mistakenly identify 10,000 innocent people as guilty. The number of guilty people erroneously listed as innocent is larger, but still very small: one in 100.

Another interesting tidbit:

There are 13 million people on the FBI’s terrorist watch list. That’s ridiculous, it’s simply inconceivable that a number of people equal to 4.5% of the population of the United States are terrorists. … And in any case, any watch list with 13 million people is basically useless. How many resources can anyone afford to spend watching about one-twentieth of the population, anyway?

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A state court in Georgia has issued temporary restraining order, which forced the cancellation of a conference panel this past weekend. A company called Blackboard, which sells campus automation systems to colleges and universities, convinced the court to block the publication of embarrassing details about Blackboard products.  The injunction is a prior restraint on speech, which prevented the defendants from speaking to an specific audience that had gathered to hear them in spite of any consideration of the First Amendment.

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A MIT grad student hacked the Xbox and described his methods in a widely distributed research paper, helping spur a wave of Xbox-hacking that has led to the development of Xbox versions of Linux and other homemade software.

The publishing deal on his recently competed book, “Hacking the Xbox” was killed because the publisher is scared that Microsoft will come after them with the DMCA. (The Department of Justice recently used the DMCA to shut down ISOnews.com, a Web site partly used to distribute Xbox-hacking tools, and to imprison the site’s owner.)

So he decided to self-publish the book, but the shopping-cart service he used also got scared off by the DMCA.

“The thing I have to emphasize is that the book itself is not criminal,” Huang said. “It’d be like saying that breaking and entering is illegal, so you can’t write a book on how locks work.”

Full story

Microsoft Corporation today announced a high-level arrangement with the U.S. State Department to restructure postwar Iraq as a Windows-based application.

full article

Seriously. I’m not making this up.

With one hand they sell “enhanced-CDs” with additional video or promotional material which can only be seen by using a computer. With the other they spank you for using your PC to play a regular CD.

I just got the CD “Songs for the Deaf” by “Queens of the Stone Age” and put it in my PC. It froze the computer. I went through the normal CTRL-ALT-DEL fix-it steps, trying to shut things down and recover, and it crashed the system. Then it wouldn’t fully reboot. It also wouldn’t eject the CD. I finally removed the CD while rebooting for the third time by hitting the eject button before Windows started. And then the PC recovered.

This CD has no warnings on it about not using it in a computer or being copy protected. I checked the web, and sure enough, it is listed as one of the CDs that uses especially severe copy protection.

I’m listening to in on the stereo that’s in the other room as I write this and it’s playing fine. When it’s done, although I like the CD, I’m returning it. I expect a fight because they’ll want to give me the same disc. We’ll see what their policy is, but those are the rumors.

For now I’ll just warn others that the warnings I’ve been hearing are real.

Excellent brief Point-Conterpoint debate clearly summarizing what both sides have stated about Operation Shuck and Jive, oops, Shock and Awe.

Discover Magazine announced that highly respected wildlife biologist Dr. Aprile Pazzo has discovered a new species in Antarctica: the hotheaded naked ice borer. These fascinating creatures have bony plates on their heads that, fed by numerous blood vessels, can become burning hot, allowing the animals to bore through ice at high speeds. They use this ability to hunt penguins, melting the ice beneath the penguins and causing them to sink downwards into the resulting slush where the hotheads consume them.

After much research, Dr. Pazzo theorized that the hotheads might have been responsible for the mysterious disappearance of noted Antarctic explorer Philippe Poisson in 1837. “To the ice borers, he would have looked like a penguin.”

Read more here about yesterday’s announcement.

Along with the possiblity of losing your citizenship if you’re found to have contributed “material support” to organizations deemed by the government, even retroactively, to be “terrorist,” this does what many feared:

…many of PATRIOT I’s “sunset provisions” � stipulating that the expanded new enforcement powers would be rescinded in 2005 � would be erased from the books, cementing Ashcroft’s rushed legislation in the law books. As UPI noted March 10, “These sunset provisions were a concession to critics of the bill in Congress.”

The act was leaked a couple of months ago, and quickly denied as “just an early draft.” But this article points out that, just as Patriot 1 was rushed through after 9/11, “if 10,000 residents of Los Angeles had been vaporized by a “suitcase nuke” in late January, it is reasonable to assume that the then-secret proposal would have been speed-delivered for a congressional vote, even though Congress has not so far participated in drafting the legislation.”

Furniture and more at Straight Line Designs

Funny how I was reading about some of this stuff yesterday while writing a response to the “Who’s Smarter?” e-mail that’s been going around, and then I encounter new stuff today. Connect the dots…

An article titled “The Cheney Connection” says:

… there are serious questions emerging over the process by which US companies are hired to put out oil fires, … and do whatever is necessary to ”reconstruct” Iraq after allied forces deconstruct it. Some answers need to come from Vice President Dick Cheney, a major architect of the war with Iraq, … who was, until 2 1/2 years ago, chief executive officer of Halliburton Co., a Houston-based oil field services firm…

It is a Halliburton subsidiary — Kellogg, Brown & Root — that landed on a short list of companies invited by the US Agency for International Development to bid on what could grow to be a $900 million contract to rebuild Iraq. That’s the same Kellogg, Brown & Root that was recently awarded, by the Defense Department, the contract to put out fires at oil fields in Iraq.

In the first Gulf War, Iraqis torched more than 700 oil wells in Kuwait. About half the fires were extinguished by Halliburton.

Of course this isn’t really new news. And then I saw another press release about an upcoming movie by Michael Moore, of “Bowling for Columbine”, “Stupid White Men” and Oscar speech fame. It’s titled “Fahrenheit 911” and is a documentary about “the murky relationship” between former President George Bush and the family of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

According to Moore, the former president had a business relationship with Osama bin Laden’s father, Mohammed bin Laden, a Saudi construction magnate who left $300 million to Osama bin Laden. It has been widely reported that bin Laden used the inheritance to finance global terrorism.

Moore said the bin Laden family was heavily invested in the Carlyle Group, a private global investment firm that the filmmaker said frequently buys failing defense companies and then sells them at a profit. Former President Bush has reportedly served as a senior adviser with the firm.

“The senior Bush kept his ties with the bin Laden family up until two months after Sept. 11, “said Moore.

And I was reading about that yesterday at The First 80 Years Behind the Bushes. Again, it’s not really new news. There have been stories about this stuff for a long time.

So many dots, so little time.

Californians can now pre-register here for the nationwide Do Not Call list that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is expected to launch this summer.

A number of states are considering bills that apparently are intended to extend the national Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Freedom To Tinker provides a lot of concise info. Their original description from 3/26 is already out of date, but it’s the best I’ve seen. The MPAA is pushing it. It has already passed in Michigan.

It’s best if you read about it there, but here are a couple of examples:

• Most security “firewalls” use NAT, so if you use a firewall (and you should be), you’re in violation.
• If you have a home DSL router, or if you use the “Internet Connection Sharing” feature of your favorite operating system product, you’re in violation for the same reason.
• Most operating system products would also apparently be banned, because they support connection sharing via NAT.

Another example of the government trying to legislate what it doesn’t understand.

April 1st to April 8th is a week during which everyone is encouraged to turn off outdoor lighting. It was founded to reduce light pollution so we can step back for a moment and see the night sky. It occurs from 10pm to 12 am (ET & MT) and 9pm to 11pm (CT & PT).

Read about it the at NDSW web site.

You probably didn’t know that Bush apparently went AWOL (Dallas Morning News) from his Air National Guard duty in the 1970s. It was covered by a few newspapers, but the story disappeared after he claimed he couldn’t remember what happened. Right. “I can’t remember what I did, but I wasn’t flying because they didn’t have the same airplanes. I fulfilled my obligations.”�

He also apparently skipped a medical exam that required a drug test.� Can you say special treatment?

While I’m at it, both these items are mention in this article about why we’re really going to Iraq.

It seems like it takes almost all day to read the Sunday paper. So, just how much stuff is in there? What if it was in book format instead of that thing that takes over the floor or couch or sometimes both?

If this Sunday’s LA Times was put into a standard size paperback book format, it would be over 2,500 pages long. And it would have a second 1,250 page supplement to cover the classified, jobs and cars ads. Yeah, there are lots of full page ads (each taking almost 13 paperback pages) that you would just skim through, but that’s still a lot of reading material. And the page count doesn’t include any of the extras like ad or magazine inserts.

The Times was made up of a 200 page main paper with another 100 pages of classified and car ads. Just a coincidence, or is it this size all the time? Stay tuned.

Q: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
A: Who cares, they’re both delicious!

Somebody that’s offended by PETA’s latest advertising campaign came up with this great idea for today.  Too bad I found out too late and don’t have any meat in the fridge.  Yeah, that will be the day.  They’ve even got a letter to PETA and addresses to send it.

I think it’s time to go heat up some sausage…

Ten Second Films. They require a lot of bandwidth: cable and DSL are considered slow.

Do not breakdance under piles of rubble.

The government is trying to help us prepare for terrorist attacks with ambiguous pictures. Some wisecrackers made new captions. The site became so popular that they removed many of the pages to cut down on the traffic. What’s left is still good.