Ingenious arithmetic and plain wordplay

31Mar06

Sometimes the news media calls out official doublespeak: 
NYT: Fewer Marshes + More Man-made Ponds = Increased Wetlands
WASHINGTON, March 30 — In the bog of the federal regulatory code, a wetland is defined as a marshy area of saturated soils and plants whose roots spend part of their lives immersed in water. In the Interior Department's [...]

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Feminist blogging

30Mar06

Guardian gives its 2c on feminist blogging: 
The third wave – at a computer near you

Comparative levels of computer literacy and interest mean that younger women do dominate. As Valenti says, "There's always been this sense among second-wave feminists that young women just aren't interested. That's never been true though: they just didn't know how to [...]

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Apr 29 March (NYC)

30Mar06

 Perhaps we old armchair activists can show half the nerve of the students in LA:
United for Peace : april29.org
MARCH FOR PEACE,
JUSTICE AND DEMOCRACY
End the war in Iraq -
Bring all our troops home now!
SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 2006
NEW YORK CITY

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CentOS hacks OK city website!

28Mar06

An old one that has already been /.ed but worth repeating! Register reports: 
Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over 'renegade' Linux maker
By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View
The heartland turned vicious this week when an Oklahoma town threatened to call in the FBI because its web site was hacked by Linux maker Cent OS. Problem is [...]

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Security schmecurity?

27Mar06

 
Is it just my old age or is the IT industry paradoxically getting less worried about password security these days? Back in the day we used to jump through hoops to not reveal cleartext passwords. Today: my hosting provider prints the password out in cleartext in form responses and email. Various online sites (blogs and [...]

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Globalisation well-defined

27Mar06

 
WaPo (believe it or not!) has a chat with Noam Chomsky online. In the quoted section below, Chomsky, as always, reclaims the use of terms and zeroes in on verbal hoodwinking that should be, but sadly isn't, obvious:
Chat With Chomsky
[...]
Washington, D.C.: Do you believe that Latin America can be successful in developing alternatives to Washington [...]

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Barbarism

25Mar06

Every day I learn of one more incredulous fact:
Giving Birth in Chains – New York Times
America regards itself as an eminently civilized country, but in many states female prisoners who give birth are required to be held in shackles during labor. Besides being grotesquely inhumane, this appalling practice is medically dangerous.
A report by Amnesty International [...]

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Mac Software Essentials — one more

23Mar06

In my earlier entry on Mac software, I forgot one that is absolutely brilliant and a big help for those who have multiple computers, such as a workplace Windows PC. Synergy is a KVM (keyboard, video, mouse sharing application) without the V. In other words, it lets you share your keyboard and mouse across multiple [...]

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Zfone from Zimmerman

22Mar06

Phil Zimmerman (of PGP fame) has the following notice from a week ago:
Secure Voice over IP: Zfone
I’ve just released Zfone, a new product that takes a new approach to make a secure telephone for the Internet.
I think it’s better than the other approaches to secure VoIP, because it achieves security without reliance on a [...]

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Mac Software Essentials

22Mar06

Below are a set of applicationsy that nobody with a Mac should live without. Well some of them may just be eye candy but then again, eye candy is what a Mac is all about . Non-freeware products are marked with the suffix [$].

Adium
Multi-protocol Chat client that supports all the major services (Google, Yahoo, [...]

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