Sen. Leahy's COICA bill to permit blacklisting and seizure of domains is progressing through the Judiciary Committee. It has 18 cosponsors. Most of them are "the usual suspects" types, Senators who don't care about whether the legislation they support is Constitutional, as long as it makes them feel good. I still think this is a violation of their oath of office. Constitutionality should be the first filter. I am disappointed to see Inhofe on the list, as I thought he had more sense than that. Sen. Ron Wyden has vowed to block a vote at least until 2011. So that's good.
But in the meantime, DHS is "seizing internet domains left and right." As Don Surber says, they are "protecting rappers instead of the border." By what authority do they do this, I wonder. If this can be done as an executive function, without the need for Congress to pass legislation, then COICA is superfluous. Or else it's the way the administration wants to handle other issues as well, that is, by executive fiat. I'm thinking of using the EPA's regulatory powers to declare CO2 a pollutant and regulate it without any legislative authority. That "government of laws" business sounds nice, but it gets in the way sometimes. Pesky laws!
It’s an outrage. To begin with, there’s the bizarre spectacle of the Department of Homeland Security – which, last I looked, had some important issues before it that actually relate to “homeland security” — expending time and resources to protect purely private interests (of. e.g., the Louis Vuitton handbag manufacturers and Warner Brothers’ Records). And the operation perfectly illustrates the objections we raised in the COICA Letter: 80 websites — many of them operating overseas — have now been prevented from speaking to US citizens even though the website operators, whose domains were seized, had no notice or opportunity to respond to the charges against them (and to argue, for instance, that they are NOT infringing copyrights or trademarks), no adversary hearing, and certainly no adjudication before a neutral, that anything unlawful is going on at these sites, only an affidavit to that effect submitted by the ICE.
Albert Gonzales and Shadowcrew stole millions of credit and debit card numbers, intercepted millions of transactions, and saw "profits in the millions of dollars." James Verini has the story: The Great Cyberheist. From Jerry Pournelle's mail.
Archie Bunker liked the wrong President. Of course he did. Archie was written that way.
America missed a bet when Coolidge decided not to run in 1928. He would have been reelected in a landslide. If he had been in office, and the 1929 crash came anyway, he would have been able to follow Harding's example in dealing with it. The 1920 depression was a short sharp shock, followed by the Roaring 20's.
Coolidge presided over an era of unprecedented prosperity. He (and Harding) cut taxes and spending radically. The budget in 1929 was half what it was in 1920 [p. 21 of this GPO pdf.] At the end of Wilson's Presidency, the top income tax rate was 77%. Coolidge was able to push it down to 25%. (Robert Novak says he was not such a budget-cutter, but does so by comparing Wilson's pre-war budget to Coolidge's last budget. In the same essay, Novak points out that Coolidge made use of the Laffer Curve before Arthur Laffer was born.)
He wrote his own speeches. Contrary to the "Silent Cal" cliché, he "made use of the new medium of radio and made radio history several times while President. He made himself available to reporters, giving 52o press conferences, meeting with reporters more regularly than any President before or since." [Wikipedia, from David Greenberg's Calvin Coolidge.]
Here's a speech from 1924 in a talkie made with Lee De Forest's pioneering sound process:
I like this speech well enough that I have transcribed it. A highlight:
I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can re-establish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty.
The full text is below.
Here is the text of his address at the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Shlaes and Joe Thorndike have been writing a blog devoted to Coolidge, Silent Cal. Thorndike's personal blog is thorndike dot com.
Some notes on De Forest's sound film process, Phonofilm, here, here, and here.
Full text of the speech in the movie above:
[The] country needs every ounce of its energy to restore itself. The costs of government are all assessed upon the people. This means that the farmer is doomed to provide a certain amount of money out of the sale of his produce, no matter how low the price, to pay his taxes. The manufacturer, the professional man, the clerk, must do the same from their income. The wage earner, often at a higher rate when compared with his earning, makes his contribution perhaps not directly but indirectly in the advanced cost of everything he buys. The expenses of the government reach everybody. Taxes take from everyone a part of his earnings, and force everyone to work for a certain part of his time for the government.
When we come to realize that the yearly expenses of the governments of this country reach the stupendous sum of about seven billion, five hundred million dollars, we get [garbled] hundred million dollars is needed by the national government, and the remainder by local governments. Such a sum is difficult to comprehend. It represents all the pay of five million wage earners receiving five dollars a day, working three hundred days in the year. If the government should add one hundred million dollars of expense, it would represent four days' more work of these wage earners.
These are some of the reasons why I want to cut down public expense. I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can re-establish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty.
These results are not fanciful. They are not imaginary. They are grimly actual and real, reaching into every household in the land. They take from each home annually an average of over three hundred dollars, and taxes must be paid. They are not a voluntary contribution, to be met out of surplus earnings. They are a stern necessity. They come first. It is only out of what is left, after they are paid, that the necessities of food, clothing, and shelter can be provided, and the comforts of home secured, or the yearnings of the soul for a broader and more abundant life gratified.
When the government effects a new economy, it grants everybody a life pension, with which to raise the standard of existence. It increases the value of everybody's property, raises the scale of everybody's wages. One of the greatest favors that can be bestowed upon the American people is economy in government.
The bill is S. 3804, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, or COICA. (Full text.) It has 16 co-sponsors, including a few Republicans.
Internet advocates warn the legislation would open a door for a handful of people in the federal government to wantonly power off entire websites that may be operating legally under current law. Though senators suggest the bill would save jobs by cracking down on piracy, critics say it will hurt the economy by threatening fledgling companies whenever copyrighted material shows up on their sites. "If this bill had been law five or 10 years ago, there's a good chance that YouTube would no longer be around," Peter Eckersley, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told FoxNews.com.
Eckersley said the bill would mark a drastic departure from current law by allowing the government not just to strip copyrighted material off an offending website, but to order the shutdown of a domain name altogether.
Eighty-seven engineers who played a role in the creation of the Internet have sent a letter to the Judiciary Committee urging it to sideline the bill.
"If enacted, this legislation will risk fragmenting the Internet's global domain name system (DNS), create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure," they wrote. "All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended to restrict, but this bill will be particularly egregious in that regard because it causes entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just infringing pages or files. Worse, an incredible range of useful, law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under this bill."
They can't keep their grubby paws off.
Leahy has been in office far too long. All the political crystal gazers seem to think that there's no chance he will lose this election. I'll be hoping for Len Britton to surprise them on election night. It's a shame that the Republican Party is not supporting its own candidate.
Update: David Post at The Volokh Conspiracy says that COICA is "a truly awful bill."
A few brave congress persons have introduced a bill to repeal the incandescent light bulb ban. Powerline:
Representatives Joe Barton, Michael Burgess, and Marsha Blackburn have just introduced the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act (or BULB). The legislation would repeal the de facto ban on the incandescent light bulb contained in Subtitle B of Title III of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.
It's H.R. 6144, for those who care about that sort of thing.
There is some vaguely scientific sounding noise being made in certain quarters about health hazards of compact fluorescent bulbs. For some reason that I don't understand, most of it seems to be in the form of videos rather than articles. A number of these are assembled for your viewing pleasure at CFL Impact.
I find it offensive that the ban has no justification other than that incandescents are inefficient. That's a matter of one's perspective. A CFL is terribly inefficient, in fact downright ineffective, in an Easy-Bake oven. And since when has mere inefficiency been a reason for legislation to outlaw anything? If something is inefficient enough, people will stop buying it. Non-radial tires have just about disappeared, without ever being banned. For instance. Even though radials are more expensive. The better product naturally supplants the worse. Yet bias-ply tires are stillavailable, if you want them.
Now that there have been two failed attempts to repeal the 1099 madness in the health care bill, I do not have much hope for this first attempt to repeal another piece of lunacy. But hope springs eternal, I suppose. Hope for a change in direction. Yes, I'll have a cup of tea, thanks.
I was about ready to go to California, find Steve Jobs, and, well, I won't continue with that. Programs should not highjack file associations. I say that unequivocally. Furthermore, QuickTime is not a good player of mp3 files. It stutters too much. And what good is that, I ask you?
The new version, Opera 10.51, is called a security and stability upgrade. But it's more like an entirely different program. Menus are relocated, controls are missing; bookmarks are missing! It is not an incremental point upgrade, it's a radical departure. And it's odd that the Norwegians would go in the direction of removing controls and options. Opera, until this release, has always been the most tweakable browser around.
I have been using Opera since version 3 point something, back when you actually had to pay for it. I thought it was worth the price.
I do not like this new version.
The good news: if the automatic update thing automatically updates you, and you find the new version to be undesirable, you can revert to Opera 10.10 by reinstalling that version right over the new one. At least, it worked all right for me to do it that way. My bookmarks are back. I tried to get back to 10.10 using Windows XP's System Restore, but that was a miserable failure. The reinstall worked fine.
This 10.5 (10.51, whatever) upgrade seems to be an inadequately-tested beta release. The Opera forums are clogged with messages from users with problems.
Caveats: I'm on Windows XP, not Vista or Windows 7, and I like to be able to find menu items where I am used to finding them. Firefox point releases are good about this. This new Opera release, not so good.
Update: from the Opera forums, I glean that the way to stop the automatic updates is Tools > Preferences > Advanced tab > Security, where at the bottom of the window is a field called Auto-update, with a dropdown. Select "Do not check for updates" to avoid having to hit the "Cancel" button on the installer as soon as Opera starts up.
I think I'll stick with 10.10 for a while. One of the things missing in the new release is "Duplicate tab." Very useful, and not the same thing as copying the address and pasting it into a new tab. "Duplicate tab" preserves the tab's history. When a search gets to have many branches, some of which you might want to come back to, this is just the thing. Why lose it?
It seems that some Facebookers use search engines to get to Facebook, instead of typing the address in the address bar of their browsers, or using a bookmark. Well, that led to this (1989 comments at last count), which is more fully explained and commented on by Dan Grover, as part of his effort to develop a grand unified theory of n00bs. (The Dan Grover links come and go. If the one above does not work, you might try this one. Or Google's cached version.)
In my case it was an email that seemed to be from Facebook announcing that a friend had sent a message, but the style was unfamiliar, which should have been the tip-off.
Subject: Firstname Lastname sent you a message on Facebook ...
Firstname sent you a message.
-------------------- (no subject)
youtube poison url goes here
(The url is disguised by having www.facebook.com at the beginning, but in my case at least continued to bit.ly as the real destination, which, of course, was not the real destination.)
That's it. There is usually quite a bit more stuff in one of these message notifications. When I took a look at Facebook, I saw the message in my inbox, but by that time, I knew not to click it.
Clicking the url takes you to a screen with Facebook-like fonts and colors that says "Leaving Facebook ... Never use your Facebook password outside of the Facebook site." (That's a paraphrase, I'm not going back there to look at it again.) It then goes to something that looks like YouTube. If you're quick you can see that it actually says YuoTube at the top of the screen. It then tells you you need Flash version 10.37, and the download starts right away.
Apparently the thing affects both the computer of the victim, and his or her profile.
Trend Micro has a chart of the botnet, or parts of one of them, anyway.
I dare say there will be more. And he points out that Ken Burnside has started a blog, Data Against Demagogues, which will deal with, among other things, an effort by himself and collaborators to get the datasets and run the models, to see if any of the AGW work can be replicated in an open source way. Along the way, Burnside links to the "complete list of things caused by global warming" at Number Watch. A small sample:
Acne, agricultural land increase, Afghan poppies destroyed, poppies more potent, Africa devastated, Africa in conflict, African aid threatened, African summer frost, aggressive weeds, Air France crash, air pressure changes, airport malaria, Agulhas current, Al Qaeda and Taliban Being Helped, allergy season longer, alligators in the Thames, Alps melting, Amazon a desert, American dream end, amphibians breeding earlier (or not), anaphylactic reactions to bee stings, ancient forests dramatically changed, animals head for the hills, animals shrink, Antarctic grass flourishes, Antarctic ice grows, Antarctic ice shrinks,
The wild and wooly Internet, it's a wonderful place. No restrictions, freedom everywhere you look. Pretty much. Some of that pr0n might be a problem. But at least as far as speech is concerned, or writing, really, anything goes. I don't like using cusswords on this site, because I keep hoping my daughter will read it, and once in a while she does. But I could if I wanted to. So that's OK. My choice.
But now comes Cass Sunstein, Harvard law prof and head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (I think — I have been poking around the dot gov website and can't find any names), to say that what is said on the web needs policing. Not so much for cusswords or naked pictures, but for "falsehoods." Falsity of those "falsehoods" to be determined by Prof. Sunstein, or someone much like him. First Amendment, I loved you — but they took you away!
Sunstein is a likely Supreme Court nominee.
Read this, by Kathy Shaidle at PJ Media, and then this, by Kyle Smith at the NY Post. The days of Wild West anarchy and, you know, freedom, on the Internet, are under more serious threat than they have been since the Great Opening of the Doors back in 1992. The doors will be closing again, if these Democrats have anything to say about it. And you know they will.
These are the good old days.
Update: I could not find Sunstein's name at that site at the time that I wrote this, because he had not been confirmed yet. He was confirmed on September 10.
Make a new bookmark and paste that in for the location. When you come across rot-13 text, select it, then click the bookmark. The decoded text shows up in one of those little javascript boxes. Try it on this: "Qevax hc, rirelobql. Gb gur arj cnegare naq gur byq barf. Jr fvzcyl unir gb trg n fxvashy gb fgnaq gung Xvnevna yhapurba." And of course it works the other way round, as well.
An ultra-powerful laser can turn regular incandescent light bulbs into power-sippers, say optics researchers at the University of Rochester. The process could make a light as bright as a 100-watt bulb consume less electricity than a 60-watt bulb while remaining far cheaper and radiating a more pleasant light than a fluorescent bulb can.
How long before this becomes widely available? From Glenn Reynolds, a short item at PhysOrg:
In a study published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, lead authors at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill report that the technology completely wiped out pre-cancerous cells in 90.5 percent of patients with Barrett's esophagus who underwent the procedure. Only 1.2 percent of patients went on to develop cancer a year later.
Among patients who got a sham procedure, 9.3 percent developed cancer.
Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies A collage-homage to Guy L. Steele and Eric S. Raymond.
A beige toaster is a maggotbox. A bit bucket is a data sink. Farkled is a synonym for hosed. Flamage is a weenie problem.
A berserker wizard gets no score for treasure. In MUDs one acknowledges a bonk with an oif. (There’s a cosmic bonk/oif balance.)
Ooblick is play sludge. A buttonhook is a hunchback. Logic bombs can get inside back doors. There were published bang paths ten hops long. Designs succumbing to creeping featuritis are banana problems. (“I know how to spell banana, but I don’t know when to stop.”)
For those who have not laughed and nodded the whole way through The New Hacker's Dictionary,paper or online versions, or its online progenitor, The Jargon File, here is a little bit of exegesis.
Found at Eric S. Raymond's own blog site, referenced by commenter Jeff Read in the course of a discussion of the Danish language.
I wonder if it would be possible to put out DVD's and CD's in a package similar to the 3.5" floppy disk, so that the surface of the disk would be exposed only when the disk was inserted in the player, and even then only a small portion of it. Of course everyone would need new players.
But I'm getting tired of rental DVD's with surface flaws that obviously were caused by careless handling of the disk. You get partway through a movie, and then are left hanging. At least with VCR tapes, you could tell pretty easily if the tape was broken before putting it in the player.
This digital information storage is great stuff, but I wonder how much of the godzillabytes that are being stored in one form or another will last even a fraction as long as those clay tablets from Sumer.
A trojan that mimics Windows activation. (via) And another one: "It's not clear how the initial infection gets to your computer. But once there, it puts hooks into Firefox to allow the spyware to watch and report on access to banking-type web sites. When such a site is accessed, the spyware grabs your login credentials and sends them off to the evil hacker. And that can't be good."
"You kids take it easy with that kissing, now!" "Did you say something, Dad?" Chinese girl gets 'kiss of deaf': A young Chinese woman was left partially deaf following a passionate kiss from her boyfriend. The story says that she will recover, so a little humor is not completely out of place. All the jokes are at Althouse.
50 worst cars of all time. Up to the present, I think, is what they mean, but it's TIME magazine, so maybe it's the 50 worst cars that have appeared in the magazine, or something else, careful about facts TIME is not, and the writing is highly subjective and personal (are those the same thing?), so "worst in what way," it could be anything, and indeed it's many things, to go with many cars. Worth it for the Horsey Horseless alone. (via)
One of those blogs that's mostly links, you never know what you'll find there: The Message Digest. A few such links that appealed to me: the bacon and cheese roll. Looks delicious, but you would want to have a defibrillator handy. The Phrontistery, where "you will find the International House of Logorrhea (an online dictionary of obscure and rare words), the Compendium of Lost Words (a compilation of ultra-rare forgotten words), and many other glossaries, word lists, essays, and other language and etymology resources." Oddstrument.com, all about, yes, odd musical instruments, or as the author says, "fantastic instruments and sounds from around the world." Christmas Carol Music dot org: free sheet music for Christmas carols, in SATB and lead sheet styles, and quite a bit more, including MIDIs.
The link dump of an old grump. Posts may be folded, spindled, or mutilated, ad lib.
Pseudonymous only for disambiguation. Thanks for that word, Wikipedia. I am not, in what we laughingly refer to as "real life," a character in a 1933 novel. There was no Internet in 1933, silly!
That said: My email is Hector, a period, Owen, then an ampersat, then gmail.com.
