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Friday, January 18, 2002
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La Crescenta elementary school, in a suburb of Los Angeles, has started a Radio weblog. I think it's a nice way to keep parents informed! Schools aren't as technically clueless now as they were when I worked with them ten years ago.
11:17:35 PM 
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Gun seizure prompts House Bill 55. "The attorney general has advised state police to interpret existing federal law in such a way as to allow for these types of confiscations of guns from law-abiding citizens. It's unacceptable," said Delegate Kevin Kelly. The delegate said SWAT teams are used to retrieve guns in some situations. [Cumberland Times-News]
There really isn't any such federal law, the Maryland Attorney General is pretending there is to avoid taking responsibility. It would be nice if state Attorney Generals would sometimes obey the law.
10:34:20 PM
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How much of a Fascist are you? Take this Quiz!. Fifty years ago, the Authoritarian Personality studies attempted to "construct an instrument that would yield an estimate of fascist receptivity at the personality level."Chuck Anesi's online version of the F Scale takes just a few minutes to complete and lets you know where in the scale you fall. According to the site, the average for Americans in 1950 was 3.84. [kuro5hin.org]
My score was 2.23, a "liberal airhead." This is kind of amusing, given the current definition of "liberal." Of course, when this survey was written a liberal was more like a modern libertarian.
8:07:41 PM
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Hardware Copy Protection Battles. Does anyone really think that the movie industry will be eradicated due to copyright infringment? [Slashdot]
Does anyone think it would be a bad thing if the current movie industry was eradicated?
2:33:33 PM
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Economist.com | Fingerprint evidence. A judge has ruled that fingerprint evidence is scientifically unreliable [ ... ] This is the first ruling of its kind in the American courts, although fingerprinting evidence has been open to such a challenge for years. In the 1990s America's Supreme Court deemed it the responsibility of federal judges to insist that expert witnesses testify about the reliability of a forensic-scientific method only if the method in question has been tested so that the range of its error rate is known. Fingerprinting experts have long claimed that their error rate in matching prints is zero--but without any supporting evidence. This claim is scientifically dubious, for two reasons. One is that many prints collected at crime scenes are so-called latent prints, meaning that it takes special chemical treatments, or illumination with ultraviolet light, to "recover" them. Such latent prints are often incomplete and indistinct, and might not produce unique matches. The other reason is that declaring a match between two prints generally requires a certain number of points of similarity between them. Different jurisdictions set varying standards for how many similar points are required, which makes this standard seem arbitrary. Even worse, in some jurisdictions declaring a match requires only an overall "impression" of similarity on the part of an expert. [Privacy Digest]
This came as a surprise to me. I think people wanting to challenge fingerprint evidence will have quite a struggle, simply because the media has done such a thorough job of convincing everyone that fingerprint evidence is infallible. I know I never really doubted it, and I am not exactly inclined to trust either the government or the media.
1:32:39 PM
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America's Ivy League Left [FOXNews.com]
Now, even while duly noting all the usual caveats regarding surveys like this--the tiny size of the sample, the absence of professors from departments whose faculties usually don't tilt so far to the left (i.e., hard sciences and engineering), etc.--the poll results are pretty damning for those who would still deny that professors at America's most prestigious universities are, on balance, somewhat to the left of Che Guevara.
[...]
As David Brooks noted in a widely-discussed piece he wrote last year for the Atlantic, most students today are so apolitical that whatever radical propagandizing their professors are doing doesn't seem to be rubbing off on them. They may be turning into relativists, but they're not turning into socialists.
1:09:45 PM
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Lance Knobel started a Radio weblog which he thinks of as a commonplace book. "Commonplace books arose in the renaissance as a means for learned men to record quotations or observations that seemed important to them. I came across the idea when reading about the architect Leon Battista Alberti, who kept an apparently extraordinary commonplace book." Sounds like a weblog to me!  [Scripting News]
1:00:28 PM
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I was able to sign up for a .NET Passport from a Mac. I had to use MSIE--when I tried to use iCab, I was told that it wasn't a supported browser. There wasn't anything about the sign-up process that wouldn't have worked anyway, I think.
I wasn't that impressed by the process--the Passport site has a bunch of broken image links. I declined to enter my credit card information or check the "sell my personal information" checkbox. Now we'll see whether my daily spam intake goes up.
12:28:35 PM
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Microsoft delivers missing PPC 2002 apps. Microsoft has released both MSN Messenger for Pocket PC 2002 (a 5.3MB download) and Terminal Services Client for Pocket PC 2002 (a 5.2MB download) as free downloads. [PDABuzz.com]
I don't have an instant message package on my Newton, but my terminal package (PT100) takes up 155KB. That makes it quite large for a Newton app.
11:49:51 AM
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Pacific island eyed to launch tourists into orbit. A remote island in the South Pacific nation of Tonga could become the site of a private space port to send tourists into orbit at a cost of $2 million each. [CNN]
That's only 10% of what Dennis Tito paid, but it's still out of my price range. It will probably be a while before they get it down to $2,000 though.
10:19:38 AM
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I've now been maintaining this weblog long enough that my first post (made January 11th) has scrolled off the bottom. It had vanished completely, but Mark Paschal told me how to get it back. I hope I don't have any more disappearing posts, though.
9:56:16 AM
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Man charged over offensive weapons at London airport. Sydney Morning Herald -
Man charged over offensive weapons at London airport - a
54-year-old racing driver instructor was arrested for possessing "a
small lock knife, an old pair of pliers and a screwdriver." Standard
household tools are now "offensive weapons". Well, according to Phil
Elmore's
Understanding Knives, which I linked to a while back, a
screwdriver is the most common weapon used by muggers and
carjackers. But there's the small matter of intent... Guess that's not
considered any more in the world's brave new police states. [zem] [End the War on Freedom]
I routinely carry a Leatherman Wave multi-tool, which has two small lock knives, a pair of pliers, and five screwdrivers. It has a wood saw and scissors, just to be extra "offensive." I guess I'd better avoid London--I'm obviously much more offensive to English sensibilities than, say, a nutcase with a shoe bomb.
9:47:09 AM
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Individuality: It Could Affect Someone In Your Family!. Jason C. Ditz at anti-state.com -
Individuality: It Could Affect Someone In Your Family! -
drugs are evil, except when the state wants to use them to knock the
will out of our children.
The decision to dope him into submission was not an easy one. While
for his mother the decision was "immediate", and grandfather
grudgingly gave his consent, his father was more skeptical. "Most
of my fears were what people were going to think" his father is
quoted as saying.
Oh, by all means Mr. Hunter's dad. I know if I had a child and was
presented with the choice of having him spend the rest of his life
strung out on mind altering drugs and quietly watching television
instead of being a marginally misbehaved child, my first goddamn
concern would be "What will the neighbors say?".
[End the War on Freedom]
9:34:46 AM
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Follow-up: AirPort basestation failures [MacNN]
I've had two base stations fail on me at home. The second one died at just over one year in service--I've held off on calling Apple because I'm afraid it was out of warranty anyway.
6:37:13 AM
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© Copyright
2006
Ken Hagler.
Last update:
2/14/2006; 6:46:32 PM.
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