Identity thefts and privacy -- Comment() Cops Bust Massive ID Theft Ring: "Federal prosecutors have arrested three men involved in what officials are calling the largest identity fraud case in American history.... Cummings would then use the ruse of "helping" the customers work through software and hardware problems to obtain the customer code that allowed the company to request credit records."
iRights comments: "This is like a textbook case on why privacy issues are so importent. There is no such thing as "a company" or "a government" having access to privacy information; only "people in a company" or "people in a government" can have access to privacy-sensitive information. Now the people who had their credit records stolen, who have committed no crime, have to go through the effort of checking their records and potentially changing their Social Security Number and putting a fraud lock on their records, making credit transactions that much more difficult for the duration of the lock."
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-- Comment() Just posted! Sigma SD9 review: "The Sigma SD9 is the first digital SLR to utilize Foveon's revolutionary X3 sensor. The X3 sensor is the first image sensor capable of capturing..." [Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)]
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-- Comment() BBC says to avoid Explorer: "The easiest way to avoid parasite programs, he says, is to stop using Internet Explorer because it is targeted by many of the adware and spyware companies." [Slashdot]
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Per Bak and self-organized criticality -- Comment() Seb's Open Research writes about self-organization: "A nice introduction to self-organization by a physicist, Cosma Rohilla Shalizi." Incidentally, I just noticed today in Nature that Per Bak, one of the most cited physicists, died on October 16, 2002. In 1991, I organized a workshop on cellular automata, and Per Bak was one of the invited speakers. His work on self-organized criticality is well-known today, and influences current physics research.
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Feedback and insults -- Comment() I wrote earlier: "By the way, it may be a singularly Finnish trait that when giving positive feedback we tend to insult the recipient a bit." I received a comment from Bjarne Tveskov: "Maybe it's a Nordic/Scandinavian thing, in my experience, danes do that all the time as well." This is good to hear, now I'll feel less out-of-place in Scandinavian meetings.
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Can't stomach Microsoft? -- Comment() If you can't stomach Microsoft, the help is near: LIINUS (the text is in Finnish) will help your stomach to cope with the daily stress. LIINUS is a dietary supplement (functional food), marketed by Orion Pharma, for making your stomach behave. It may also prevent you from getting cancer. My food-related English vocabulary is a bit rusty, but I believe FLAXSEED as Functional Food for People tells of the same benefits as the Finnish discription of LIINUS. Here is a slogan for the product: "Can't Stomach Microsoft? Use LIINUS!" Could I make a career in advertising?
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What's a Weblog? -- Comment() Halley's Comment writes about weblogs:
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-- Comment() In digital world, you must protect your privacy rights: "How much private information are you willing to give away for a freebie or discount? Do you mind having all your drugstore purchases tracked for a markdown?" [Privacy Digest]
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-- Comment() Is Microsoft Truly 'Trustworthy'? "Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie recently suggested that in the name of security, it may be appropriate to force you to install Microsoft patches or updates, and if that breaks your existing applications, well, it's for your own good." [Privacy Digest]
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-- Comment() Living Without Microsoft points to an article by Michael Jennings: "Microsoft has moved from making operating systems that are independent to making operating systems that are dependent on its own computers. Besides possible privacy and security vulnerabilities, this raises numerous concerns. For example, if Microsoft decided to remove the support for Windows XP, users might be forced to upgrade. Or, Microsoft could decide to ask for monthly payment for the use of its computers."
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No more feminism -- Comment() kasia in a nutshell points to Girl Power: "Game Over. But it took me a day or two to name the new game. It's "girlism" -- women want to be sexy girls and use all the tricks girls use. Crying, flirting, begging, winking, stomping their feet when they don't get their way, general trotting around showing off their long legs and whatever else they decide to show off thereby distracting and derailing men."
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-- Comment() A Shallow Introduction to the K Programming Language: "K is an exceptional language for dealing with mathematical analysis, financial prediction, or anything that handles bulk data. I have used it for a document search engine and other computational linguistic tasks. K doesn't work very well when the problem is not vectorizable and scalars are the largest datum to operate on." [Lambda the Ultimate]
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