Well, both. Saturday I woke up without Internet. And I’m looking at going ‘Netless for six months. Although I suspended service mostly to economize, I was both looking forward to ‘Netless peace and feeling nervous about cutting back my means of livelihood. Since waking up that first morning I haven’t really worried about the earning-a-living part. That’s manageable. I’ve done it before, after all. But you know what really drove me crazy? It was the day of the Nevada Democratic caucuses and I couldn’t play political junkie. I have only one potential means of getting news: NPR on a clock…
Category: Computers & Technology
I might not have a lot to say for the next few days, so I thought I’d drop by now with a handful of questions and a few mostly feelgood links.
The questions are for car guys and computer geeks. If your eyes glaze over at the very thought, feel free to skip to the linkage.
In the schadenfreude department: Melissa Click, the social-justice pecksniff who shoved one reporter and called for “muscle” to remove another from a public demonstration, has been charged with assault. Despite using annoying “gun violence” language, this CNN article brings the good news that mental health professionals aren’t likely to sit still for Obama administration attempts to label every mentally ill person as too dangerous to own a firearm. With statistics, even! From Microsoft: useful, creepy, or both? If this is accurate in describing how classified material “escapes” from secure servers and ends up on private ones, then Hillary and several…
You remember I had to refresh Firefox last week, wiping away all my settings and add-ons. NoScript and a few key settings went back on right away and so far, so good. No crashing. In that quick re-set I made sure that “Do not track” was enabled. I didn’t, however, do anything with cookie management. Just now I was cruising through Firefox Preferences looking for additional settings to put back to normal and I had to laugh. My browser was infested by hundreds of tracking cookies — so many that I couldn’t wipe them out selectively and keep the “good”…
Hugh Farnham gives another look at why firearms confiscation is impossible. Yep. One more bit of evidence about exactly why conventional TV is doomed even as we enjoy a golden age of “television-like” entertainment. OTOH, it’s sad that Al Jazeera America is shutting down. It really did some of the best news coverage around. Real coverage, not newstainment. A kippah and Europe’s future. Okay, that’s it. The whole business of selling “naming rights” and trademarking “public” property has gone way too far. Here’s the latest thing for privacy mavens to be aware of. You’re okay if you can avoid the…
Various non-news, non-link musings follow
How other people see the ‘Net
So there I was last night, all set to prep a links post for today. And — boom! — down went Firefox, taking with it all my tabs.
Maybe the Intertubz is trying to tell me something, eh?
Guess what the most popular work at the UN library is. A thesis on how to avoid being charged with war crimes. Not how to avoid committing war crimes. Just how to avoid punishment. (H/T jb) Several major car makers are partnering up with Linux. While this is a lot better than the recent features about those partnering with Microsoft, I generally wish they’d all stay the heck out of any automobile I ever own, except for entirely optional, turn-offable devices. (H/T MJR) Another inspiring story about the life-changing power of going debt free. Who says a porno-graphic can’t be…
It should be no surprise to anyone hereabouts, but even as Microsoft pretends to have been converted to the privacy gospel, it steals your disk-encryption keys. If you have v*ted in the last 15 years, you are screwed. (H/T MJR) You may think this absurd, insecure database of v*ters is no big deal, but the implications are pretty catastrophic. And nobody knows who compiled or owns this giant mess? Fedgov, anyone? The war on Asian-American academic success. Repeat violators of HIPAA privacy provisions pay little consequence. Which is totally unsurprising because HIPAA was always more of a privacy-violation enabler than…
Of the new Omni-bust budget deal Jim Bovard sez: “Republican congressional leaders are like a football coach who believes the secret to winning is to punt early and often.” Rand Paul sez stop the bill — and he has some fairly decent ideas for alternatives. OTOH, Marijuana.com sez there are a couple of decent provisions in the 2,000 page monster sellout. On the other other hand, the USPS announces a completely unsurprising but curiously retro policy on carrying publications that contain — gasp! — ads for the dreaded Demon Weed. One wonders why they couldn’t have just kept their mouths…