Psychics and missing persons
Posted by Lippard at 3/11/2006 11:58:00 AM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 3/11/2006 11:37:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: politics
Posted by Lippard at 3/11/2006 10:49:00 AM 5 comments
Labels: Arizona, education, politics, religion, Scientology
Posted by Lippard at 3/11/2006 10:37:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: Arizona
Posted by Lippard at 3/10/2006 05:17:00 PM 1 comments
Labels: Arizona, economics, housing bubble
The Bush administration has appointed 28-year-old Douglas Hoelscher to be executive director for the Homeland Security Advisory Committee, an amalgam of 20 panels of outside experts and officials who advise the administration on homeland security matters.
Hoelscher is said to have no management experience. He came to the White House in 2001 as a $30,000-a-year scheduler.
And more at Effect Measure:Suppose you are a young 28 year old with no management experience but, according to your Friendster.com profile a good listener and someone whose favorite books include William Bennett's The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals. You aren't entirely inexperienced. In 2001 you were a $30,000 a year low level White House staffer who arranged presidential travel. Not enough for you? How about a top level job in the Department of Homeland Security? That can be arranged.(Via Tara Smith at Aetiology.)
Welcome Douglas Hoelscher, the new executive director of the Homeland Security Advisory Commitees (plural). Hoelscher is nowthe "primary representative" of department Secretary Michael Chertoff in dealing with more than 20 advisory boards. Among them is the Homeland Security Advisory Council, which includes such high-powered figures as Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, former Lockheed Chairman Norman Augustine, and former Defense and Energy Secretary James Schlesinger. (Shane Harris in the National Journal)
Posted by Lippard at 3/10/2006 04:17:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: politics
The unfolding debit card scam that rocked Citibank this week is far from over, an analyst said Thursday as she called this first-time-ever mass theft of PINs "the worst consumer scam to date."Wednesday, Citibank confirmed that an ongoing fraud had forced it to reissue debit cards and block PIN-based transactions for users in Canada, Russia, and the U.K.
But Citibank is only the tip of the iceberg, said Avivah Litan, a Gartner research vice president. The scam -- and scandal -- has hit national banks like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Washington Mutual, as well as smaller banks, including ones in Oregon, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, all of which have re-issued debit cards in recent weeks.
"This is the worst hack ever," Litan maintained. "It's significant because not only is it a really wide-spread breach, but it affects debit cards, which everyone thought were immune to these kinds of things."
[...]
Litan's sources in the financial industry have told her that thieves hacked into a as-yet-unknown system, and made off with data stored on debit cards' magnetic stripes, the associated "PIN blocks," or encrypted PIN data, and the key for that encrypted data.
Posted by Lippard at 3/10/2006 12:20:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: civil liberties, law, security, technology
Posted by Lippard at 3/09/2006 08:37:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 3/09/2006 08:24:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 3/09/2006 07:43:00 PM 0 comments
I do not have a personal charity. The reference was an allusion to Operation Good Neighbor, a charitable organization that I founded in 2000. Since then, I have had no control over its direction. My involvement is limited to being honorary chairman of the board -- a board that includes former Philadelphia mayor W. Wilson Goode, a prominent Democrat -- and lending my name to fund-raising events. That's it.Attytood shows, with quotes and photos, that Santorum's a liar.
After saying in January that he would end his regular meetings with lobbyists, Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.), the third-ranking GOP leader in the Senate, has continued to meet with many of the same lobbyists at the same time and on the same day of the week.(Via Talking Points Memo and TPM's Daily Muck.)
Posted by Lippard at 3/09/2006 05:21:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: charitable giving, Cunningham scandal, dirty politicians, ethics, politics
Dear JAMES LIPPARD:Since I hadn't amended my address details, I called the Customer Service line (after I had only received three copies of the email)--and it was busy. After a few tries, I got through and waited on hold for quite some time, and then reached a human being. She informed me that this was an "error" and that the entire subscriber base had received these emails, which was the cause of the difficulty getting through on the phone.
Thank you for amending your address details.
We have updated our records accordingly and will deliver your copies of The Economist to the amended address shortly.
If you encounter any problems with the delivery of The Economist, please call Customer Service on 1-800-456-xxxx.
Sincerely,
Customer Service.
From: "Paul Rossi, Publisher of The Economist" [comcast email address omitted]I never received an email asking me to confirm address details as described in this email.
Subject: Apology from The Economist
Date: 09 Mar 2006 23:31:01 GMT
Dear Reader,
I am writing to apologise for any e-mails you may have received today from The Economist.
I sent an e-mail this morning asking you to confirm your address details. I understand that in error, we may have sent further e-mails confirming a change to your address.
This was caused by a technical error on our part and I am very sorry for the inconvenience and irritation that this may have caused you.
I want to reassure you that your address and all of your personal details have at all times been secure and will remain so.
If you did not change your details, we will continue to deliver your copies of The Economist to the usual address.
We are aware of the problem and are dealing with it. In the meantime, if you wish to contact me regarding this please e-mail [email address at economist.com omitted].
Yours sincerely,
Paul Rossi
Publisher, North America
Posted by Lippard at 3/09/2006 08:34:00 AM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 3/09/2006 07:57:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: spam
Posted by Lippard at 3/08/2006 08:38:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: technology
Posted by Lippard at 3/08/2006 01:53:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 3/08/2006 10:28:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: charitable giving, politics, religion
Clicking there yielded:WARNING
This blog has been locked by Blogger's spam-prevention robots. You will not be able to publish your posts, but you will be able to save them as drafts.
Save your post as a draft or click here for more about what's going on and how to get your blog unlocked.
That's what I saw Wednesday morning... afternoon Thursday, it's still locked.Your blog is locked
Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.
You won't be able to publish posts to your blog until one of our humans reviews it and verifies that it is not a spam blog. Please fill out the form below to get a review. We'll take a look at your blog and unlock it in less than a business day.
If we don't hear from you, though, we will remove your blog from Blog*Spot within 10 days.
Find out more about how Blogger is fighting spam blogs.
Hello,And it's back, apparently since shortly after I last checked and found it locked, based on the timestamp on this email.
Your blog has been reviewed, verified, and whitelisted so that it will no longer appear as potential spam. If you sign out of Blogger and sign back in again, you should be able to post as normal. Thanks for your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.
Sincerely,
Blogger Support
Posted by Lippard at 3/08/2006 09:59:00 AM 6 comments
Labels: spam
"Every appropriation we wanted [from Burns' committee] we got. Our staffs were as close as they could be. They practically used Signatures [Abramoff's restaurant] as their cafeteria."Burns' former staffers have also made millions from going to work for telecom and tech firms that have received funding from Burns earmarks.
Posted by Lippard at 3/08/2006 09:58:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: dirty politicians, earmarks, politics
Posted by Lippard at 3/07/2006 08:28:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: parody
Posted by Lippard at 3/06/2006 03:36:00 PM 1 comments
Labels: Arizona, technology
Posted by Lippard at 3/05/2006 05:36:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Kat Lippard at 3/04/2006 06:14:00 PM 2 comments
Labels: animal rescue, animals, dogs
Posted by Lippard at 3/04/2006 11:18:00 AM 1 comments
A nimble, four-legged robot is so surefooted it can recover its balance even after being given a hefty kick. The machine, which moves like a cross between a goat and a pantomime horse, is being developed as a robotic pack mule for the US military.In this amusing or perhaps creepy video (28MB Windows media file), the robot walks over different types of terrain--including mud, rocky ground, and snow--and is given a few kicks to show how it stabilizes itself. Unlike the photo at left, in the video it looks like a pantomime horse with both people facing each other--sort of the opposite of a pushmipullyu.
Posted by Lippard at 3/04/2006 11:04:00 AM 1 comments
Labels: technology
Posted by Lippard at 3/04/2006 07:15:00 AM 4 comments
Labels: Arizona, censorship, politics, religion, Scientology
Posted by Lippard at 3/03/2006 09:50:00 PM 25 comments
Labels: Answers in Genesis, Answers in Genesis schism, Creation Ministries International, creationism, ethics, finance, Institute for Creation Research, Kent Hovind
It's amazing how small the animal kingdom is in the picture--if "speciesism" is a real problem, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) are apparently guilty of it by focusing only on animals.Here's a quick tour of the tree. Start at middle of the circle. The central point represents the last common ancestor of all living things on Earth. The tree sprouts three deep branches, which between them contain all the species the scientists studied. These deep branches first came to light in the 1970s, and are known as domains. We belong to the red domain of Eukaryota, along with plants, fungi, and protozoans. Bacteria (blue) and Archaea (green) make up the other two domains.
These lineages probably split very early in the history of life. Fossils of bacteria that look much like living bacteria turn up at least 3.4 billion years ago. Just a few lineages became multicellular much later, with some algae getting macroscopic about two billion years ago.
The length of the branches on this tree represent so-called genetic distance. The longer the branch, the more substitutions have accumulated in its genes. Since these genomes all come from living species, the branches all span the same period of time. The fact that some branches are long and some are short means that some lineages have evolved more than others. Many forces can stretch out genetic distance. A species may reproduce fast, or it may have a life that makes it prone to acquiring more mutations. The slash in the Bacteria branch represents a segment that the scientists left out to make the full tree easier to see.
Posted by Lippard at 3/03/2006 08:01:00 PM 2 comments
Labels: science
Posted by Lippard at 3/03/2006 07:00:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: Cunningham scandal, dirty politicians
"Checking every phone call ever made is an example of old think," he said.
He was alluding to databases maintained at an AT&T data center in Kansas, which now contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, has asserted in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system, a giant storehouse of calling records and Internet message routing information, was the foundation of the N.S.A.'s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.
An AT&T spokeswoman said the company would not comment on the claim, or generally on matters of national security or customer privacy.
But the mining of the databases in other law enforcement investigations is well established, with documented results. One application of the database technology, called Security Call Analysis and Monitoring Platform, or Scamp, offers access to about nine weeks of calling information. It currently handles about 70,000 queries a month from fraud and law enforcement investigators, according to AT&T documents.
A former AT&T official who had detailed knowledge of the call-record database said the Daytona system takes great care to make certain that anyone using the database — whether AT&T employee or law enforcement official with a subpoena — sees only information he or she is authorized to see, and that an audit trail keeps track of all users. Such information is frequently used to build models of suspects' social networks.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was discussing sensitive corporate matters, said every telephone call generated a record: number called, time of call, duration of call, billing category and other details. While the database does not contain such billing data as names, addresses and credit card numbers, those records are in a linked database that can be tapped by authorized users.
New calls are entered into the database immediately after they end, the official said, adding, "I would characterize it as near real time."
(Via Bruce Schneier's blog.)
Posted by Lippard at 3/03/2006 05:07:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: NSA, privacy, security, technology, wiretapping
Posted by Lippard at 3/03/2006 07:29:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: civil liberties, J.D. Hayworth, John McCain, law
Posted by Lippard at 3/02/2006 09:08:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: creationism, Dover trial, intelligent design
Posted by Lippard at 3/02/2006 09:07:00 PM 0 comments
"I don't think Americans have been given the full context of those cartoons," Abboud tells Uncle Nasty, her voice becoming louder as she tries to speak over the one on the other end of the phone. "I'm not defending the violence. But the editor of the Danish paper wasn't trying to make a point; he was clearly trying to offend people."Actually, the editor of the Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten, solicited the cartoons because Danish author Kare Bluitgen had written a children's book about Mohammed and was unable to find an illustrator. The editor wanted to see if there was really such a chilling effect against artists that they were afraid to illustrate the book, and solicited artists' renditions of Mohammed, without specifying that they take any particular position. The instruction was to "draw the Prophet as they saw him."
Posted by Lippard at 3/02/2006 04:54:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: Arizona, civil liberties, Islam, politics, religion
Posted by Lippard at 3/02/2006 02:04:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: dirty politicians
Posted by Lippard at 3/02/2006 02:01:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: Cunningham scandal, dirty politicians
Posted by Lippard at 3/02/2006 01:50:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: charitable giving, dirty politicians, earmarks, politics
In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, risk lives in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage of the briefings.Via Talking Points Memo.Bush didn't ask a single question during the final government-wide briefing the day before Katrina struck on Aug. 29 but assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: "We are fully prepared."
... the video and transcripts show federal and local officials discussed threats clearly, reviewed long-made plans and understood Katrina would wreak devastation of historic proportions. "I'm sure it will be the top 10 or 15 when all is said and done," National Hurricane Center's Max Mayfield warned the day Katrina lashed the Gulf Coast.
Posted by Lippard at 3/01/2006 04:28:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: politics
Posted by Lippard at 3/01/2006 11:43:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: politics, privacy, security, technology, wiretapping
Posted by Lippard at 3/01/2006 10:06:00 AM 0 comments
Bob Smith, USA is a hilarious documentary film that provides a view into American culture through the eyes of seven men named Bob Smith. One of the seven Bob Smiths will be attending the screenings and will discuss the film afterwards.The showings are on Friday, March 3 at 6 p.m. and Saturday, March 4 at 2 p.m. in ASU's Life Sciences building, room 191. (Map here.) The screenings are free and open to the public, and there will be a party for Bob Smith on Saturday night, details to be provided at both showings.
The filmmakers traveled across the United States documenting the lives of the Bob Smiths. Despite their common names, the men vary greatly - from septic tank repairman to yoga instructor; from twenty eight to eighty-eight years old; from Evangelical Christian to Evangelical Atheist. As each man's story unfolds in their own words, intimate portraits are drawn; creating a poetic, non-judgmental and highly entertaining document of American life.
Posted by Lippard at 2/27/2006 04:57:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Einzige at 2/26/2006 01:16:00 PM 0 comments
Labels: movies
Posted by Lippard at 2/26/2006 11:00:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: torture
More at News.com. Here's a strategy Randy Olsen might like...A scientist walks into a bar. More than 100 people are there, eager to hear all that she has to say and ask a lot of questions. No joke.
That's what happens at the Wynkoop Brewing Company here every month when Cafe Scientifique is held.
Posted by Lippard at 2/26/2006 08:31:00 AM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 2/24/2006 06:47:00 PM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 2/24/2006 11:39:00 AM 0 comments
Posted by Lippard at 2/24/2006 08:15:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: police abuse and corruption
Posted by Kat Lippard at 2/23/2006 06:45:00 PM 2 comments
Labels: animal rescue, animals, dogs
I'm not sure I see what the big deal is about P&O being owned by Dubai Ports World being owned by the Dubai government (the Hong Kong of the United Arab Emirates), vs. P&O being owned by PSA International being owned by Temasek Holdings being owned by the Republic of Singapore--apart from a general objection to government-owned businesses. I also don't see a big deal in Haier (Chinese company) making Maytag washing machines, or Lenovo making IBM ThinkPads. It seems to me that the more economic interests that cross national boundaries, the less likely we are to have wars.UPDATE 2: At least some provisions of the agreement (presumably negotiated as part of the CFIUS process) have come out, and while the DHS described the terms as "unprecedented among maritime companies," they sound lax by comparison to the terms that have been used in such agreements for foreign acquisitions of U.S. telecommunications companies. Apparently the Bush administration is more concerned about the flow of information than the movement of physical materials.
Posted by Lippard at 2/22/2006 08:03:00 AM 4 comments