Voter ID: How security theatre can win elections (2012/08/12)
As a number of people have observed, there is no obvious means by which taking nail clippers away from little old ladies prevents healthy young men from using weapons already secreted aboard an airplane to try to hijack it. Similarly, all the aggressive increases in ID checking seem irrelevant; none of the 9/11 hijackers were using assumed names. And yet, for the most part, people have put up with the TSA’s hijinks. Why?
[read more...]A reminder: Overtime is nearly always stupid. (2012/08/12)
In a discussion about a video game, and why the developers should have been working on code rather than taking a break to do some social/promotional stuff, someone wrote:
[read more...]The Secret World: Way, way, better than some reviewers think (2012/08/10)
Inexplicably, TSW reviews sort of poorly. Wait, that’s not inexplicable; it’s totally explicable, it’s just sad. Many of them aren’t even reviews of the retail; they’re from mid-to-late beta. Others are just plain wrong on basic claims about mechanics. But mostly, I think, reviewers tried to play it as though it were a modern-setting WoW, and got disappointed when it wasn’t.
[read more...]Google+: In theory, they understand names (2012/07/31)
(Hello, hypothetical reviewer. Please read this; follow the link to see why.)
[read more...]YouTube tries to push for real names: Google doesn't get it (2012/07/27)
After the drama over Google+ demanding “real names”, and the claim that they were now accepting pseudonyms (they aren’t, for real people), and after a friend had her G+ account deleted because someone somewhere decided the name wasn’t good enough, I suppose I sort of accepted that Google was constitutionally incapable of comprehending that there could ever be legitimate reasons for people to want any kind of privacy.
[read more...]Liar, liar, pants on fire (2012/07/24)
So, there’s this long story. As always, Snopes has pretty good coverage of the whole issue.
[read more...]We were not near the shooting. (2012/07/20)
There was a shooting in Colorado, but it was not here.
[read more...]Are you sure? (2012/07/17)
One of the recurring themes in user interface design is confirming actions which might be destructive. You tell the computer to do something, and it says “are you sure?”
[read more...]Says it all, really. (2012/07/13)
Build ran forever. Went and looked, and discovered that a program called ecj1 had taken up well over 3 hours of CPU time. I announced that it was probably Java-related based on that alone.
Cisco's new view of how routers work. (2012/07/04)
You may not know what routers are. Routers are devices which transmit information around, so for instance, if you have three computers, and an Internet connection, somewhere in there you probably have a router. The router is what makes sure that all three computers are able to access the Internet, and that your email ends up on your computer while someone else’s videos end up on theirs. They provide some basic control over data flows and such.
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