The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jonah:

And in case you had any doubt that the folks at NRO are completely around the bend, John Derbyshire has a column up in which he attempts to make the case the Obama will cut funding for life sciences because he is afraid of research showing that the white folks are inherently superior to black folks.

@8:

The signs prevent their ever-vigilant enemy competitors from copying prices or special pieces.

I worked at a Whole Foods Market for a few months several years ago (Whole Foods is an upscale US grocery chain, for those who don't know). They had a strict no-photography policy, and their rationale was that if they allowed photography their competitors would photograph their displays in order to copy them.

@13:

I'm thinking the ziplock people could probably use this in a commercial.

I know you're joking, but if I were in charge of marketing for Ziplock the last thing I'd want to do would be to associate my brand with the TSA in any way. I mean, this is the organization that is tied with the IRS for least popular government organization here in the US.

Chris @2 wrote:

This gives me an idea for a new way of choosing the President.

Election by drinking games!

Actually, that's how the secret cabal who actually runs the world chose GWB.

I'm not a huge Clinton fan, but I find it disturbing that so many people apparently hate Clinton so much that they would rather vote for John "1,000 years in Iraq" McCain. I mean, statistically speaking at least some of the people who are saying they would vote for McCain are also people who say they want the US out of Iraq, right?

The first news I remember being aware of was the Challenger disaster, when I was 8. Since most people here seem to remember news stories from when they were 5 or 6, I wonder if my comparatively late awareness of the news is due to some aspect of my own personality, or if there were no sufficiently gripping news stories in the two years before Challenger. I doesn't seem like anyone else here has come up with a major national news story between late '82 (when I turned 5) and the Challenger disaster.

Re: #10

The bison picture is also on the front page of reddit.com, along with gems such as this. WARNING: before clicking the second link you should be aware that the reddit description is "Pikachu's vagina brings happiness to children" (no, it's not porn).

Just to be clear, the "In this instance the TSA was clearly right" quote does not refer to the seizure of a hard drive full of indie music, but to another case where a woman was harassed for spilling (possibly intentionally) some liquid from here child's sippy cup. (Boing Boind has a decent summary of the whole thing here.) I don't actually agree that the TSA was "clearly right" in this case, but I still think the point Schneier is making is an important one, and the quote doesn't really make sense without the first sentence.

This story sounds suspicious to me, but the fact that intelligent, well informed people find this story to be plausible certainly says something about how we perceive the DHS and the current security climate. As Bruce Schneier noted, when writing about the "sippy cup incident":

In this instance, the TSA is clearly in the right.

But there's a larger lesson here. Remember the Princeton professor who was put on the watch list for criticizing Bush? That was also untrue. Why is it that we all -- myself included -- believe these stories? Why are we so quick to assume that the TSA is a bunch of jack-booted thugs, officious and arbitrary and drunk with power?

It's because everything seems so arbitrary, because there's no accountability or transparency in the DHS. Rules and regulations change all the time, without any explanation or justification. Of course this kind of thing induces paranoia. It’s the sort of thing you read about in history books about East Germany and other police states. It's not what we expect out of 21st century America.

I would also like to take this opportunity to remind you that "True terror lies in the futility of human existence".

"The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points."

So it could only be 16%.

Margaret Organ-Kean wrote:

For that matter, why are they even bothering with the photo ID & ticket check? This is not stuff that's hard to fake or steal. If you're planning a hijacking/terrorist attack do they really think faking an ID is going to stop you?

Checking your ID doesn't do much to increase security, but it does make it harder for you to resell your ticket. Bruce Schneier has written about this.

Here is a link to the New York Times article that doesn't require registration.

Charles, over at Through the Looking Glass has posted the lyrics for Humanwine's Big Brother, a "tune for our times".

...
What, are you gonna sit around and worry,
chewing your life to its tomb?
What, have you given up on freedom
before they've taken it from you?
You're unhappy and losing your mind.
You're naked and weeping in the mall.
Shiveringly asking, "why is everyone looking at me?"
...

You can also listen to it on Humanwine's MySpace page (requires Flash).

How many more lives must die?

leaving parentless children to cry

Oh my father in heaven I ask Oh Why?

Do we live in a world of the fiery eye

It's enough to make me think that maybe we need some sort of Internet Censorship Act. I mean, won't somebody please think of the children? (Of course, the pro-censorship crowd never seems to target the truly disturbing material that's out there on the 'net.)

Scorpio wrote:
Seems that they just may be a more successful lifeform than thee and me.

Sounds like you've been reading Accelerando.

Oops, forgot to check the date of Steven Brust's post before posting here. As Anne pointed out, it's from over a week ago.

To those wondering when this will be published: I have no more idea than you, but Mr. Brust wrote:

The occasion was the completion of the first draft of Dzur.

Now, on to revisions.

which, sadly, seems to imply that Dzur may still be a ways off from being ready to publish.

Tina: it seems you have either an odd accent, or an odd sense of rhyme.

"I don't know if you have cats (I don't), but I had a three year old who cried for three months after we'd finished because he wanted to go home now."

3-year-olds can be surprisingly resistant to change. When my little brother was 3, our family moved from Desplains, IL (a suburb of Chicago) to Evanston, IL (another suburb of Chicago). My brother was furious. For approximately the next 10 years, he referred to the house in Desplains as "our real house".

One day, a few months after the move, he was nowhere to be found. One of my parents eventually found him several blocks away, walking determinedly away from our new house. He was trying to walk home. Compared to a 3-year-old, cats are easy.

(My Dad has a similar, though less extreme, story about me. He tells me that when I was 3, he rearanged the living room furniture. I indignantly told him to stop joking around, and put everything back where it was supposed to go. I think I vaguely remember this, though I may just remember my Dad telling me the story.)

kip wrote:
>I didn't block the IP addresses--I think it's the work of a lone [expletive inadequate], who's munging IP addresses somehow.

I'm not an expert, but I do know a little bit about this stuff, and I don't think that's possible. To put it as simply as I can: in order to post here you must be able to send information to the server, and the server must be able to send information to you. In order for this to happen you (or your computer) must know the IP address of the server, and the server must know the IP address of your computer(1).

If the IP address you provide the server with is not the true IP address of your computer, any information the server tries to send to you, will never actually reach you. (Instead it will be delivered to the computer at the IP address you provided, if such a machine exists.) This would make opening an tcp connection with the server impossible, and opening an tcp connection is a necessary prerequisite to doing things like viewing a web page, or posting via a web form. (See http://www.grc.com/dos/drdos.htm for a nice graphic.)

(1)Ok, in practice this might actually be the address of your NAT router or proxy server, but the principle remains more or less the same (and if you don't know what a NAT router or a proxy server is, don't worry about it).

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