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Seen, Heard, Said

Things I’ve seen, heard, or was told by someone. Item in this category usually originate from the Internet.

Terror, the end game for Terrorists

Merriam-Webster defines “Terrorism” as:
ter·ror·ism, noun
the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion

From www.schneier.com:

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

Terror, it’s in the word Terrorist and Terrorism. Their goal is terror.

Merriam-Webster defins “Terror” as:
ter·ror, noun
state of intense fear

(Okay, there actually is another definition, but it’s not applicable because no demands have been made…at least none that I’m aware of)

The implausible plots and false alarms actually hurt us in two ways. Not only do they increase the level of fear, but they also waste time and resources that could be better spent fighting the real threats and increasing actual security. I’ll bet the terrorists are laughing at us.

Another thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that the British government arrested the 23 suspects without fanfare. Imagine that the TSA and its European counterparts didn’t engage in pointless airline-security measures like banning liquids. And imagine that the press didn’t write about it endlessly, and that the politicians didn’t use the event to remind us all how scared we should be. If we’d reacted that way, then the terrorists would have truly failed.

via 2020 Hindsight.

Moses and Jesus

A burglar broke into a house one night. He shone his flashlight around, looking for valuables, and when he picked up a CD player to place in his sack, a strange, disembodied voice echoed from the dark saying, “Jesus is watching you”.

He nearly jumped out of his skin, clicked his flashlight off and froze. When he heard nothing more after a bit, he shook his head, promised himself a vacation after the next big score, then clicked the light back on and began searching for more valuables.

Just as he pulled the stereo out so he could disconnect the wires, clear as a bell he heard, “Jesus is watching you”. Totally rattled, he shone his light around frantically, looking for the source of the voice.

Finally, in the corner of the room, his flashlight beam came to rest on a parrot. “Did you say that?”, he hissed at the parrot.

“Yes,” the parrot confessed, then squawked, “I’m just trying to warn you.”

The burglar relaxed. “Warn me, huh? Who do you think you are any way?”

“Moses,” replied the bird.

“Moses” the burglar laughed. “What kind of stupid people would name a parrot ‘Moses’?”

The bird promptly answered: “The same kind of people that would name a Rottweiler ‘Jesus’!”

Fun Facts About…Death

No, I’m not in a morbid mood. I’m just clearing out my Inboxen™. Here are some of my favorite facts:

From www.discover.com:

  • No American has died of old age since 1951.
  • That was the year the government eliminated that classification on death certificates.
  • The trigger of death, in all cases, is lack of oxygen. Its decline may prompt muscle spasms, or the “agonal phase,” from the Greek word agon, or contest.
  • Within three days of death, the enzymes that once digested your dinner begin to eat you. Ruptured cells become food for living bacteria in the gut, which release enough noxious gas to bloat the body and force the eyes to bulge outward.
  • So much for recycling: Burials in America deposit 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid–formaldehyde, methanol, and ethanol–into the soil each year. Cremation pumps dioxins, hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide into the air.
  • Zoroastrians in India leave out the bodies of the dead to be consumed by vultures.
  • The vultures are now dying off after eating cattle carcasses dosed with diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory used to relieve fever in livestock.
  • For organs to form during embryonic development, some cells must commit suicide. Without such programmed cell death, we would all be born with webbed feet, like ducks.
  • Waiting to exhale: In 1907 a Massachusetts doctor conducted an experiment with a specially designed deathbed and reported that the human body lost 21 grams upon dying. This has been widely held as fact ever since. It’s not.
  • Eighty percent of people in the United States die in a hospital.
  • If you can’t make it here . . . More people commit suicide in New York City than are murdered.
  • It is estimated that 100 billion people have died since humans began.

via BoingBoing

100% Free Moo Cards

I love free. Being a college student makes me love free even more. That’s why I got excited this morning when I was reading my BoingBoing RSS feed and I saw an offer for 10 free Moo cards. Now before I continue, I need to clarify:

First, they are only free if you have a Flickr Pro account. Second, there is no shipping and handling fee. That’s right. I didn’t even have to enter a credit card number.

Now, what are Moo cards?

From www.boingboing.net:

Moo prints beautiful little calling-cards for kids and the young-at-heart. Each card can have a different back, and the undersized cards are just the right size for your name, email address and a URL or two.

…

It’s hard to convey just how cool-ass these cards are. They feel like a fetish object, the thick card and soft laminate finish create a great hand-feel, and they’re visually stunning — playful and intensely personal.

So head over to Moo and get your 10 free Flickr cards!

[tags]flickr, flickr pro, boingboing, moo[/tags]

Random Questions

Last…

  • Cigarette: Never.
  • Good cry: Last spring, over school sucking.
  • Library book checked out: Naked Conversations
  • Movie seen: Super Troopers
  • Book read: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
  • Cuss word uttered: “Fuck”. Potentially “shit”.
  • Beverage drank: Glass of water
  • Food consumed: Chocolate cake
  • Phone call: my Mom
  • TV show watched: Family Guy
  • Time showered: Today, around 1pm
  • shoes worn: New Balance
  • CD played: CD?
  • Item bought: Food
  • Downloaded: picture of my cat, Dunstan
  • Annoyance: The lady downstairs
  • Disappointment:
  • Thing written: Economics homework (typed)
  • Key used: a
  • Word spoken: “That’s pretty awesome.”
  • Sleep: 11:45am
  • IM: Laura
  • Ice ream eaten: Coldstone
  • Time hugged: today, my aunt
  • Time scolded: Last week, for being “too loud”
  • Chair sat in: the one I’m sitting in
  • Shirt worn: In-n-Out
  • Time dancing: baseball game on Friday
  • Show attended: Chicago, in London

via Audreyln

A Brief History of the Facebook Privacy Debacle

Unless you go to college, you may not have heard about the recent revolt against Facebook this week.

Tuesday morning, after a wonderful three day weekend for most (but not me), Facebook updated their website with the now infamous “News Feeds.” Within hours, people started revolting by the masses. A group called “Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)” was created and within hours over 10,000 people had signed up. A large number, but only a fraction of what would happen. By the end of the day, that number had increased nearly ten-fold to over 100,000.

Within a a few rather long days, that number would eventually reach over a quarter-million users. 750,000 out of 8,000,000 doesn’t seem like a whole lot, but it is. The issue at hand was a perceived invasion of privacy. I used “perceived” because while no new data was being collected or mined, users of Facebook did feel like their lives had been taken to a whole new level of openness.

News-Feed-Example_thumb

From www.time.com:

The feature in question appears on the user’s home page and looks like a glitzy laundry list. It chronicles every action a user’s friends have recently taken on Facebook. These include the mundane: Sally befriended Joan, the boring: Tim now likes The Daily Show, and the juicy: John and Beth broke up. And in case it matters, each action is time-stamped to the minute.

What came next was pretty amazing, and not in a good way:
In a post titled “Calm Down. Breathe. We Hear You.” Mark Zuckerberg, head of Facebook, writes, “We’ve been getting a lot of feedback about Mini-Feed and News Feed. We think they are great products, but we know that many of you are not immediate fans, and have found them overwhelming and cluttered.”

Calm down? Why should anyone calm down? Facebook managed to alienate a very significant number of their users with this “upgrade” and they want them to breathe. I can see it now: a group of Facebook students crowded outside Mark Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto office shouting “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

Why not just roll back the update until a suitable solution could be found?

As tension between Facebook users and Facebook-the-company grew, a temporary fix emerged:
In addition to having a News Feed on your homepage, each user also has a Mini-feed on their profile page that details just their actions.
Mini-feed

Clicking on the “X” would remove that item from both your Mini-feed and the News Feed of your friends. But users would have to click through up to 10 “X”‘s to remove all the items. A spiffy, Javascript-based bookmarklet, Nuke Facebook Feed Items, let users easily remove all items.

Then early Friday morning, Mark posted another article, “An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg:” The first sentence said it all, “We really messed this one up.”

People, and companies, are going to make mistakes. That’s a fact. While fessing up your mistakes should be a requirement, it’s not. Robert Scoble pretty much sums it up:
From scobleizer.wordpress.com:

Notice how different this is from how HP is handling things? Where’s the HP’s CEO’s blog?

Scoble is referring, of course, referring to the recent HP Privacy Fiasco.

I digress. Zuckerberg continues, “When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now.”

Facebook decided not to roll back the changes, I still think they should have. Instead, they opted to add more privacy features.
From blog.facebook.com:

This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about.

59,000 Dumb-ass Webmasters

This is amazing. Google has a very good crawler and will find anything, just about. Interestingly enough, many of these look like PDFs, with some PowerPoint (PPT) and Word Documents (DOC). And don’t think that just removing the document will take it off the web. Often times the data is cached by Google or other organizations, such as the Internet Archive (aka Wayback Machine).

From www.boingboing.net:

Sometimes I waste time on the Net by putting in interesting searches into Google. Today’s was quite interesting — Google this: Confidential “do not distribute.”

Ryan Goodwin says, “That’s 59,000 dumb-ass webmasters.”

[tags]google, confidential, do not distribute[/tags]

Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin Dead at 44

Just got this on my watch:

‘Crocodile Hunter’ Steve Irwin dies in marine accident, media reports say.

The details are still trickling in.

From www.cnn.com:

Steve Irwin, the Australian TV presenter known as the “Crocodile Hunter,” has died after being stung in a marine accident off Australia’s north coast.

The BBC doesn’t have anything yet, but Wikipedia seems to be on top of it:

From en.wikipedia.org:

Steve Irwin was killed at the age of 44 by a stingray barb through the heart while filming an underwater documentary in the Batt Reef off the Low Isles near Port Douglas, north of Cairns, Queensland, Australia.

Irwin is survived by his wife, Terri, and two kids: daughter Bindi Sue Irwin, 8, and son Robert Clarence Irwin, 2.

[tags]steve irwin, crocodile hunter, dead, died[/tags]