You have nothing to lose but your gullibility:
People who have suffered life’s hard knocks while growing up tend to be more gullible than those who have been more sheltered, startling new findings from the University of Leicester reveal. — University Of Leicester
via Metafilter
Via Slashdot:
CNET has an article describing how AT&T accidentally leaked sensitive information involving the NSA lawsuit. From the article: ‘AT&T’s attorneys this week filed a 25-page legal brief striped with thick black lines that were intended to obscure portions of three pages and render them unreadable. But the obscured text nevertheless can be copied and pasted inside some PDF readers, including Preview under Apple’s OS X and the xpdf utility used with X11. The deleted portions of the legal brief seek to offer benign reasons why AT&T would allegedly have a secret room at its downtown San Francisco switching center that would be designed to monitor Internet and telephone traffic.
Previously: Track Changes
Watch the video at: Medallia Blog: SmackBook Pro Archives.
Review the footage of the Nintendo Wii in action via this old trailer.
Now, what if every data manipulation had a shot at becoming the next dance sensation?
That was one of the stories from today’s Morning Edition on NPR. The gist: it’s hard to get enough Mandarin teachers to meet the demand in elite circles.
The closing “shot” describes a third grader, blonde, reciting some Chinese. My response: why bother trying to find teachers to teach these white kids Chinese?
Just adopt more kids from China — the software is preloaded. Bundled, even.
On the Newshour a few weeks ago ago, Mark Shields called immigration the gay marriage of 2006:
And whites in this country, 30 percent of whites, want to build a wall tomorrow and they want to deport the 12 million. And if you’re going to energize them in the campaign of 2006, that’s the issue: Immigration is the gay marriage issue of 2006, to get those folks out.
Here’s Glenn Greenwald summarizing the “conservative” response to Bush’s immigration proposals:
I think a lot of the Malkin types have become bored with the whole “War on Terror” business, which provided them good, strong emotional sustenance for the last four years. But September 11 is now almost five years away. There have been no good “battles” for a long time; we don’t even pretend to capture or kill any high-ranking Al Qaeda members any more; and while invocations of “war” will always be good for some blood-rushing excitement, the whole thing seems so distant and abstract at this point. It’s just not enough any more.
They’re also clearly tired of slogging through the political and ethnic complexities of Iraq. That country just doesn’t lend itself to any morally clear good/evil dichotomies. There are no good cartoon villains to hate. Calls for increased “ferocity,” less “sensitive” approaches (”bomb some more mosques!”), and less discriminate bombings can generate some temporary enthusiasm — as it did for a day or so with Shelby Steele’s column — but Iraq is so muddled and ambiguous, and not all that emotionally satisfying. It’s pretty depressing, actually, to think about how everything they said would happen there is not happening, and trying to figure out solutions, ways out, is just not very invigorating stuff for those who thrive on Hating and Warring Against Evil.
As a result, attention gets turned to immigration — Mexican immigration specifically. It entails the opportunity to rail against “appeasement” (of Vincente Fox); to create the anti-terrorist/pro-terrorist dichotomy on which they thrive; and to demonize a clear, foreign enemy as threatening not just our economic prosperity but also our national security (the “Mexican invaders”). And if the weakened, ready-to-be-tossed aside failure, George Bush, is one of the spineless appeasers this time, so be it.