In his keynote talk at the 30th Chaos Communications Congress (30C3) conference last month to an audience that consisted to a large extent of computer professionals and systems administrators, Glenn Greenwald talked about one encouraging sign that he has observed, and that is the increased resistance he has observed among ordinary people, especially those in the tech industry. [Read more…]
Every year we have the same sequence of events. There will be a few days in succession when temperatures fall far below average values, combined with fairly heavy snowfall. This is what we who live in the northeast call ‘winter’. And sure enough, this will be followed by amusement among some members of the media that this conclusively proves that global warming is some gigantic hoax being perpetrated on the US by a conspiracy of scientists, liberals, and the rest of the world. [Read more…]
In the service sector where employees have to interact with the general public, it has long been recognized that it is much easier to teach employees the skills they need to actually carry out their jobs than to teach them the kind of good attitude that will make a positive impact on customers. So “hire for attitude and teach the skills” has been a useful aphorism for them. [Read more…]
David Simon is a successful screenwriter of political dramas and in a blog post he writes what I too have felt all along, that even under the remote chance that New Jersey governor Chris Christie did not explicitly and personally order the closing of the lanes to the George Washington Bridge in September, thus massively tying up traffic for four days right at the beginning of the school year, now that we know that its was deliberately ordered by his close political aides as an act of retribution for whatever reason, the nature of the political relationships within the coterie of people close to major political figures strongly suggests that Christie would have been informed immediately afterwards, thus making a lie of his claim that he did not know anything about this until the story of the emails broke on Wednesday. [Read more…]
In his keynote talk at the 30th Chaos Communications Congress (30C3) conference last month to an audience that consisted to a large extent of computer professionals and systems administrators, Glenn Greenwald talked about how the US government’s spying apparatus can, must, and will be foiled. [Read more…]
The Daily Show marveled at Fox News’s obsession with this topic and and had fun with Bill O’Reilly’s weird beliefs about the dangerous joint addictions of young people with marijuana and texting. [Read more…]
I wrote recently about services like Wickr and Silent Circle that have systems that prevent (or at least highly hinder) the ability of the NSA and other US government agencies to spy on their members’ communications. Nico Sell is the head of Wickr and in an article Max Eddy has Sell explain how their operating model prevents them from being complicit with the government in snooping. [Read more…]
The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart hails from New Jersey and knows something about its hardball politics. He is disappointed in governor Chris Christie’s behavior over the bridge closings, saying that it is far below the state’s extremely high standards of political retribution and vindictiveness. [Read more…]
Apparently your responses to 12 apolitical questions can reveal your political leanings. After doing it, you can check the rest of the article that explains the reasoning behind it. Of course, these things are meant just for fun. The whole uniaxial liberal-conservative spectrum is itself problematic.
I came out as 67% liberal, 33% conservative.