Violating parking etiquette

Some people who drive expensive cars are so worried about their cars being dinged by the opening of doors of cars parked next to them that they park straddling two spaces. This is a serious violation of parking etiquette that can enrage people. I myself, though not prone to get upset over trivial things, also find myself highly irritated when I see someone do that, even though I know it is small in the great scheme of things. But like most of us, I do nothing except secretly despise such people. [Read more…]

Our skewed world

Now that Edward Snowden has temporary asylum in Russia, he has the freedom to travel anywhere in that country and work. Apparently, he may already have a job offer.

Late Thursday, the founder of Russia’s Facebook-like social network site VKontakte, made what sounded like a job offer.

“We will be happy if he decides to supplement the team of star programmers at VKontakte,” Durov wrote on his page.

[Read more…]

Summer camps for fun and learning humanist values

I recently heard about Camp Quest, a nationwide network of summer camps for children where, in addition to the usual summer outdoor fun activities, they also learn science and humanist values and critical thinking. It is a wonderful opportunity for parents and children with scientific, secular, and atheist outlooks to have a good time with like-minded people, as a counter to the large number of religion-based camps. There are already 17 such weeklong camps nationwide and the growth has been fairly rapid. [Read more…]

Snowden leaves airport and enters Russia

After several false starts, Edward Snowden has finally left Moscow airport and can move about in Russia. It must be nice for him to be out in the open again, for the first time since arriving in Moscow on June 23. He has been granted temporary asylum for one year.

Cue the screaming in the US by the usual political and media hacks about the need for him to be sent back to the US and to punish Russia for not doing so. Here are the initial salvos. [Read more…]

The NSA wants all your passwords

We now have pretty good algorithms to encrypt our online communications. It is true that given sufficient time and computer power, some of those encryption systems can be broken but (at least as I understand it) the de-encryption has to be done separately for each individual case. This inconvenience clearly must be an irritant to those in the NSA who want to be able to more easily scoop up all telecommunication information, despite having probably the most powerful computers in the world and an army of people to do this work. [Read more…]

Jeffrey Toobin exposed as being the hack he is

Glenn Greenwald does the honors. It is interesting how whenever Greenwald brings up the issue of why people like Toobin never call for jailing in cases of high-level sources leaking to high-level journalists (like Bob Woodward), Toobin dodges it by saying that is a different discussion without explaining how it is different. He really sank to new lows in this interview, which is quite a feat since he was pretty low in my estimation even before this. [Read more…]