So a headline on slashdot today was "MS To Limit Security Fixes to Legal Copies of Windows" (emphasis mine). The article goes on to say that

An Associated Press artcile [sic] on MSNBC is reporting that Microsoft is going to start restricting access to security updates from pirated copies of its Windows operating systems. Starting in mid 2005, if you have a pirated copy of Windows, the only way to obtain security updates will be through the automatic updates mechanism. And even that method may be restricted at a future date. The article is light on details about what versions of Windows this will affect. Parts of the system to check for a valid copy of Windows is already used when downloading software (such as Media Player) from Microsoft - except that validation is currently optional.

Where did that headline come from? Are pirated copies legal?

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 26 January 2005 at 3:48 PM

Let's talk about the Oscars. Yesterday the nominations came out, and in the six major categories (Best Picture, Best Director, and the four acting categories) twelve films were nominated:

• The Aviator
• Finding Neverland
• Million Dollar Baby
• Ray
• Sideways
• Hotel Rwanda
• Being Julia
• Maria Full of Grace
• Vera Drake
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• Collateral
• Closer
• Kinsey

From this list, I've seen one movie, The Aviator, although I plan on seeing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind this week. That leaves me with ten movies to see over the next month! Why are the Academy Awards always so heavy with movies that come out at the end of the year?

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 26 January 2005 at 3:34 PM

Google has a new service out that lets you search TV broadcasts for words spoken in the program. It uses the closed captioning information to do the search. The concept seems cool, but the results seem to lack relevancy. My cursory examination had them being much too dominated by local news results.

Also, what is the point of searching videos when you can't actually watch the videos. Someone needs to combine this service with a bittorrent rss scraper that would link you to the actual file when you do the video search. I wonder if the google APIs support the video searching?

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 25 January 2005 at 9:42 AM

Daniel Okrent, the New York Times's Public Editor, wrote a very interesting column paired with a couple entries in his weblog about the use of numbers and statistics in media reporting. (Here is the article while the two weblog posts are here.) Statistics are a very interesting thing. Almost always, without context statistics are meaningless, yet they are seen by the public as the gold standard of truth. That "the numbers don't lie" is so widely accepted is a bit disturbing, especially when the public seems to be so greatly concerned with journalistic bias these days.

If Okrent's argument that reporters don't have the mathematical background to understand the statistics they use in their articles, this is a very disturbing revelation. Webloggers like to pride themselves on being the new journalists, but the truth of the matter is that credentialed reporters often have more access to information than the general information. If they can't intelligent analyze the statistics they use in their articles, it will be difficult for anyone to correct them because we often lack the base data that the statistics are drawn from. As Okrent argues, the best way to address this is to make statistical training for reporters the norm

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 24 January 2005 at 11:10 AM

I'd like to buy a hard drive-based MP3 player. Is an iPod my best choice?

Comments: 5 Posted by david on 21 January 2005 at 2:58 PM

I was saddened today to learn of the passing of Mike Sampson yesterday. Mike was the host of "St. Louis on the Air" and "Cityscape" on KWMU, the local public radio station here in St. Louis. Mike was one of the most knowledgeable and convivial radio hosts I've ever had the pleasure of listening to. Mike lived in the CWE and was a visible presence in that neighborhood. Many a morning was enhanced by hearing his voice on the radio and I'll miss hearing him.

Related:

• Post-Dispatch news article about Mike Sampson's passing.
• KWMU homepage with news about Mike Sampson.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 21 January 2005 at 12:04 PM

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran an article about desktop searches today. Talk about missing the boat. This article is nothing but FUD. Desktop searches don't give anyone access to anything that isn't already available on your computer. One of the main complaints about desktop search tools and the main point reiterated by this article, is that desktop search tools will make the cached version of encrypted web pages available. This means that someone might be able to access your credit card number or other sensitive information.

While it is true that using something like google's desktop search agent will find information you might prefer not to have it find, the real culprit here is your browser, which is caching these pages. Google's (and Yahoo!'s and MSN's) tool simply makes it faster to locate these items. These tools expose flaws on the underlying system, but do not create flaws themselves. The backlash against desktop search tools is akin to shooting the messenger when the real culprit is the maker of the browser that caches those pages.

Bruce Schneier, an "[i]nternationally-renowned security technologist" and author of "Applied Cryptography," the bible of cryptography, weighed in on this issue a few months ago on his weblog and in his monthly email newsletter. Here is the link to his article.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 21 January 2005 at 9:42 AM

Today was, in some ways, a very sucky day. I avoided reading the news all day because I knew it would set me off. However, toward the end of a slow day at work I gave up and loaded a news site in my browser. I didn't make it past the lede of the major news of the day before I got really pissed. I hammered out an angry email as a way of venting but it didn't help. So I shut things down and just went home.

Comments: 3 Posted by david on 20 January 2005 at 4:41 PM

I'm fairly certain the space shuttle will never fly again and I've begun to wonder why we haven't used the past two years to develop a newer, better space flight system. Surely we've learned enough during the 30 years since the shuttle was designed to come up with something a bit less brittle and a bit more reusable.

I come into this with some bias. I may be the only person in the country who was in favor of Bush's proposal to send humans to Mars in the near future. (However, I think we weren't being ambitious enough. We went from essentially no space program to sending men to the moon in 8 years. Surely, given our advances in technology, eight or nine or ten years should be more than enough time to get the infrastructure in place to send astronauts to Mars. Further, setting near-term artificial deadlines is how you get things done. Setting a 20-year timetable is pretty much a guarantee that nothing is going to happen; funding and personnel will change and the goal will be lost or forgotten.) I like the idea of pushing forward on space exploration if only because we don't know how to do it. Having a pie-in-the-sky target with a huge budget is, in my opinion, a successful technique for advancing our scientific and engineering knowledge. Our space program has been riding on the coattails of the scientists and engineers who worked at NASA in the '60s and '70s for too long and it seems like its time to start over.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 20 January 2005 at 9:43 AM

The new Iron Chef series "Iron Chef America" debuts this weekend. If it bears any resemblance to the Iron Chef America specials I saw last spring, this show should be avoided by all fans of the original "Iron Chef." It just didn't seem to have gotten what people liked about the original.

FYI, the show debuts on Sunday.

For what it's worth, the NY Times has a rather positive write up of the show, although it isn't really a review.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 14 January 2005 at 9:31 AM

Slate has an interesting article about Ivy League graduates representing a smaller portion of top management jobs at Fortune 100 companies than they did 20 years ago. The author's opinion on why this is the case is fairly provocative and touches on the changing nature of elite education in America:

Something has changed about the character of the student bodies at many Ivy League schools in recent decades. With the rising ability of the wealthy to smooth the path to admission by paying private-school tuition and hiring college advisers and SAT-prep tutors—and with college tuition far outpacing financial aid growth—rich kids are more likely to get in, and to attend, Ivy League schools than in the past. A widely quoted study from the Century Foundation found that 74 percent of the students at 146 selective colleges surveyed came from the top socioeconomic quartile, while only 10 percent come from the bottom half! Harvard President Larry Summers devoted his 2004 commencement speech to this phenomenon. On a percentage basis, fewer Ivy League graduates than public school graduates today need to find stable, high-paying jobs at big companies. More of them can afford to traipse around Asia for a year or pursue a career in film-making. It could be that the already rich and comfortable are simply less interested in pursuing careers in large corporations than their less-comfortable public-school peers for purely economic reasons.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 13 January 2005 at 1:36 PM

I heard about this on NPR this morning and just saw it confirmed on STLtoday.com: E! is going to get around the ban on cameras in the Michael Jackson trial by staging daily re-enactments. It looks like they're planning on five 30-minute shows per week and a Saturday wrap-up show. Talk about ridiculous.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 12 January 2005 at 11:00 AM

The Becker-Posner Blog is a weblog run by Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize winning economist, and Richard Posner, a federal appellate court judge with an interest in the intersection of economics and the law. The weblog is a dialog between the two with a weekly post by one of the two followed by a response from the other. I don't always agree with them as they both seem to sit (in general but not exclusively) to my right, but what really gets my goat are the comments that people leave on their posts.

I hope that Becker and Posner keep the blog going, but I would certainly sympathize if they chose to abandon it. So many of the comments are just so dumb that it must be frustrating to have intelligent analysis of complex issues ignored or denigrated by people who don't have the simplest grasp of economic issues. Here is an example:

I have to say that part of your post is hilarious. Well, OK, more than one part. First, the idea that the financial markets would produce student loans at not much more than current mortgage rates. It's more likely that the rates would be at least twice current mortgage rates. Why? Because they could. Because they have stockholders who want not simply good but great performance.

This person has failed to understand how markets work. Businesses can't simply raise their rates arbitrarily, especially on a big-ticket item like a student load. Consumers are going to shop around and take the lowest price. Too many Americans buy into a corporations are evil mindset without really understanding how things work. Here is another example:

seems that Mr. Becker has forgotten that most of those involved in the business of loans have sold their souls. He thinks that they are simply rational beings involved in market transactions that actually involve something resembling competition.

Corporations might very well be evil; it doesn't matter. As long as they aren't collaborating on price (a practice that is illegal) I can just shop around for the best price and there isn't anything they can do.

I'm not arguing here against discussion of the issues that Becker and Posner address on their blog, just that people try to restrain themselves from derailing that discussion with ridiculous messages like the ones cited above.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 11 January 2005 at 2:38 PM

Is anyone else getting tired of "Desperate Housewives?"

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 11 January 2005 at 1:35 PM

That long post below started out as a thought that I should point all of you to two newly resurrected blogs, but instead got side-tracked by my TV. But I've just recalled the original intent, so I'll try again.

Two of my favorite blogs from about a year ago are back. So point your browsers to llamasgalore and kill9 for lots of weblog-based excitement. I assume that the long hiatuses will result in posts of exceptional quality.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 10 January 2005 at 2:40 PM

Let's talk about televisions. More specifically, lets talk about my new, too-huge-for-words television. This past week, inspired by a too generous Christmas check I received from my grandmother, I went out and bought a new 35" television. Ignoring the omens of a poor decision (on the way home from Best Buy I nearly plowed into the side of a red-light-running old lady), I brought my TV home on Wednesday. The TV and its box entirely filled the back of my SUV, but -- thanks to Rachel's dolly and our apartment building's suspect elevator --getting the whole thing up to the apartment didn't prove to be too difficult. Because of the increased size of the TV I also needed to invest in a larger TV stand. And that's where things got complicated.

First, I posted an inquiry on the electronic bulletin board here at work asking where I could get "cheap but not too cheap" furniture. This netted me ten recommendations but also sparked an involved controversy about American TV & Furniture (one recommendation, many people giving long, involved stories about why I should avoid it). So with my recommendations in hand I roped michael into helping me and we set off to try to find a TV stand. Eight stores and a number of hours later I was still without a stand. Most of the stores didn't have anything like what I was looking for (mainly, an inexpensive version of one of the TV Stands I found at Pottery Barn) and the few that I found were much, much too expensive. However, very late on Thursday night some creative googling saved me. I found pretty much just what I wanted online and then located a merchant here in Saint Louis that carried the unit that I wanted. That merchant? Circuit City. I had been shying away from ready-to-assemble furniture because they are often of fairly low quality and I often don't have the patience to assemble them. However, this product exceeded my expectations. It took a long time to assemble, but everything went together smoothly and the end product looks great. Really, the only fly in the ointment was the fact that the elevator in our building has been out of service since last Thursday so michael and I had to lug the 160 pound unit up two flights of stairs. (For the record, michael designed a unique lifting strategy that allowed him to place his end on the ground while I lifted the full weight of he unit up and flipped it over. In hindsight, I believe he did this to torture me.)

So that's the story of my new TV. I suggest all of you invite yourselves over to take a look at it.

PS -- I'll update with some pictures shortly.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 10 January 2005 at 2:25 PM

The NY Times has finally decided to take an opinion on the infamous Batman vs. Superman debate. As most of you know, I'm a Batman fan, so I was glad to see the following run as a correction in the Times today:

An obituary of the innovative comic-page illustrator Will Eisner yesterday included an imprecise comparison in some copies between his character the Spirit and others, including Batman. Unlike Superman and some other heroes of the comics, Batman relied on intelligence and skill, not supernatural powers.

Link (last item).

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 6 January 2005 at 2:34 PM

The photo to the right is from a wedding I was in this weekend. My high school friend Luke Wagner married the former Sarah Rogers in a New Years Day ceremony. Luke invited me to be one of the ushers and I was happy to help him out with that. This marks the second wedding I've been to this year where I've been an usher and I'm getting pretty good at it. Good enough, in fact, that I should probably add ushing as a skill on my resume. If you're interested, here are almost all the photos I took at the wedding. Some of the photos I took had bad poses, awkward collars, or bad lighting. In one notable photo someone was "scratching [his] nose." I removed all of those so as to embarrass myself or my subjects.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 2 January 2005 at 9:17 PM