The High Cost of Failing to Secure Air Travel

So, how many confiscated nail clippers sold on ebay does it take to fund the TSA?

Not enough.

$500 phone call (that's call, singular, domestic!), millions paid to shady private contractors that disappear, $1500 to rent extension cords for three weeks. The list goes on. (Wapost)

$741 million in a single year and they can't even keep a 20 year old drunk from stealing a plane 68 miles away from New York City.

Three quarters of a billion dollars sure goes a long way to confiscating items any moron knows are safe, or confiscating pocket knives from armed soldiers though, so they get high marks for being bureaucratic idiots. (Hmm. Idiobureaucrats has a nice ring to it.)

As to keeping the skies safe, I'll stick to driving.

Sour Apples

Up until today, I've been able to use my iPod Mini seamlessly on both my XP Workstation and my Mac OS X laptop.

Today, Apple shafted me for picking the route of universal compatibility.

There's no good technical reason for the Mac iPod Updater to have this limitation.

Not only that, but my mini is FAT32, not FAT.

All I Want for Christmas....

...is one of these. [11 mb video download, w/audio. G-rated.]

I used to fly RC Helicopters, and this blows them away. My neighbor has a four acre pond. I can see it now

"He get that thing off my pond!"
"Ok" (whoosh)

Be sure to FFW to 2:00 into the video to see all the capabilities.


Designer web site.

No, you can't get one now.

Welcome to the Hotel Kelofornia

It was bound to happen, though it's a little scary given how many laws that were once considered perversely extreme are now being passed.

The Lost Liberty Hotel proposal.

To be built at the address of Justice Souter's current residence, the Lost Liberty Hotel would serve better public use as a hotel with a "museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America."

My favorite kicker: "Instead of a Gideon's Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged."

Although it's too late to claim it, I actually thought this would be a good idea. I couldn't find anyone except one of the majority justices in the case that I wanted to use as a target though.

You can expect that if I hear of anyone local supporting the Kelo decision, a similar thing will happen here. (Un?)fortunately, I can't find anyone who thinks this is a good idea.

[Update: pledge here to stay at the hotel and show the tourist dollars at stake]

Markets for everything

This is a little weird, and a little icky.

The Only Good Thing to Come from Intelligent Design

Alas, if you believe in ID, you probably won't get this anyway.

Be sure to read the responses at the bottom.

Oklahoma Sucks and Nebraska Blows

There always talk of wind power in Kansas. It seems very windy here. This past winter NPR radio personality Laura Lorson even called our wind "constant, mindless and vicious".

But this map from the Dept of Energy, says our wind generation potential is fair or good. On a scale of 2-7(?), we are at most a 4.

Paved paradise, and put up a parking lot...

...over what used to be your farm.

The supreme court decided today that the government owns everything.

At least it was 5-4.

Not too surprising that the same court that wants to jail cancer patients also wants to steal people's homes and give them to wealthy developers. The potential for abuse here is utterly mind-boggling.

O'Connor said it best in her dissent:

"Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms."

Slippery slope indeed.

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
-- P.J. O'Rourke


[Update 6/27/05:

After having a few days to think about this and talk it over with people (all over the political spectrum), I think this is a better way to understand how scary this is:

When you don't pay market value for property (which is not required by eminent domain) and you are able to turn around and sell it to a developers for market value, any takings of property will generate local revenue both through sale and taxes on the sale. Since the developer's property tax will almost always be equal to or exceed the personal property tax, and since the sale of the property always generates revenue for the government, any and all takings will contribute to the Supreme Court definition of economic growth.

Or, to put it more succintly: When you may steal property and sell it, profit (and therefore revenue) is guaranteed, as is the state's right to take it.]

So long as it wasn't an Enterprise pledge

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. "
-- Justice Louis Brandeis (1928)

" Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let me label you as they may."
-- Mark Twain

"Liberty and freedom have to be more than just words."
-- James T. Kirk, The Omega Glory


This is the kind of story that convinces me of two things, primarily because the teacher says it was a "extremely important and patriotic moment".

1) if I had a child in school right now, the school and all the teachers would hate me. Police would probably be involved as well.

2) The most frequent teachers of "patriotism" have no idea what it means.

At the point where the teacher told the mother she should be ashamed, this would have been my response.

My child should be teaching the principles of patriotism to the rest of your class. It takes more than rote memorization of borderline government propaganda to evoke patriotism. Regardless of whether you think this was parody of or an homage to the Pledge, it required critical thinking and a deeper level of understanding than was required to simply spout off the words like a robot.
My son learned a very important lesson today, but it's not the one you meant to teach him by punishing him. He learned there can be no patriotism where coercion is involved.
On top of all this, that pledge was damned funny and bordering on genius. You do realize there was an entire episode of Star Trek devoted to the what it means to be a patriot of the United States that climaxes with a recitation of the Preamble?

Of course first I would probably be red-faced and wanting to strangle every authority figure in the room. Then I might be able to come up with something like the response above.

Then we'd go over to Cafe Press and get some shirt with Worf or Spock saying "Slaves recite, patriots question" or something else similarly inflammatory. I also would go ahead and take off work the next day since I know I would have to pick him up from school.


[BTW, if you read the blog comments, Mom didn't make him write the Pledge, and she confronted the teacher. It was also a parent who complained, not the teacher. ]

Credit Card Forms, the right way

I paid a bill online today and noticed that someone FINALLY got Credit Card information right. Oddly enough, this is my rural electric company -- the LAST of my utilities to implement online billing, and generally a company that isn't tech savvy.




You will note that

• The form does not ask for City. It's evidently looked up by Zip code.
• The credit card number is not SPLIT INTO BLOCKS making the user wonder if tab or mouse action will be required. Same for phone number.
  
• The Name is one text field.
  
• The expiration date is requested in the form it's printing on the card. This is probably the number one problem with credit card entry forms. Cards are printed with numeric dates, not month names. This is not the place for a popup menu, it's the place for a text field. Why is this a problem? Because making the user translate the month date to a name, then select that item in a popup menu offers two additional chances for an error in entering the information. By asking the user for the data in the form that it is printed on the card, there is only one chance (which can't be reduced further).
  

The only thing they could have added was removing the Card Type popup, though I can justify it's existence as an indicator of what cards they accept. A list of cards would be better though.

The only company I have seen come close to this is yahoo stores.

Kudos ljec.

After chemo patients, let's jail responsible parents

If you are thinking that your teenagers are going to drink anyway, so the best thing to do is to supervise them and provided a safe environment, don't do it.

Wow, World "gets" it for RSS

The local newspaper, the Lawrence Journal-World, prides itself in being ahead of the technology curve. If I had broadband at home [wink wink-lay cable north, sunflower!] , I suspect their podcasts would completely displace (or at least supplement) KPR for local news.

Recently, they added RSS feeds for both their lawrence.com and the ljworld.com main site. Each one of their main sections has an RSS feed associated with it. This really is an important change in the way news is delivered. It's also very nice for watching their blogs. [cup-o-joel is the only one worth reading btw, the others are sporadic nonsensical mishmashes]

When lots of sites are thinking about making it harder to get information, this is a refreshing change.

What's most interesting though, is the content of the RSS feeds is just what you want to read. The headline and a meaty excerpt. Someone there gets it. RSS by section is the way it should be. Any single page/section and the changes/updates. Yowza.

Sadly, it doesn't work for classifieds, which is the worst part of their site (a quagmire of popup menus where text search should rule).

I'll take what I can get, and glad someone there took the time to do it right.

[update 6-17-05: Now they don't appear to be working at all. My RSS reader can't get the section titles for several pages. Sigh.]

[update 7-20-05 here is the error that I get on several sections.

Request of URL http://www2.ljworld.com/news/crime_fire_courts/ failed: This XML document does not look like an RSS feed

I am using RSS Bandit on windows, but I ran this through several XML validators and none of them succeed.]

An apostrophe walks into a bar...

and ask's...

Anyway, having just visited a pizza joint with a sign on the cash register that said:

"We do not except out of town checks."

I had to laugh at this.

I love the extra count of for misspelling the name of the product that is your primary business.

Cingular: Our customers should shut up anyway

Cingular is now on record saying they oppose lifting the FCC ban on the use of cell phones during airline flights.

America's self-proclaimed "Number 1" cellular provider (by no coincidence ranked the worst in customer service), has another message to their customers: you didn't need to make calls anyway.

My hunch: they went ahead and did this because if the FCC ban is lifted, their customers will expect their phones to, well, work.

Finally, a government study worth doing

Especially since it's not our government.

TOKYO, Japan, Jun. 10 (UPI) -- A Japanese government department will study the possible negative effects the government's energy conservation program has on necktie makers.

The premise being: causing everyone to dress up makes the A/C work harder in buildings.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em

Quote from this guy.

"... the annual risk of a person under Soviet control being murdered by the regime was 1 out of 222. But, compare -- the annual risk of anyone in the world dying from war was 1 out of 5,556, from smoking a pack of cigarettes a day was 1 out of 278, from any cancer was 1 out of 357, or for an American to die in an auto accident was 1 out of 4,167."

Resulting slogan, with glorious double meaning.





Need a better style, then I would buy one.

props balko.

No Joy in Joyland anymore

One of my childhood hangouts was Joyland in Wichita, Kansas. Unfortunately the park was outdated even 30 years ago. I remember at least a couple of kids getting killed on the roller coaster, but I also had a lot of fun there. The giant slide was always the best deal -- you could usually ride it all day on a kid's pocket change. It also had great bumper cars, and a haunted house that I would never enter even as a teenager.

I would play skee-ball until my arm would fall off, and redeem the tickets for a bunch of worthless plastic junk. They had a trash receptacle with a vacuum attached to it shaped like a giant pig. If you held your trash in front of the pig's mouth, it got sucked in.

Ah, memories.

Oh, it's now up for sale on ebay.

Comments to Letters at LJworld

I just noticed that the LJworld.com website allows comments in the Letters to the Editor section.

This should be really fun.

Those Crazy South Carolina Boys

I don't know what's funnier. The actual video of the Napoleon Dynamite joke in the National Spelling Bee, [6.5mb .mpg] or the fact that the hosting website for the video misspelled Napoleon on their spelling bee video page.

Guards for Darth Tater

As if Lucas needed more money.

(.cf Darth Tater)

My Short Take on Raich

"We can't win the war on drugs, but I bet chemo patients are easy targets."
- ONDCP.

Next step for the administration: stomping on puppies.

Do they qualify for HOV lanes?

Not sure how to classify this

Maybe I meant "papal vestiges"

I am not sure what the iTunes Music store was thinking with this alternative search term.

I was searching for the Bela Fleck song "Eager and Anxious." How bad of a speller do you have to be to get this?

Question Authority: And stay alive

"Rainbow of doom."

Gotta love it.

So, looked at your local building codes lately?

Enviropod

Over at slashdot yesterday they covered the issue of who should be responsible for recycling computers.

The answer is the consumer of course, since anyone else will probably not pass the cost on to you in a manner you like, and you should be able to pick what companies recycling methods suit your tastes based on the product you buy.

Interesting that the next day, Apple announces that they will recycling ipods and giving consumers 10% off the purchase of a new one on that day.

Before you applaud them, however, it should be noted this was only done after they got lots of complaints. No doubt this was a pre-emptive measure to keep government from handing down something to Apple that was more costly. I suspect they now figure recycling costs into the costs of the new unit -- ala bottle deposits.

Interesting to note: This means your 100%-dead-got-run-over-by-truck-is-this-even-an-ipod is worth a minimum of about $15. Expect to see dead ipods on ebay more often now.


Apple has always been environmentally responsible, so this was not unexpected.

Ipods contain no lead, BTW.

props TUAW

Feel Safer Flying?

With this sort of stupidity, I don't.

soldiers — all of whom were armed with an arsenal of assault rifles, shotguns and pistols — [were told] to surrender pocket knives, nose hair scissors and cigarette lighters.

Learn to Shoot a Mile From the Comfort of Your Home

Have you ever been browsing Netflix or at Blockbuster and wondered "I really am in the mood for a video that will teach me how to anodize niobium".

If so, technicalvideorental.com is the site for you.

Want to learn how to play the banjo? Brew beer at home?

But shouldn't Advanced Fretting [bottom] be in the Self Help section?

Never used 'em, but if I ever decide I want to spend a weekend "Forging and Finishing The Ox Forge Bowie*" I know where to go.

Seriously, Buffing is an Art? I might take it up if it causes my Balls to Multiply.

(* if I ever have a band, I found a name.)

Pfuck you

Pfizer used to be completely against legislation that would put pseudoephedrine behind the counter at pharmacies.

Now that they have the only drug with the name Sudafed that can be out from behind the counter, they said "put the other guys in back."

Way to game the system guys.

via Agitator, via Cato.

Definitely need a bigger bumper.

When reading some info on intelligent design theory, this came to mind.