Garnet's Wiki Blog from August, 2008

I found an interesting set of blog posts about Platte Valley Academy on the issue of video games in the rooms of students at their Adventist boarding academy. Apparently this has been quite a divisive issue, with the parents, and the school board, the administrators, and conference officials all coming down on different sides of the issue. Apparently some teachers or school administrators may have been fired for having a different opinion that the board members.

I thing Adventist education is a great way to prepare kids for life. I went to Adventist grade school from grades 5 thru 8, and I learned a lot there. But I've also been on the wrong end of conflicts with school boards, so this whole story brings back some sorry memories. Sometimes school boards close ranks to keep an opinion that flies in the face of facts. Some people may find it hard to see the love of Jesus in the bickerings of school board meetings.

The first post in the blog series I read was where Pastor Randy Brehms speaks out about sports and video games in Adventist schools. I then read quite a few of the other posts.

• How should video games and computers be handled in Adventist boarding academies
  • I think our children need more strictness in our Adventist schools
  • My collection of early calculators and video games I like
  • Balancing an eight year olds love of legos and his handheld video game
• My posting to the Platte Valley Academy blog

Forget the Clintons and their lapdog Swami Global-Warming-Us Gore. Everyone prefers a warm beach to an ice age, and we all know that our SUVs are helping to prevent the next ice age. And if we don't get busy and use up the oil first in our California Air Resources Board approved smogged engines, China will burn it in their unmogged engines and export the fumes back to us across the Pacific.

What I'm worried about is that statistics show the earth's magnetic field has decreased 10% in the last century, and scientists saying it might be entirely gone within 2000 years.

Why is there a conspiracy of silence among politicians about this impending magntic doom?

Will Obama find a way to tax us for this impending catastrophe of the collapse of the earths magnetic field? Will he and Michelle find a new reason to not be proud of America until somehow our nation is made to bear a collective burden of guilt over the collapse of the magnetic field of the earth? Will they invent the theory that because we have been more productive than the rest of the world, and enjoy a higher standard of living as a result, the Gaia of earth is reacting to the magnetic fields emitted by all our gadgets, especially all the miles of wire wound into cores within discarded electronics now filling our landfills? (Oh right, politicians are already taxing us for electronics, and then spending the money on things entirely unrelated to the polution those devices might someday cause. Must be the early stages of memory lost from lack of earths magnetic field.)

Will we be harassed into reducing our magnetic footprint? Magnetism Tax Credits for the poor? Will police departments be equipped with gausometers as a new way to profile us?

A National Magnetism Act? A new California Department of Magnetic Field Management? Fights between the states and the feds about who should have jurisdiction over the earth's magnetic field?

What is the recommended amount of daily earths magnetism we should be receiving? Could a lack of magnetism be the real cause of cancer? Is the American Medical Association keeping a lid on the health effects of this problem because no pharmacy has found a way to patent a pill to solve the effects of a deficiency of a magnetic field? Will doctors begin recommending annual MRI's as a way to reduce the effects? Or are they prohibited researching into whether the increase in diagnostic use of the MRIs one of the causes of the magnetic field collapse?

Commercials on late night TV by lawyers asking us to contact them if we think we've been harmed by the collapse in the magnetic field?

The Bigfoots coming out of the woods, not as gorilla costumes in Georgia freezers, but instead looking for a new source of magnetism to guide their migrations?

I'm afraid. Very afraid.

Intrigued? Want to know more about the debate between science and evolution? Then you will enjoy learning more in this book... Science vs. Evolution A 1972 article, by Max Blumer, ("Submarine Seeps: Are They a Major Source of Open Ocean Oil Pollution?" in Science, Vol. 176, p. 1257) offers decided evidence that the earth's crust is not as old as evolutionary geologists had thought. *Blumer says that oil seepage from the seafloor cannot be a source of oceanic oil pollution. He explains that if that much had been regularly seeping out of the ocean floor, all the oil in offshore wells would be gone long ago if the earth were older than 20,000 years.

• More on why science supports the fact of a young earth

Philip J. Berg, Esq. Files Federal Lawsuit Requesting Obama Be Removed as a Candidate as he does not meet the Qualifications for President.

Phillip Berg is on Coast To Coast AM Radio Show 8/22/08, interviewed by Ian Punnet. Says Berg: "The media has given Obama a free ride, and I hope it is not because he is black. We now find out that Reverend Wright was with him the day he announced his presidency... but he told Reverend Wright he couldn't come up on stage with him.... I don't believe he has been properly vetted... And the biggest is, 'Is he eligible to run for president', and I believe not."

"I'm very disturbed by the past 8 years of the current administration, this administration has taken away more individual rights than any other administration.... If we can't get back to the basics and follow our constitution as it was written years ago, we will lose citizens who will leave this country... When I am proven right on this, I think Barack Obama has a lot of explanation."

The definition of frivilous suit: The person filing has everything to gain, and nothing to lose. What are you willing to do if you are proven wrong? Will you go on the record about this?

• "You want a think like the governors of the superbowl 'I'll give a case of bananas to your case of oranges'."
• "I'm an attorney, and I've been practicing for 37 years... and I have an excellent reputation... If I didn't believe in this, I wouldn't have filed suit. Under Federal Rule sanctions can be imposed if this is a frivilous suit."

"I haven't read (Corsi's) book.... The difference with John McCain, is that both his parents were citizens.... The people narrowed down for both parties are who they are, and I think we deserve a lot better. If you are in the service, and you have a child, that child is always declared a natural born citizen.... All service personel when they have children are given this."

Ian: He wasn't born on soveriegn U.S. ground. Misses the issue stated by Berg, it's the serving in the service of the parent, not the sovereign ground issue...

Question from caller:

• Republicans are concerned about the control AMH, a lean methanol, will start some plants by the defense department. It will cause some oil wars. You know how the republican party is about business. Do you have any comment on the tremendous push to shutdown the alaskan pipeline after the election,... and they'll revoke or refuse drilling.
• "I'll have to check into this AMH. I haven't heard about dropping the 50 mile to 25 miles. The danger of not doing offshore... is that foreign governments like China and other places are coming into our areas and drilling for oil... I think China has already bought certain sites.... We need to move forward... If we need more energy, we need more energy.... I think the no votes are apalling.... People believe that congress is doing a good job is down to 8% or 9%.... People should take a hard look at any elected official who is not looking out for our interest.... Their biggest goal is to get reelected. I think that it is time for some changes in that, I think we deserve better than what we are getting from the democrats, the republicans, and the independents."

See his website at Obama Crimes

Some of the things that caught my eye today:

• Nanny government laws in the eye care industry
• Wiki about the game Spore by Maxis
• How Nuance Communications has a virtual lock on speech control technologies
  • They are too busy developing vertical markets
• Inventor's Dilemma
  • Industry needs Speech Enabled in the Flash Browser - http://www.neurolanguage.com is trying to do this.
• Why isn't speech recognition more widely used - Some comments from others, and my essay on the difference between natural language recognition and speech recognition
• Steve Wozniak on the passion of engineering
  • Pranks of Steve Wozniak
• Free alternatives to expensive graphics software
• Wikipedia postings aren't forced to be gender choice affirming

• Copyright owners must consider 'fair use' - http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10021999-93.html?tag=nefd.pop
  • Ruling - http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/lenz_v_universal/lenzorder082008.pdf
  • Some comments by readers:
    • Finally, a DMCA ruling that considers the rights of the people.
    • It is a travesty that corporations have so perverted the intent and spirit of IP laws. Copyright and patents are no longer working as intended.
    • She gets to continue the case only to lose it later. I guess this is good since EFF is paying her legal bills. Since the DMCA requires explicit bad faith she'll never get past summary judgment.
    • Re: Fair Use - If She loses one problem we all face is if Pepsi or coke go after you for drinking a soda in a youtube video they don't like. Or someone sings the lyrics to a song in the back ground. copyrights should only go after people that seek profit from it. Maybe cops can charge you for copyright infringement next time you play your radio to loud. Or next time you lend your movie or music DVD or CD to a friend. Greed or common since . So Fair use Fair Use. Common Since the Wisdom of Solomon is needed in Courts
• New on the fly system to be used by Google to measure adwords ad quality - http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10023046-93.html?tag=nefd.top

Some other headlines today at dailymail.co.uk Wealthy Mexicans terrified of kidnap implanted with GPS chips The mobile phone that could kill off the camera Angry iPhone users sue Apple over dropped calls and slow downloads Men in polygamous societies live longer 'because they have more wives to care for them' Not so Dumbo: Scientist prove elephants can do maths Green machine: The £92,000 electric sports car that does 125mph in complete silence Pictured: Hubble's view of gravity-defying filaments of gas reaching out from a galaxy far, far away Living with humans has taught dogs morals, say scientists Stunning pictures of 'bubble' clouds in the menacing skies above Britain Computer hackers could target pacemaker patients in deadly new form of 'cyber attack', warn scientists Billy the dolphin teaches his flippered friends to walk on water Move over Lara Croft! Emily the electronic actress is the most realistic computer character yet Apple iPod nanos catch fire after 'defective batteries' overheat Women only have themselves to blame for failing to crack the glass ceiling, says female scientist How do you spot a lie? It's all to do with the 'blinking' obvious ... Scientists claim breakthrough in creating 'a limitless supply of blood' Mirror image: Magpies recognise their own reflections Student inventor creates £20 wind turbine out of scrap for developing world 'Failsafe' face scanners could replace passport officers at airports How sea air may not be good for you after all...and in fact leave you breathing in noxious chemicals A mother's grief: Heartbroken gorilla cradles her dead baby Untangled at last, scientists get to the root cause of a bad hair day Scientists on 'Indiana Jones' mission hope global warming will help solve 160-year mystery of missing British explorers Unearthed after 2,500 years, the gold earrings that could have been made yesterday Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk

I am only to page 424 of the 900+ page paperback version "Evolution Handbook" of the hardback "Science vs. Evolution", but after selling many copies of the book, I decided to write the following review for Amazon.com:

Very comprehensive coverage of the doubts that evolutionists have about their theory

This is a large and thorough book. It has more material than the paperback version called "Evolution Handbook". I tell people that there are three really good reasons to read this book:

1. It will help you appeciate the marvelousness of nature, and how intricately designed we, and all of life, are.
2. You will discover a greater appreciation of the the Creator
3. It will help you be keenly aware of the difference between observation ("this is a fossil") and interpretation ("it is blah-blah million years old"), and how evolutionist are always trying to fudge the line and slip their interpretations under the line as if they are facts.

The book covers every area of science related to evolution in easy to understand terms. Key to every section of every chapter are quotes from the evolutionists themselves laying out exactly what the holes and flaws are in their beloved theory. Only occassionally does the author make incredulous comments. After describing the "hopeful monster" theory of Goldschmidt, popularized by Gould as "punctuated equilibrbrium" or "quantum speciation" the author points out the holes, and asks "Is this science fiction, Greek myth, or Anderson's fairy tales?"

The author is happy to let the scientists speak for themselves about their doubts. And the majority of the scientists quoted are not known to have any belief in creationism, their names are marked with asterisk. For example: *Isaac Asimov, *Stephen Gould, *Niles Eldredg, *Goldschmidt, *Norman Macbeth, *John Gliedman.

The sources are quoted extensively, for example (*M. Keith and *G. Anderon, "Radiocarbon Dating: Fictitious Results with Mollusk Shells" in Science 141, 1963, p. 634.)

You really should buy a copy of this book for yourself, and one to give to a friend. At least give your friend a copy of the paperback Evolution Handbook, so you can read and discuss the book.

Amazon tags:

• evolution, science, creation, creationsm, biology, geology, paleontology, physics, genetics, mutation, mutations, vance ferrell

Special offer on Amazon

Please visit my Amazon marketplace storefront and buy a copy Science vs. Evoluton from me. As a special bonus, I'm including two extra books free with each copy you buy:

• Condition: New! With your purchase I'll include free paperback copy of Desire of Ages and a free copy of Evolution Handbook (paperback version) that you can share with a friend. All three books are new.

I hope to ship your order to you soon!

• More on why science supports the fact of a young earth

The title should be: Take a picture of the police breaking the law, go to jail, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars

Man Jailed After Taking Photo of Police Van Ignoring 'Wrong Way' Sign

• http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,407005,00.html

A British man Andrew Carter, of Bedminster Bristol, was jailed for five hours after he photographed a cop reversing the wrong way up a one-way street.

After Carter snapped the picture of the cop van, he got a chance to see the inside. Officer Aqil Farooq leaped out, hit the camera to the ground, handcuffed him and bundled him into the back of the vehicle.

• Farooq... Is that a last name typical of an imigrant from an islamic country?

Farooq claimed that Carter was drunk and resisted arrest and assaulted the officer with the camera.

• In the U.S., they not only take away your camera when entering the immigration and naturalization service office, they take away any recording devices too. Wouldn't want you to assault them by making a record of them that they can't deny later.

Carter, of Bedminster, Bristol, said: "I was nearly knocked down there once so when the police van went the wrong way I sort of said, 'Hey mate. no entry'. But he just shouted out of the window, '(expletive) off — this is police business'. "It was very frightening. All I had done was photograph these police officers doing something illegal, but I was the one who ended up being arrested."

• Perhaps Farooq has been around long enough to learn slang. Wonder what the important police business was that it could stand being interrupted to hassle Carter?

Farooq apologized at a disciplinary hearing.

Rob Beckley, Deputy Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset Police, has written to Carter saying: "I would like to add my apologies. We expect the highest standards and PC Farooq fell below what was required. His colleagues feel he let us down and he has learnt a difficult lesson. He realizes his actions were totally unacceptable and he could and should have apologized to you much earlier."

• Aww, isn't that special? And would you like some crumpets with your tea?

• More about Aqil Farooq - Black Muslim British Policeman who arrests people who take a picture of him breaking laws

I love spotting policemen who are driving who don't bother to buckle up. I let them know I noticed. Generally they buckle up, and ocassionally they say thank you, and in Georgia they try to sell you a Bigfoot costume frozen in ice....

Other similar stories:

• http://www.bakelblog.com/nobodys_business/2008/06/cops-bully-vide.html

Too bad for Tom Biscardi and Searching For Bigfoot. Opportunists in Georgia tried anything to get their Bigfoot tracking wilderness expedition business going, including a flashy website, spoof videos on youtube, and more. But nothing got attention like freezing an alleged body in a freezer. They got an advance out of Biscardi and demanded that a press conference be quickly held. Only after the press conference, and a couple of days of thawing, did Biscardi get close enough to the object to discover it was a costume. Matthew Whitton (a Clayton County Georgia sheriff deputy on disability) and Rick Dyer (all kinds of different occupations alleged) have disappeared. I am worried that a police officer would be involved in such a fraud, but I'm sure a lot of people know policemen who don't mind getting involved with fraud.

Some pundits congratulated Biscardi on achieving a new level of popularity for the story. Previous stories have generated about 200 news stories maximum, but this finding, and press conference, appear to have generated at least 1000 news stories.

• What they are saying about the Rickmat Georgia Bigfoot Hoax of 2008

When I had a colporteur booth in San Francisco, with childrens books, and Bibles, health books, etc., a very angry man came up to my booth. He was wearing biker leathers, he had plenty of tattoos, and several body piercings with various hardware.

He told me "I'm homosexual, and I want you to know that God is not .... And God is not....." And on and on he went, very angrily proclaiming to me all the things that he thought on that topic. I listened quietly, inclining forward to him, nodding, and agreeing as empathetically as I could without putting in a word edgewise. Finally the man started calming down.

When I had a chance to speak, I told him very honestly, "You know, you did such a wonderful job describing all the things God is not, that I can't disagree with you. In fact, your list was so thorough, that what was left out of your list, you know what's left over, it's pretty close to describing who God actually is." I think he was quite stunned. The rest of the conversation he was much less angry and animated. I'm sure he was expecting to enjoy a great argument. But I had none with him...

There is a Bible verse dear to colporteurs, "Matt 10:16 Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves."

My pastor friend was asking me yesterday what to do about an external hard drive that seems to have failed. When he plugs it into his computer, it gives an error that it can't recognize the device.

Unfortunately I have a whole stack of failed external hard drives at home. I've always said that as long as data is sitting on spinning magnetic media, it's not really backed up.

But, with some external hard drives being over 200 times as large as a DVD disk, very very few people are going to take a time to make a backup. Big companies use robotic tape libraries, but those are units that probably cost more than your new car, or even as much as a house.

You might try to segregate the files you've created from the ones you've collected, and could probably collect again in the future. Make optical disk (CD or DVD) backups of your personally created files, which, unless you are into multimedia video creation, are probably considerably smaller than your whole file collection.

With such large hard drives becoming commonplace, the only real backup solution for the average person is to buy an extra external hard drive, and periodically copy the contents of the main drive to the backup drive, then disconnect the backup drive. Hopefully you'll never be in a position where both drives fail at the same time. Some product contain extra internal hard drives, and automatically perform the mirroring operation as a RAID array. Just be sure to be on the lookout for the failure light, and replace the failed drive before both internal drives fail.

He was asking me about the little small tiny USB drives, "thumb drives". A lot of people like to carry files around on them, and they might even think of them as a backup because they have no moving parts. I told him those are not guaranteed either. I've had them fail too. Again, make sure you never keep your data in only one place.

I should probably modify my maxim to say "As long as your data is on a rewritable device, it's not really backed up." The use of RAID mirroring of data to secondary drives only decreases the risk of failure.

Later in the day I was trying to copy some project files off an 8 GB SanDisk Cruzer thumb drive. But computer would not recognize the drive. I'd seen this before where sometimes one machine would not recognize the drive, but others would. So I tried a second laptop. I tried different ports, as I've occassionally seen the drive not work in one port, but work in another. Occassionally the computer would recognize the drive briefly, but most of the time it wouldn't.

I was very distressed by this. The thumb drive is less than a year old. I suspected a problem with the usb connection, but I didn't want to risk stressing the USB connector on my computer by putting pressure on the thumb drive to make better contact. So we stopped at a Best Buy store to try using the computers there. I found a laptop that would recognize the failing thumb drive, so I plugged in a second thumb drive I had, and copied over the most important files. I then bought an external USB HUB, and an 8GB PNY thumb drive. Cost: $100. PLus an hour or more trying to get the failed thumbdrive to work.

This morning I experimented with the hub. I found out if I insert the thumb drive into the hub, and flex the drive upward from the hub, it would make better contact. So I started coping off the rest of the files. But after half an hour, my hand got tired, and my grip shifted, and drive disappeared. So I tried again, this time proping the hub and thumb drive on some books on my bed, and putting some other books on the joint to create flex. (Funny pun, I was using an ActionScript 3.0 cookbook and some books about Adobe's Flex programming.) That worked, until one of my cats tried to perch on the books, and drive disappeared again. So then I tried on the kitchen table with some Bibles, and stacks of business cards. I started the copy, then took some smoked salmon to a different room, so the cats would chase me into the other room and leave the stack alone.

I have finally emptied the thumb drive. There are now three thumb drives hanging from my necklace, and one or two others in my laptop bag. They are starting to look like the digital equivalent of a sharks teeth necklace.

For your really important files, like the unique files you've created, it's probably best to copy them onto three different DVD or CD disks. (Avoid the DVD and CD rewritable disks, I have found that they have a higher error rate.) Then store each copy in a different location. If you are really paranoid, use different brands of DVD's, and different brands of DVD holders. Probably the jewelcase holders are best, since the DVD is supported without any of it's reflective surfaces being in contact with anything. For some of the plastic sleeve multiple disk holders, I've seen the reflective layer peel away from the disk when trying to remove it from the sleeve. The sleeves with dimples in them are probably least likely to havethis problem. It's probably good not to put a lot of pressure on those kids of softcases. A hard case, not overly stuffed, is another way to store the disks.

For the past few years I have been interested in collecting more books related to creation science, creationism, intelligent design, and the evolution controversy. One of my current favorites is Science vs. Evolution. It uses a lot of quotations from the evolutionists themselves about the incredible gaping holes in their theories.

An important issue in the religious community today is how far are we willing to accept the story of Genesis, or how willing are we to allegorize away it's meaning as just another story, perhaps on par with other "great" literature, but certainly not offering any more authoritative opinion on the issues of creation, and man's purpose in the universe. Are we willing to throw away the Bible when it seems to be confronted at every turn by the demands, findings, and philosophizing, of secular scientists, or will we step forward and defend the unique perspective that the Bible offers?

I lost my bookmark from the book, so I was re-reading the introduction. Claussen describes his position as a scientists who also believes in the Word of God:

Everyone has a bias as they study, so I will try to outline mine here. I come to the topics in this book as a scientist who looks at nature as marred by sin and interprets it through finite human senses and reasoning. I take science seriously as saying something about reality, but do not regard it as the final word on every subject. I also approach these topics as a Christian trusting Christ as Lord and accepting Scripture as God's Word written and interpreted by humans. I accept God's Word as authoritative, but empahsize that when using such an approach I am not engaging in science. I do not believe that the Bible presents the best scientific model for origins or even a scientific model, for Scripture presents much more than a naturalistic model, much more than a model based o what can be perceived by the physical senses.

I like that statement. I personally add to that the belief that true science will eventually discover a worldview that is in harmony with the grand themes of Scripture. For many issues, such as how atoms combine in chemistry, or how an organ in the body functions, or in the calculations needed to send a man into orbit, scientific inquiry doesn't intersect with the claims of the Bible. But I believe that when science is used mainly as a tool to explain away God, it is proceeding from a false premise, and is doomed to have a warped and flawed outcome.

The other thing that struck me was how a joke told to me by a pastor friend yesterdsy applies to this issue. We were having a potluck, and afterwards several of us were discussing "exotic" foods like french foods, mediterranean foods, etc. We are all vegetarians in various degrees. I jokingly remarked about frogs legs as a dinner item, and "what happens to the rest of the frog? Who has ever een 'frog torso' on a menu?" One of the other people remarked about a cartoon showing frogs without legs on crutches leaving a restaurant advertising frog legs special. I remarked about my favorite Far Side comic of a chicken ill in bed, and Ms. chicken bringing him some soup saying "Yes, it's chicken soup, and no, it's nobody we know."

My pastor friend remarked it was his understanding that the rest of a frog is useless as an edible item, in fact most animals are smarter than humans and won't try to eat frogs. He then told me this joke:

A scientists is studying how far frogs can jump. He puts a frog on the table and yells at the frog "Jump!" The frog responds and jumps a certain distance and the scientist records the distance. Then he removes one of the frog's legs, and puts the frog back on the table. He yells at the frog "Jump!" The frog jumps again, but not as far. The scientist records it in his journal "Frogs with three legs jumps not as far as four legs, distance of ...." Then the scientist removes another leg, and another leg, each time tell the frog to jump, and writing down the ever decreasing distances the frog jumped. Then finally, the frog has no legs, and the scientist places the frog on the table. The scientist yells at the frog several times "Jump!" But the frog doesn't jump. Finally, he writes in his journal "Frog With no legs: Deaf"

I think this joke well describes the situation in science when we try to go too far without any reference to God. Eventually, we're going to miss the point and come to a wrong conclusion if we are only working to remove God more and more from the explanations for life. Eventually, we'll come to a totally wrong conclusion.

From CRN News

Phony Cisco Gear Nets Reseller 30 Months (and millions of dollars in fines)

By Andrew R Hickey, ChannelWeb 2:56 PM EDT Thu. Aug. 07, 2008

A New York-based hardware reseller must serve 30 months in prison for trafficking and selling bogus Cisco Systems (NSDQ:CSCO) gear. Charles Lacy-Thompson, former owner of Coletronic Computer, was recently sentenced by U.S District Judge Stephen C. Robinson in White Plains Federal Court to serve the 30-year-term and also pay $2.2 million in forfeiture and restitution, according to the United States Attorney, Southern District of New York.

Funny typo above about it being a 30 year sentence. Please proofread your articles better, selling phony electronics is not a crime worse than murder.

Notice that he forfeited a bunch of money to the government, not to any individuals who were actually damaged, i.e. the people who bought the fake gear. As usual, the government gets richer, and the individual people have no recourse.

Looking at it another way, the fortfeiture amount to a big discount to the government. Will the forfeiture be distributed back to the taxpayers? Hah!

He has also made payments in back taxes of over $972,000 to the IRS and $211,000 to State of New York.

Wonder if he had to pay taxes on the amount he forfeited?

The U.S. Attorney said Lacy-Thompson imported generic items from China that resembled Cisco transceivers, devices used to transmit and receive data across networks; as well as packages of white stickers bearing the model numbers of transceivers manufactured by San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco.

Wonder if most of the real-name brand gear is actually also made in China. Cisco basically admitted the phone gear is as good as their own, security wise at least. If so, what's the real difference other than bloated price?

Cisco ... has never turned up a software or hardware modification that opened devices to security vulnerabilities.

Oh, and what about prosecuting the Chinese for making such good knockoffs, or diverting items off the Cisco production line and selling them out the back door? That wouldn't be good for free trade would it?

Fast Facts:

• Company: Coletronic
• Guilty: Charles Lacy-Thompson
• Location: Briarcliff Manor, New York
• Judge: Stephen C. Robinson
• Court: White Plains Federal Court
• Extent of the problem: Government agencies have bought 3,500 pieces of phony Cisco gear, worth roughly $3.5 million, including Cisco routers, switches, Gigabit interface converters and WAN interface cards.
  • Including FAA, Marines, US Air Force, Navy, FBI, defense contractor, universities, finanicla institutions

Quotes:

• Judge Robinson - "This was a crime of pure greed"

How would you like to receive a call at 6:50am reminding you that your software license had expired, and would you like to pay hundreds of dollars to renew it?
The extreme lack of common sense in some companies is legendary!

If you're like me, (especially if you're a programmer like me who is up until 1am or later working on cool programming ideas), you're probably up late at night, and the last thing you want before 7am is someone calling you to remind you of an email they sent you a week ago asking you to spend hundreds of dollars on a software license renewal. Especially if it is a piece of software that you were carefully considering whether it really meets your needs, or if you should replace it with other alternatives.

When I get a call before 7am, from a number that I don't recognize, but from an area code I do recognize as belonging to one of my clients, for whom I manage one of the world's largest in-house engineering wikis, I assume it must me the worst kind of emergency. Uh oh, maybe it was their network monitoring center, there must be a system down event, thousands of insomniac engineers unable to edit their wiki page. I didn't grab the phone in time, so by the time I got to my phone, and saw the number I didn't know with an area code I did know, the adrenaline starts flowing and I wake myself up enough to check through my voicemails to get to the emergency call. Imagine my shock and amazement at finding it was just a sales reminder!

I normally have enough courtesy not to wake other people up at 6:54am. (Unless it is a system down event, and I have no choice, or I want a software vendor to experience the pain of my having to be up at that hour supporting their crashed software.) In this case however, making a callback seemed appropriate to this perky sales person. Of course, all I got was her voicemail, doubtless she was busily leaving other reminders for others at that hour. I find it hard to believe that she got up before 7am with a short list of only my name on it.

Unlike my usual articles blasting the practices of clueless telemarketers, I'm not going to expose the name of this company because I love this company and am a big fan of their products. (Unfortunately my friends will know who I am talking about, I'm not a big fan of many companies. Clue though: It wasn't Sprint, it wasn't Verizon. My friends are now rolling on the floor laughing, they still talk at dinner parties about my Nikita Kruschev pounding shoe on the desk impression while talking to telephone companies).

Hoping you're sleeping at this hour, rather than blogging about a sales call you just received....

• Read the follow up email I sent them in... Advice to a telemarketer who thinks that calls to customers before 7am are just fine

It's great that technologies, like Adobe AIR, encourage software publishers to take responsibility for their software. It's too bad that the only way to do that is to pay protection money to overpriced certificate vendors.

Am I the only one who thinks that is outrageously expensive? The article on code signing mentions in more than one place that Verisign and Thawte are (maybe) the only choices if you want users not to see warning dialogs, because, as the article on code signing AIR applications points out:

• However, only VeriSign and Thawte come pre-installed on most end user's machines (Mac OS X or Windows) and are trusted by the operating systems.... Using certificate authorities other than Thawte or Verisign is going to require that the end user (not the developer of the software), or a system admin charged with managing a computer on an enterprise network, manually install a root certificate for that certificate authority.

More of my rant here: The High Cost of Digital Code Signing Certificates To Give Away Free Applications...

Definitions:

• Knol - A unit of knowledge - A knol is an authoritative article about a specific topic.
• http://knol.google.com
• Featured knol on Aug 3, 2008: Photograph Composition - an Introduction - Photography tutorial - Yanik Chauvin

Some sample knols on Aug 3, 2008:

Plain old bag o' knols - Who needs a search engine? Ctrl+F

The Onion had their own knol about knol: Infographic - July 30, 2008 | Issue 44•31

Google Launches Wikipedia Competitor

Last week, Google made public its beta encyclopedia site, Knol, which unlike Wikipedia features articles written by a named author and only permits selective outsider participation. What are other ways in which Knol differs from Wikipedia?

• Knol will not give the people at Encyclopaedia Britannica the sinking feeling that they have completely wasted their lives
• Possible spoilers in articles will be announced by the 220-decibel Spoiler Siren
• Knol will not be published in Polish
• Site is boringly factual
• Will include a picture for the "Colonel" Tom Parker entry
• Author of Knol much more tired than millions of authors of Wikipedia
• Whenever Knol is wrong, Google has pledged to rearrange facts in the world to make it right

I recently wrote a security advisory for one of my clients. A clever engineer had used a javascript from googleapis.com on an intranet website, along wih some extra javascript to solve the problem of Confluence's global setting for camelcasing. Camelcasing may be necessary with legacy content, but it can be aggravating to newer users who are posting source code, which frequently has a lot of camel cased variable names. With this javascript, the engineer could make false links to uncreated camelcased variable and procedure names just disappear on his pages.

I had to sound the alarm though. Everytime someone views his page, it would cause the users browser to request the .js from googleapis.com, and potentially leave the url of the wiki page (which is similar to the title of the wiki page) in the referrer logs at googleapis. Wiki page titles can be very informative, and should not be freely sent to the logs of external websites.

This morning another client was paniced and wrote me:

From: Tom tom@tom.tom Sent: Saturday, August 02, 2008 6:49 AM To: Garnet R. Chaney Subject: Web Site down - HELP Garnet, When I try to go to the BIG web site I get an error that says "Internet Explorer can not open the site". HELP! Tom

Uh oh. First thought: "Someone got hacked. Hope it wasn't my server." I discovered that his home page would load in Firefox, but not IE. I sent him an email asking him if he had a previous version of his homepage to try. I then went a little further, and this is what I found:

From: Garnet R. Chaney Sent: Saturday, August 02, 2008 7:44 AM To: Tom Subject: RE: More Info on Site Down I googled: popup "internet explorer cannot open the internet site" "operation aborted" I just found this page: www.humsurfer.com/internet-explorer-cannot-open-the-site-operation-abortedsitemeter-crashed-internet-explorer I'd suggest removing sitemeter for the moment. They may be having a problem on their servers... I tried going to the sitemeter.com home page, and their site is doing the same thing.

Some of my older sites with sitemeter links aren't showing a problem.

In general this is the same problem I warned the engineers about with their intranet wiki. Not only do you leak information when you include extranet javascripts in your site, you have no control over what javascript those untrusted sites are serving to be included with your site. Right now, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of websites are being broken by sitemeter's oops. It's amazing they don't seem aware that their change broke their own home page! This points to incredibly poor quality assurance on their part. And hundreds if not thousands of webmasters and their ISPs fielding tech support messages of "My site is broke! What is wrong with your server."

Judging by the timestamp on various messages around the net, sitemeter has been causing this problem for at least 24 hours. For their credit, I've used them for many years and never seen this kind of problem before. But I probably wouldn't have noticed this problem if my client hadn't alerted me. For sitemeter's loss, the word is spreading to thousands of webmasters that they can fix their sites by removing the sitemeter code. Those webmasters are then sending their friends messages "Yup... That was it. The site meter was crashing it. All is well now." Too bad for sitemeter, it can take years to build up a large user base, and only 24 hours to lose a big chunk of it.

Be very careful about including other people's javascript on your own pages. They are a lot like boxes of chocolates, you never know what you might get.