MyATMPinIs1234

2011-09-26T16:44:00.002-04:00

New Business Idea

Criminal conspiracy staffed exclusively by deaf people that have photographic memories. All communication would be done in sign language and nothing would ever been written down.

2011-07-13T16:29:00.001-04:00

Wow no posts in 3 months? This blog kinda sucks.

2011-03-29T13:09:00.002-04:00

I think one thing everyone's missing in all this state budget rigamarole is - why are teachers even in unions in the first place? Didn't they go to college? Don't they consider themselves professionals?

I guess not. The fact that they are violently pro-union suggests that they themselves believe that teachers are replaceable cogs in the machine. Frankly, at least in public schools, it's probably true.

As such, I'd like to suggest another way for local governments to close budget gaps. Just fire all the teachers and replace them with educational software and a few security guards. I really doubt the educational outcomes would fall dramatically, especially in the inner cities.

The only problem with this is that the budget savings on schools would probably be somewhat counterbalanced by increases in welfare spending when the fired teachers find out they are unemployable elsewhere. He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

2011-03-11T17:28:00.002-05:00

I get it. Twitter really is a game changer. From its ability to so rapidly disseminate information about the recent Japan quake, to its adroitness at allowing people to foment revolutionary ideas in the middle east, twitter is not only remaking media, but society.

The previous statement would be true on opposite day.

Twitter is still a useless toy. I did learn about Japan via social networks. So fucking what? I would've found out about 9 mins later when I turned on the TV anyway. What about the first hand perspective? Someone on facebook posted "a guy on twitter said it was the strongest quake he'd ever felt." A guy on twitter said that? Holy crap I guess we can FUCKING THROW AWAY THE SEISMOGRAPHS. To paraphrase Rodney Dangerfield, Twitter is like buying already highlighted textbooks. How do you know the previous guy isn't a maniac?

Oh and the Middle East revolutions? They didn't have twitter in E. Europe in 1991. They didn't have Twitter in Iran in 1979. They actually still don't have Twitter there, and the revolution is hampered by a much more effective and brutal secret police, not some magical technology that allows people to suddenly know that a revolution is happening. Also, a lot of the street names are longer than 140 characters in those weird countries.

Why is twitter so huge? 3 reasons.

1) Because the media lives in a young, urban, high tech echo chamber where everybody uses it. "I can't believe Richard Nixon won... Nobody I know voted for him!"

2) Vanity. People like to think they're important and I think twitter indulges this. Not like blogs, where you can make sure nobody is listening via your site stats.

3) Laziness. Writing a book is hard. Writing a PHD thesis is hard. Even writing a blog post on a regular basis is hard. Twitter is something people can participate in without actually doing any work. Hard to overestimate the laziness of most people.

So there it is. This post is also available via 74 twitter updates.

2011-02-28T13:01:00.002-05:00

New Business Idea

Airplane skins made out of golf ball dimple material.

(and yes I know why this wouldn't work)

2010-12-14T11:45:00.002-05:00

I just finished reading the Gawker hack release notes.

There is really nothing to say other than that they have massively incompetent technology people. The are so bad, they don't even know what they don't know.

"They are not stored in plain text and are on entirely different systems than the third-party hosted Campfire screenshots that appear in this article. There's no evidence to suggest any Gawker Network user accounts were compromised, and passwords are encrypted (not stored in plain text) anyway, so stealing passwords isn't even possible."

How does this guy not know about rainbow tables? Is their tech guy a journalist who taught himself PHP?

Now against a determined adversary you are probably screwed anyway, but this whole thing would have been much harder with a few VERY BASIC security concepts, including:

1) Adding a SALT to your stored passwords
2) Adding firewall rules to only allow access to your servers from necessary IP address blocks.
3) Disabling the root accounts

I'm not talking about a sophisticated intrusion detection system, but how about setting up a script that emails you every time someone logs in to the production system? My FUCKING Facebook account does this! That would have prevented allowing them to spend 3 days downloading your database.

2010-12-02T09:43:00.002-05:00

There's been some hubbub over this wikileaks situation. If "loose lips sank ships" back in WWII, in the information age it's a warfighting tactic and I think we have just been attacked. So while the original leaker should be hung, and while I would not be averse to having a cruise missle accidentally land in Mr. Assange's parents' house -- there is only solution to this problem long term.

The signal to noise ratio is a measure used in science and engineering to quantify how much a signal has been corrupted by noise. The United States should hire a large group of people to write or forge millions of fake official government/military documents and submit them to wikileaks and found a dozen other document release websites to swamp the signal with noise.

It would be cheap, would give anyone who needed it plausible deniability, and would allow for the release of strategic misinformation to our enemies.

In fact, maybe they've done it already.....

2010-10-07T21:48:00.002-04:00

"Our education system is broken," says the person who just came out of Waiting for Superman.

I hate to break it to you, but the education system is not broken. It is functioning EXACTLY as one might expect based on its design.

Education is a service, just like any other. There is a mechanism for enforcing that any good or service is of sufficient quality, and that is when the seller has to convince the buyer to voluntarily part with his own money to acquire it, and acquire it from him rather than his competitor.

When the service is paid for by a 3rd party, and the customer only has one choice, it is a sure thing that the service will be very poor quality. That is not broken, that is poorly designed.

Imagine if you could only eat dinner for free at one restaurant that was in your neighborhood, and the government paid the restaurant regardless of whether you liked your meal or even showed up. Does anyone believe this restaurant would have good food? The only reason restaurants strive to provide good food and service is because they have to convince you to come to their restaurant to eat.

You might be wondering why rich neighborhoods have good public schools and poor neighborhoods have terrible ones. It is most certainly not about the amount of money that is spent. It is because rich neighborhoods have a very inefficient but still functioning free market, in that rich people can move to a better school district. Poor people do not have this option and again as you would expect their schools are very bad despite the same or more resources being thrown at the problem.

Imagine how fast schools would improve if the state or locality gave every student a voucher for the $15K they annually spend and told them they could spent it on any school they wanted. The incremental cost would be zero. Milton Friedman was arguing for this almost 60 years ago. We haven't done it, because the system is not broken, the system is working exactly as the designers of it, the teachers unions, want it to work.

2010-08-06T13:04:00.002-04:00

Notice to women of NYC

The utility of sandals and the utility of boots are not accretive when you combine them into one shoe.

2010-07-31T15:47:00.001-04:00

Am I the only one that does preemptive wear leveling on my couch cushions?

2010-07-28T13:15:00.001-04:00

I really hope I don't get dementia when I'm old. Because it will take all the fun out of just pretending to have dementia.

2010-07-09T10:54:00.002-04:00

"It has been proposed that the hominid lineage began when a group of chimpanzee-like apes began to throw rocks and swing clubs at adversaries, and that this behaviour yielded reproductive advantages for millions of years, driving natural selection for improved throwing and clubbing prowess. (link)"

Whatever the cause, our elite throwing ability is the result of ancient morphological and neurological changes unique to humans, and have been integral to hunting and warfare for millennia.

In modern society sports have generally replaced hunting and warfare as a means to express our evolutionary heritage for competition and aggression. This is why sports generally require throwing a ball or clubbing an object. Baseball, basketball, football, hockey, golf, badminton, bowling, cricket, bocce, billiards, javelin, polo (water and horse), racquetball, etc. Sometimes sports are just fighting and hunting, like martial arts, wresting, fishing, boxing, fencing, and hockey.

This leaves soccer in a strange place. While I imagine our ancestors occasionally kicked or headbutted prey or an adversary, this certainly was not the preferred method and was probably limited to humans that had severe injury to their arms that precluded their use. In this way, in the taxonomy of human activity, I believe soccer should be categorized as a general leisure activity or perhaps hobby, but not a sport.

Up until now I haven't distinguished between genders, however it's interesting to note that modern humans display a strong sexual dimorphism with respect to elite overhand throwing. In some ways, soccer represents the historical role of women, using team work to go out and gather objects to bring back and deposit it safely, while avoiding having it taken by a the women of a neighboring tribe through trickery but generally without violence. So being charitable there is a basis for concluding that soccer is a girl sport.

2010-06-09T15:31:00.002-04:00

We knew that you didn't have to be John Venn to realize that when almost all people complaining about AT&T's network are iPhone users, the problem might be the phone rather than the network. So I was interested to read this:

"But here’s the fascinating point: the signaling issues aren’t just AT&T’s fault. In a quest to extend battery life on the iPhone, Apple did something 'non-standard' which compounds the issues – the iPhone constantly drops connections, going in to an idle state. Keepalives within the apps then reestablish a new connection after only a few seconds. Network equipment makers never anticipated this. Think of it as hanging up during a phone call when the line is silent, and then redialing to respond. (via)"

It's thin though.

2010-05-25T11:45:00.002-04:00

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin accused the president of being in the pocket of Big Oil, a charge usually leveled by Democrats at the GOP.

"You've got to have a license to drive a car in this country, but, regrettably, you can get on a TV show and say virtually anything," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said (WSJ, Pg A1, 5/25/2010).

Key Takeaways:

Sarah Palin -- most likely not the smartest politician we've ever had in this country.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs -- Thinks the First Amendment should require a government license to be exercised.

Dummy.

2010-05-21T16:56:00.002-04:00

New Business Idea

Kitchen timer for the outside of the bathroom door. Can be set to 35 or 45 mins.

2010-05-20T14:50:00.000-04:00

It's starting to happen. Apple vs. Google in mobile is a replay of Apple vs. IBM in PCs 20 years ago. Apple creates a better product, and then completely locks it down from external innovation (even apps are censored). The open competitor quickly overtakes apple and crushes it. The Android ecosystem will be (maybe already is) better, cheaper, and faster than the iPhone. The irony of Apple's famous superbowl commercial is incredible. Steve Jobs is the Pol Pot of technology.

Apple was recently the 3rd most valuable company in the U.S. In my opinion this is horrifically flawed valuation. I will be investigated very far out of the money put options.

By the way, I hear non stop complaining about the AT&T service. These complaints always come from iPhone users. As a self-anointed expert in debugging, when a network has many devices, and problems occur with only one of the devices, the PROBLEM IS THE FUCKING PHONE NOT THE NETWORK.

2010-05-14T12:15:00.003-04:00

New Business Idea

A version of Facebook where all the status updates and pictures are fully encrypted before sending. Everyone then has a browser plugin that stores each friend's public key and decrypts locally for viewing. Nothing is ever stored or transmitted in plain text, however it is completely transparent to the users.

Update: Forgot to mention, this new business idea, like all new business ideas, is not a new idea.

2010-05-01T00:20:00.002-04:00

Where do I shop if I want my blinds to stay?

2010-02-12T13:51:00.002-05:00

New Business Idea

Software that blocks internet access for children. The twist is that it blocks access by tweaking a setting, and you tell your kids that they can use the internet when they figure out how to unblock it. The software would start with something easy like disabling the network card. When the kids figure out how to turn it back on, it waits a few days and changes a more difficult setting. After a few months of the kids figuring out and fixing everything from bad IP addresses to secretly corrupted routing tables, you will have successfully tricked your kid into becoming a computer expert thereby preventing teenage sex.

2010-01-27T15:59:00.002-05:00

Steve Jobs fucked us in the ass. Again.

We do not need something between phones and laptops. What we need is for Apple, RIM, and Google to get together and develop an industry standard for phone input and output devices. Basically an adapter to connect phones to keyboards and displays.

Phones are already powerful enough to do most of what we need, -- email, music, videos, games, web browsing. And they fit in your pocket and you always have them with you.

What I absolutely do not want it to start carrying around a 10" screen everywhere I go. What I do want is for the industry to come up with a standardized docking station or adapter, so I can just connect my phone anywhere and use it as a computer.

If it were standardized, venues such as hotels, airports, airplanes and starbucks would have an incentive to make kiosks available, and you could just use your phone for everything without hauling a display. And it already has built in wireless.

And if you really, really need to read the NY Times, and you are not at home or work where you already have a computer, and you don't want a paper version, and you can't read it on your phone, then yes I guess the iPad is perfect for you. Steve Jobs has invented a device for the biggest douche holes in the world. Congratulations.

* I reserve the right to delete or heavily modify this post at a future date should the iPad become the greatest thing since Gutenberg invented sliced bread.

2010-01-15T14:46:00.003-05:00

Al Gore is not a mass murderer. But only because to be guilty of murder you require mens rea or a guilty mind.

But he is a killer.

By now some of you have probably heard, via facebook status updates, about the tragic earthquake in Haiti. It's mostly tragic, however, because as an impoverished nation they were unable to afford strict building standards, and they are unable to mobilize heavy equipment and relief supplies to rescue survivors and assuage the misery.

Which brings me to the subject of ~~global warming~~ climate change. Ignoring for now the fact that researchers had to lie and manipulate data to get their models to predict climate change will occur, I don't think anyone really disputes that there's really nothing we can do about it. The most drastic solutions cut carbon emissions by a few percentage points far down the road. Without some fundamental breakthrough in energy, or abandoning modern lifestyle, our carbon emissions will march on. There's no getting around it.

But what we can do is severely damage our economy and the world economy by imposing draconian taxes on carbon and massively distorting the market for energy.

Thankfully the global cooling scientists were predicting a few decades ago never materialized and I'm confident the warming will likewise not come to pass, however, if they are accidentally right, and global warming happens, and it turns out to be on a net basis more harmful than beneficial -- would we rather deal with the consequences as a Haiti or as a Northridge, CA?

2010-01-12T18:04:00.002-05:00

There's reason to believe airport security is worse than useless. It maintains the appearance of safety while providing very little and lots of inconvenience. For example, all the talk about the "No Fly List" misses the point that at home printable boarding passes make circumventing this check trivial.

There's probably not very much that we can do about this. But only because the government is in charge of security and they are massively incompetent at everything except providing health care, I'm told.

But just for fun, here's a few ideas I would implement if I were in charge.

1) Except for businessmen and parents with small children, you don't really need ANY carry-on luggage. People only bring luggage on board because a) checked luggage is inconvenient and now expensive; and b) entertainment.

In-flight entertainment should be upgraded to include free movies and TV's on all flights. Flights should also have internet access, with portable keyboards that could be rented and work with the seatback screens and something like Chrome OS.

Instead of charging for checked bags, they should give a discount for people with no carry-ons. This would expedite security, boarding, and probably end up saving airlines money. Checked luggage should be faster, easier, and free, to further discourage carry-on bags.

When a majority of people can stroll through security with not much more than their wallet and a paperback, the process will be more efficient and TSA will have more time to search the underwear of foreigners. Parents with small children would still need to carry-on bags so they should be banned from air travel.

2) We should pay the low level TSA agents $500k each time they find a bomb. $250k for a gun. Or maybe more than that. They should also be given small bonuses when security wait time exceeds a given service level for the entire shift.

3) When they check your ID matches your boarding pass before security they should ensure the boarding pass is not a forgery. Authorization doesn't work without authentication. This shouldn't be hard to do.

2010-01-06T16:26:00.003-05:00

By now everyone knows that on Christmas day someone tried to blow up Northwest flight 253. This is a clear failing of the Obama administration. They have obviously not done a good enough job informing the world that we are closing down Guantanamo Bay, and that Islamic radicals have no reason to hate us anymore.

2009-12-16T11:22:00.001-05:00

My idea for reducing our dependence on foreign oil: Putting shag carpeting on the highways and using the static shocks to power the cars.

2009-11-21T23:22:00.001-05:00

My idea for an iPhone app: Turn your iPhone into a scale. Of course it wouldn't actually do that, I just want to see how many people I can trick into stepping on their iPhone.