Schneier on Security: What the Terrorists Want

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.

Once again Bruce Schneier is right on point. We've effectively given terrorists a whole new weapon; our own over-reaction. They can pretty much count on us mucking things up royaly even when there's been no attack. The guys in London with their magic liquid bombs were no where near blowing anything up and they were caught but we're still banning liquids on planes for who knows how long (which itself is pretty useless but that's a different topic). All any smart terrorist group has to do now is make up a plan for using laptops as bombs and leak the info to the authorities and watch global business flying evaporate when laptops are banned for real. All without really having to do any hard work. We need to chill the hell out and start thinking instead of pissing ourselves every time 2 people with dark skin check their watches at the same time.

Tags: grommes, schneier, terrorism, terrorists, airlines

Kung Fu Monkey: "Wait, Aren't You Scared?"

"Wait, Aren't You Scared?"
Errr, no. And if you are, you frankly should be a little goddam embarrassed.

This is just plain great. Read it.

Tags: grommes, terror, fear, terrorism, bombings

The Observer | The 100 greatest novels of all time: The list
No list like this is ever going to please even a fraction of people but this one is a little strange even considering that qualification. It's very heavy on the English authors (which isn't too surprising since it's an English paper doing the list) but any list of greatest novels whose only Hemingway is a book of short stories is a little off in more than one sense (no Sun Also Rises? And since when is a collection of stories a novel?). And no Vonnegut? That puts me off right there. No Delillo? No Pynchon? Don Quixote as number one is a safe choice but a good one. But I guess my liking for The New biases me against any list like this which has to be heavy with The Old to appease people who think anything from the past century is automatically disqualified from Great status. Like I say, nice try.

Joel on Software

Third. I can't really think of anyone less qualified to "protect" you from "geeks" than a bunch of insurance salesmen. Get over yourselves. Have you looked at your own actuaries? Have you noticed how insurance people dress?

This is great. I used to be very offended by ads like this, which used to be a lot more prominent before the .com boom when the geeks were the ones rolling in cash, but I stopped even noticing them. Joel sure noticed this one though, and his takedown is a must-read.

I've travelled a bit. Not as much as a lot of people, but more than most people I know. But I learned quite a bit on our recent family trip to New York City and northern New York state. Here's a few of the lessons I learned.

• New York City isn't scary, even with kids.
  I had been leary of travelling to and around NYC (abbreviated for laziness, not coolness) but it's not bad at all. Even with the kids we got around everywhere we needed to go quickly and easily and with no hassles besides too much walking until we got the gumption to take the subways. We were in the Times Square / Theater District area which is very well lit and full of other people at all hours.


• If anybody ever tells you to visit Newark, New Jersey you should immediately punch them in the head as hard as you can.
  I've never been to such a craphole of a city. Sorry if you live there but you should leave immediately. It's like a whole city made of those city blocks you see where the buildings are all shuttered and the billboards haven't been changed since they put up the 'Try New Coke!' signs. And as my brother-in-law put it, it's as if they designed the streets by sneezing on a piece of paper and connecting the dots. Bleh.


• People suck, and they hate middle seats.
  Delta Airlines, in their infinite wisdom, decided to put me 20 rows away from Kim and the kids. I asked the woman with the seat that rightfully should have been mine next to my family if she'd mind switching and she said fine, until she learned that I had a middle seat. Then she refused. She couldn't have been more than 5 and a half feet tall and in no way needed more legroom than I do at 6 feet but as she explained to the flight attendent "I just don't want a middle seat" as if that was an explanation. So I switched and finally was able to move Kim and Allison's seats up to mine, tying up the whole plane just so that idiot wouldn't have to have a middle seat.


• Rental car companies will screw you if you're prepared.
  If you make a car reservation ahead of time, the rental company charges you more than if you walk up and get a car with no reservation. And not a little more, a lot. Like almost 100% more. We had an ordeal with Avis about their not-written-down-anywhere policy of requiring a corporate ID if you use a corporate discount. We didn't have an id. Not that we forgot it, we were never given one. In the course of trying to get them to honor the discount, the lady said she'd just give us the walkup rate, which was almost 50% of the reserved rate. My brother-in-law and I were so taken aback by this we questioned her on it to the point where she probably would have liked to just kick us out and not rent the car to us. They basically figure that if you're consciencious you either really need the car for something specific or you're a corporation. In either case they feel perfectly alright with totally screwing you. If it was a little more to plan ahead, maybe I'd understand. If you do a walk-up rental, you're helping them out by renting a car they wouldn't have rented otherwise so they give a discount. But they take advantage of your need or corporate pocketbook to an absolutely absurd degree and all it does is make me want to find a way of putting in a reservation under one name, cancelling it the same day and walking in to rent the car under another name.


• Southwest values old people and children. Delta Airlines values rich people and VIPs.
  I'm used to flying Southwest. Both because I'm cheap and because they do a heck of a job. There are reasons beyond price why Southwest is the only profitable carrier and has been profitable for literally years in a row while the others are in bankrupcy. When boarding starts for Southwest they let people with kids, the disabled, and the elderly get on first. Delta lets their VIPs on first, with first class next and everybody else afterward in some kind of seemingly random class system. Right there tells what each carrier's values are. If Southwest had assigned seating, I'd guess that based on the values I see, Southwest would not split up families on every leg of a flight. Delta knew we were all together and we had a baby but still, I got a seat on the other end of the plane despite buying our tickets fairly far in advance. And the attendents don't care even a little bit. I understand that not everybody can be in the seat they want but it's insane to put two parents with two small kids, one of whom isn't even 1 year old yet, in different seats. I'll never fly Delta again.

Tags: grommes, travel, new+york, flying, delta

Long Now: Views: Essays: Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine
This is a really good essay by Danny Hillis, one of my favorite people, about Richard Feynman, one of my other favorite people. Hillis gets right to the heart of what makes some scientists the best kind of people. Feynman was incredibly curious, generous, smart, and willing to talk to anybody about anything he knew about. And when you're Richard Feynman, you know a lot about a lot. If more scientists were as open and willing to break things down to explanations "regular" people could understand, we wouldn't have as much of a problem with the sciences as we do. I think people tend to feel dumb when talking about science since anymore we know so much that it's easy to get bogged down in details and complications. I make it a point to talk openly and easily about science with kids so they feel like it's something they can get their arms around and not some far-off thing only people in lab coats can understand. Feynman was the ultimate example of that, somebody who could make anybody understand even things like quantum chromodynamics. Of course, he's also the one who said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you're wrong.

Tags: grommes, scientists, science, feynman, hillis

Light Blue Touchpaper » Ignoring the “Great Firewall of China”

However, because the original packets are passed through the firewall unscathed, if both of the endpoints were to completely ignore the firewall’s reset packets, then the connection will proceed unhindered! We’ve done some real experiments on this — and it works just fine!!

This is a very easy-to-use way of getting around most of the censorship done by the so-called "Great Firewall of China". I applaud any attempts to route around censorship, especially political censoring like the government of China does.

Tags: grommes, china, censorship

KRQE News 13 - Flames wipe out four businesses
One of the places apparently destroyed by a stripmall fire this morning was The Comic Stop, the shop I went to weekly for years. After I dropped out of comics for a few years I decided to find a shop and see if there was anything I was interested in. I found the Comic Stop and quickly returned to the comics habit in full force. The owner, James, was in a lot of ways a stereotypical comic geek turned shop owner but he's a hell of a guy and I could live with occasional ranting about things like changes the new Battlestar Galactica made to the Viper's wings. Going to a comic shop every week means you get to know the people at the shop and hopefully become friendly with them. I still fondly remember George, the guy who owned Comic City, the shop in San Diego that my parents drove us 30 minutes to every week for years and years over a decade ago now. James and Mary, who also worked in the shop, became friends of mine pretty easily, not something that usually happens to a introvert like me.

This is a terrible and sad thing to happen. Thankfully nobody was hurt. Since we moved pretty far from the shop I haven't been there but I hope he starts up again. There's not too many genuinely nice and friendly comic shop people in Albuquerque and he deserves to try again.

Tags: grommes, comics, fire, comic+stop, albuquerque, friends

One of my favorite artists, Beck, was in town on Friday and I was lucky enough to get to go see him. It rocked. I'd heard that he was performing partly with puppets and I was sceptical but man, those puppets were so cool it's crazy. He had a mini stage setup with puppets of the band performing behind the real guys. Then the puppets were broadcast on the big screen behind the stage so you saw Beck, and Puppet Beck performing everything. It wouldn't have worked with very many bands, I'd think, but Beck has always had a playful / weird streak so it completely worked. I was happy enough with this show that I'm not really all that dissapointed that I'm probably not going to get to see Tom Petty and Pearl Jam in Denver next weekend.

Tags: grommes, concerts, music, beck, puppets

The Porter County (Indiana) library system board of directors, apparently realizing that they'd rather not spend their afterlife roasting in hell, has lifted their ban on lending books to homeless children living in shelters.
Sheesh. These people should all lose their jobs for even thinking of something like this. A library should be a place for people to come and have a chance to better themselves or at the least get a break from reality, something I'd imagine most people living in homeless shelters would welcome. They don't need to be treated like criminals and denied access to books, of all things. Shame on this board, I hope they never have to be treated like they've treated the residents of the shelter.

So I'm looking at the Unreads.com homepage the other day and what do I see? The site's first actual user! Click to see Cinqo's Unreads Stack. Awesome. I have no idea who this person is but from the look of the books on their list, I'm intrigued. They look like my kind of person. Whoohoo!

I'm going to start emailing people today to have them look at the site so hopefully more people will be giving me feedback before too long. I've been working on the text and the Help popups and man, it's hard. I'm very wordy so boiling things down to their essence is tough stuff. It's useful though, it helps me crystallize my thoughts on the site. You work with something and you have an idea but actually communicating that to people who don't know anything about the site makes you figure out just exactly what the thing is supposed to do. Unreads can appeal to lots of different people with different uses but I can't just list a bunch of ways to use the site, it has to pull people in. Hopefully I'll make enough money off the site eventually to hire somebody to help me out in this area.

Onward and upward.

Tags: grommes, unreads, startup, web2.0, design

MAKE: Blog: DIY Smoker

This Trashcan Smoker I made last weekend was featured on the MAKE magazine blog. The author of the article in ReadyMade magazine where I got the idea also found it. Awesome!

Anna Burnside: Potter and the philosopher's endless drone - Sunday Times - Times Online

So it came as something of a surprise to discover that readers of The Book Magazine have voted J K Rowling as the greatest living writer in Britain. How can this be? ... She had one good idea that became a formula that she has now worked into the ground.

I agree with her assessment of Harry Potter but I always find these lists interesting for another reason. The people who voted Rowling the best whatever didn't do so because they actually thought she was the best writer. Most likely the majority of people who voted for her haven't read almost any other books than the Harry Potter books so they have little to compare her to. They voted for her because they know her name and they "liked" the books. I quote "liked" because that's how most people think of books, they either like them or they don't. There's no critical thought behind it, no comparison even really. "I liked Harry Potter and the kids read them so I'll vote for whats-her-name". This doesn't invalidate the ranking, but the ranking isn't for Best Living Author, it's for Most Popular Author. Those 2 things are different in every way except some authors might appear on both lists and it's disingenuous for the magazine involved to label the list the way they did.