• Tech

    Thank you Mister Walton

    Late last night my old D-Link router died. What was I to do? No electronics store opened before 10:00 AM and I had a full day planned with projects due.

    I know (I thought), I’ll just head over to the Wal-Mart off of Memorial Drive. Then I remembered, the Avondale City Council decided that they preferred an abandoned building to a useful store.

    So I had to drive to Dunwoody to find one that was open at 6:00 in the morning. They did have a nice Linksys Wireless G with 4 ethernet ports for a very good price.

    That’s been my day so far. Fighting the good fight against zoning.

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  • Africa,  Climate Change

    Global warming is coming right at us!

    I read this article Greenland ice cap thickens slightly with it’s winning quote

    However, they said that the thickening seemed consistent with theories of global warming, blamed by most experts on a build-up of heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars.

    and laughed. So, global warming produces more ice?

    Then I read this article in Wired Grim Outlook for Africa’s Future. The article is unremarkable with the following sentence standing out:

    The potential consequences of global warming could be devastating for the world’s poorest continent, yet its nations are among the least equipped to cope.

    Money buys things, primarily health and safety. If they weren’t the poorest continent,
    then none of this would be devastating.

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  • Atlanta,  Wal-Mart

    As If

    In a remarkably shoddy job of reporting, the AJC goes through an entire article about Avondale Estates’ quest for businesses to pay taxes and fill spaces on College Avenue without mentioning that they turned down the Walmart that would occupy the abandoned and dilapidated Avondale Mall.

    And speaking of Walmart, in parts of New York, they’re trying not so subtly to ban them from building there.

  • Privacy,  Tech

    Weird and creepy

    The EFF does good work says the WaPo
    Sleuths Crack Tracking Code Discovered in Color Printers

    The feds claim that they do it to stop counterfeiters, but that seems a bit ridiculous. All the more reason to never register hardware.
    Quotes:

    Schoen said that the existence of the encoded information could be a threat to people who live in repressive governments or those who have a legitimate need for privacy. It reminds him, he said, of a program the Soviet Union once had in place to record sample typewriter printouts in hopes of tracking the origins of underground, self-published literature.

    “It’s disturbing that something on this scale, with so many privacy implications, happened with such a tiny amount of publicity,” Schoen said.

    And it’s not as if the information is encrypted in a highly secure fashion, Schoen said. The EFF spent months collecting samples from printers around the world and then handed them off to an intern, who came back with the results in about a week.

    “We were able to break this code very rapidly,” Schoen said.

    How long before this code floats into Open Source?

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