Speculation on which Republicans may run in Gabrielle Giffords' vacated seat. Ted Cruz is looking fairly likely to be the next senator from Texas. He'll be an improvement. The Republican primaries are interesting and apparently can get even more interesting. Now, if only there were a good candidate...
Dear Dustin Richardson: You’re Doing It Wrong
Dustin Richardson, last seen tooling around in the Braves farm system before he got canned, was suspended 50 games for being caught with five banned substances in his system. On the one hand, I give him credit for doing it To The Max, but on the other hand, when your main problem is that you couldn't find…
It’s Like Planned Economies Don’t Work Or Something…
(Via Mike Munger) When the government starts mandating that organizations use things which don't exist, you have problems. This kind of idiocy---and then following through on fines because organizations didn't buy something which didn't exist!---is a natural outcome of government control. The major difference between the US and USSR in this case is that at…
Even Better Than Burying Money
Trade with non-existent aliens. This is another bit of anecdotal evidence against Keynesianism (and against Keynes himself, as this is just a new spin on one of his ideas): if your theory ends up with destroying wealth making you richer, you may need to rethink your theory. If it helps, instead of sinking everything in…
Early thoughts on Mass Effect 2
I finished Mass Effect a few days ago and have begun Mass Effect 2. For your reference, I play a female Shepard Infiltrator class. -- It's a lot more action oriented. The "tell other companions what to do" bit is much more streamlined and less finicky. There are fewer skills to research (a pity) but…
SSIS OLE DB Tools Not Deprecated
A while back, when I learned that OLE DB was being deprecated, I was concerned for what would happen with SSIS. Fortunately, the SSIS components are not being deprecated.
Geeks In Space (And Other Security News)
I like the idea of sending up satellites to combat censorship. More information here and here. Governments should not be the only entities controlling satellites---that is, unless you want to have space remain as relatively stagnant as it has been the last half-century. My concern would be overtly criminal activity happening through these satellites---child pornography…
Crazy Idea: Trust Employees
From the Brent Ozar PLF mailing list, I picked up a link on offering employees unlimited vacation days. There are a few companies which do this, and I think that for a small organization, it's a great idea. The rub is that your hiring practices have to be good: you need to find motivated, hard-working…
This Week’s Security Notes
Not too much for this round, though I'll have a few more links later this week. I ignore Google ads in their search results. Looks like there's good reason to. Yet Another Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability. Social engineering on the rise. People are the weak link in most organizations, and if you are going to target…
Abolish The TSA
The TSA list of things they're protecting us from. If that list doesn't prove the TSA's irrelevancy, I don't know what does. Well, maybe that they're gung-ho about protecting us from cupcakes. Schneier himself doesn't want to abolish the TSA, but I'd consider that too much faith in a government institution. At one point, I…
36 Chambers - The Legendary Journeys: Execution to the max! 