Stefan Karlsson has a few notes on it: Estonia and Latvia are doing quite well. Europe in general, however, is a mixed bag. As a quick exercise, here are Karlsson's reports along with that country's Heritage economic freedom ranking. Let's see if we can spot any trends. Rapid Boom: Latvia (65.2; rank 56) Significant Growth: …
Security Notes
Whenever I read or hear people arguing that government needs to "step in" on cybersecurity (I'm looking at you, Mark Russinovich), I caution them to wait until the government stops screwing up so badly. Private-sector computer security is weak, but their public-sector counterparts are definitely not better in this regard. Keeping software up to date is…
Security Theater
A policeman confronts his local airport screeners. Unlike the officer in question, I do not want stronger searches; I'd rather get rid of them altogether at this point. They're obviously not doing anything useful. If we have to have security theater, I'd rather do what the Chinese do (egad, having to say that saddens me,…
Baby Steps
Yesterday, I pointed out that there are two large structural problems for conservatives and Republicans at this point in time. Those are multi-decade problems which require multi-decade solutions. In the meantime, here are some ideas for the next few years that conservatives should debate. First, conservatives need to explain their ideas. We have some interesting…
Scooped By 40 Years
So apparently, Ronald Reagan beat me to the punch. By 35 years. His message is salient; its importance is as a meta-message: don't look necessarily at the specific policies Ronald Reagan espoused, for those were tied to his particular point in time. Instead, look at the unchanging ideals and apply those ideals to problems of…
Where To Go After 2012?
There has been a lot of back-and-forth in Republican and conservative circles after the 2012 election. I consider this a good thing and hope it goes on for a while yet because there's a lot to talk about. First, the bad news: this is not an easy fix. The problem was not Mitt Romney. Nor…
The Changing Dead Drop
Dead drops in the computer era. Combine this with steganography and you have an interesting problem for the defenders.
Windows 105
Bad name, but awesome job. To think that you could rig a Windows look-alike on a Commodore 64 is just amazing.
TinEye
Neat service: TinEye is a reverse image lookup. Give it an image or a link to an image and it will try to tell you where it came from. This is nice for maintaining copyright protection.
A second American Civil War…
... is not going to be the response to these lovely online petitions. Legally, the White House has to respond if there are 25,000 signatures, and Texas is already over the limit. Texas may be viable economically if it were to secede, but I honestly think Obama's response will be along the lines of "lol…
36 Chambers - The Legendary Journeys: Execution to the max! 