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Politics, open government, and safe streets. And the constant incursion of cycling.

Category: Society Page 30 of 69

What’s In Your (File) Wallet?

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On January 6, 2009

In Law, Society, Travel

This enterprising fellow asked for – and got – a look at the records that DHS has been keeping of his travels:

My biggest surprise was that the Internet Protocol (I.P.) address of the computer used to buy my tickets via a Web agency was noted.

[ . . . ]

The rest of my file contained details about my ticketed itineraries, the amount I paid for tickets, and the airports I passed through overseas. My credit card number was not listed, nor were any hotels I’ve visited. In two cases, the basic identifying information about my traveling companion (whose ticket was part of the same purchase as mine) was included in the file. Perhaps that information was included by mistake.

Some sections of my documents were blacked out by an official. Presumably, this information contains material that is classified because it would reveal the inner workings of law enforcement.

Interesting.  If you think so, too, check out the end of the article, which provides easy to follow instructions about filing your own FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request for your government files.  There were a couple of years where it seemed that I was getting SSSS (direction for secondary security) scrawled on my tickets every time I flew, and I’d meant to file a FOIA request to see if there were any clues about that.  But then it dropped off, and I forgot about it.  I’m curious again.

TSA and Jet Blue Pay for Stupidity

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On January 6, 2009

In Society, Travel

I’ve been a little free with the words “stupid” and “idiocy” here of late, especially in connection with the recent behavior of AirTran.   The discussion that followed in the comments turned to whether or not it was worth it to stand up in the face of stupidity, especially when that stupidity came under the guise of “security.”  Well, it was worth it for this fellow:

JetBlue and the TSA have settled a lawsuit brought by a man who was refused boarding on an airplane because he was wearing a shirt with Arabic writing on it (the TSA said that this was like “wearing a T-shirt at a bank stating, ‘I am a robber.'”). They’ve paid him $240,000.

Raed Jarrar, the fellow who dared wear a t-shirt JetBlue and TSA didn’t like, writes:

All people in this country have the right to be free of discrimination and to express their own opinions[.]  With this outcome, I am hopeful that TSA and airlines officials will think twice before practicing illegal discrimination and that other travelers will be spared the treatment I endured.

If they can’t understand decency, make them familiar with the costs.

(I was surprised to find out that this is the same Raed Jarrar that writes RaedInTheMiddle, which I came to from the “Where Is Raed?” blog by Salam Pax.  Used to read Jarrar quite a bit in 2004-2005.)

The Euro at Ten

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On January 6, 2009

In EU, Policy, Society

I’m a few days late, but it’s still worth noting that we’ve just passed the 10 year anniversary of the emergence of the Euro. It was the subject of an enormous amount of speculation and debate, with many predicting its failure as a currency. SuperFrenchie does some dancing on the graves of those predictions here.  Jerome a Paris, a banker with no shortage of opinions, provides a useful exploration of the place of the Euro – especially in comparison with the US Dollar – in a global economy:

The dollar is increasingly money backed by financiers-manipulated debt. The euro is fundamentally money backed by real economic activity. The distinction will matter. And the finance industry will follow.

Interested?  Read more.

(The kid in me misses the Deutsche Marks, the Pesetas, the Guilders.  My interest in currency fluxuation began when we moved to West Germany, and I discovered the wonderful thing that was aribtrage – I could get so much more when I turned my dollars into marks (and that’s not even touching the experience of turning dollars into East German marks on the black market).  Of course, with the current exchange rate being €1 = $1.40, I now have some appreciation for the other side of that.  )

Wonderful Folks

By

On January 4, 2009

In Music, Personal, Society

A friend passed this along yesterday, and every time I watch it, I like it more.  It’s Amanda Palmer‘s Runs in the Family, and what you’re seeing is a terribly well done fanvid for it.

I think it pairs well with a video clip that Amanda Palmer herself posted on her site a few days ago.  It’s of Bill Hicks (personally dear to me for his “looks like we’ve got ourselves a reader!” line) talking about what he wants to hear, in front of an audience that doesn’t really seem to get it:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRkA6zugNMQ[/youtube]

Absolutely.

Another Reason to Avoid AirTran

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On January 2, 2009

In Society, Travel

I’ve held a deep dislike for AirTran since it was named ValuJet and dumping people into the Everglades.  Every contact I’ve ever had with the airline reinforces my notion that it is run by the cheapest and most incompetent labor force it can scrounge up.  Which leads to incredibly stupid things like this scene that unfolded at National yesterday:

A Muslim family removed from an airliner Thursday after passengers became concerned about their conversation say AirTran officials refused to rebook them, even after FBI investigators cleared them of wrongdoing.

Atif Irfan said federal authorities removed eight members of his extended family and a friend after passengers heard them discussing the safest place to sit and misconstrued the nature of the conversation.

Irfan, a U.S. citizen and tax attorney, said he was “impressed with the professionalism” of the FBI agents who questioned him, but said he felt mistreated when the airline refused to book the family for a later flight.

Because an organization can’t be run entirely on stupidity, I presume that the issue eventually made its way up to someone with a little sense (if still completely lacking in tact), resulting in the airline issuing a statement that concluded with:

The nine passengers involved were all offered full refunds and may fly with AirTran Airways again after having been released from questioning and cleared by the law enforcement officials.

Yeah, probably not.

Update: Per the comments, they found someone at AirTran who managed to grind out an apology on behalf of the airline.   Of course, they try to avoid responsibility and hide behind the usual security excuse:

“We regret that the issue escalated to the heightened security level it did on New Year’s Day, but we trust everyone understands that the security and the safety of our passengers is paramount and cannot be compromised[.]”

The part that is entirely AirTran’s fault had nothing to do with security, and everything to do with AirTran’s utterly ridiculous refusal to let the family rebook for the next flight.

DC Vote: Will This Be the Year?

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On January 1, 2009

In DC, Law, Politics, Society

Will this be the year that DC residents get the same rights enjoyed by citizens in every state?

President-elect Barack Obama is an original cosponsor of the DC Voting Rights bill, which would turn the city’s congressional delegate, who has limited power, into a full-fledged member of the US House.

Some are hoping Obama will also back measures eventually leading to statehood. The issue could be one of the first legislative initiatives of his presidency, and a test of his commitment to make life better for the district’s 581,000 residents, who on average pay some of the nation’s highest federal income tax bills.

That the title must be a question, rather than a statement, is a result of learned caution on the issue.   As usual, the Republicans can be counted on to lobby against the effort – they’ll give a dozen different reasons, but it always boils down to their simple opposition to additional Democratic representation.   But this Republican commitment to disenfranchisement shouldn’t let Democrats off the hook.   Democrats, as a party, haven’t put nearly enough effort into solving this issue as they should.  With control of Congress and the White House, however, there are no more excuses.  Make it happen.

More about the issues and legislative efforts at DCVote.org.

American Exceptionalism

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On December 31, 2008

In Personal, Society

Today I came across an essay posted over at Booman Tribune in the summer of 2006.  It was written when the drumbeat of war with Iran was louder than it was today, but it’s still relevant.  It will be for the rest of my life, I suspect:

The disconnect between mainstream America and critics abroad is unarguably a wide one, and most likely an unbridgeable one, at least in practical and reality-based terms, but it may be possible for each, if they try, to get at least some sort of understanding of the other’s position, even though it is very unlikely that anyone will change their minds.

Let’s look at the American point of view first, since so many people around the world have trouble understanding it. The first step is accepting, whether you agree with the practice or not, that Americans are taught almost from birth that not only is the United States the greatest country in the world, but it is so much greater than any other country, in every possible way, that laws and rules that may govern the way the global community of nations behaves toward each other simply do not apply to the US because of its greatness and uniqueness. It is not that the US objects, for example, to international laws or the Geneva cnoventions. In fact, if any other nation even thought about going round to other countries and seizing people at will, and hauling them off to secret torture camps, you can bet that the US would be the first to condemn such an atrocity, and would aggressively pursue any and all strategies and methods to put a stop to the practice immediately, and bring that rogue nation to heel, quite very possibly including a very swift and most likely unceremonious regime change. Now there might be exceptions to that. Note that word exception, because you will be hearing it a lot. An exception might be, for instance, Israel. As most people are aware, the US and Israel have a very special and unique relationship. So special and unique in fact that situations, such as that international kidnapping and torture camp thing, might not be looked at in the same way as it would if say Malaysia did it. Or France. Or Iran. Like the US itself, Israel would be considered an Exception.

That word, exception, is so important because to Americans, it’s not just a word. It’s not just a policy. It’s a doctrine. A fundamental core value on which policy is based, and according to which policy is implemented.

Where do we go from here?

Tech Notes: Desk Clearing Edition

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On December 31, 2008

In Distribution, Personal, Policy, Society, Tech

This story on “passive” heating of homes just confirms my decision that if I’m ever building a place for myself, I’m hiring Germans to do it:

The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.

And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.

~

I wouldn’t even consider owning an iPhone (keyboard required), but I’ll have to admit that this nifty little application – which geocodes your photographs by syncing your iphone’s GPS position with the timestamp on your photos – makes me wish my Treo could do that.

~

I wonder if this search/bridge will make the Tor anonymizer service any more useful. I try to keep a Tor node running most of the time, but it doesn’t seem to see much use.  What’s Tor?

Tor is endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistle blowers and human-rights workers to communicate with journalists, among other uses. It works by randomly routing traffic, such as website requests and e-mail, through a network of nodes hosted by volunteers around the world before delivering it to its destination. The traffic is encrypted enroute through every node except the final one, and the end point cannot see where the traffic or message originated. Theoretically, nobody spying on the traffic can identify the source.

It’s often painfully slow and not terribly easy to use, however.  Perhaps the app I linked will help stimulate some interest in overcoming that.

~

Looks like NASA is contracting out resupply of the International Space Station to two private operators.  While part of me is pleased to see an operator like SpaceX get some stability through this, I can’t help but wonder if it’s a significant step down the path of placing the space program (and tech) entirely in private hands.  The problem I have with that is massive public spending on R&D that will only end up being locked up for private benefit.

~

Consider the possiblities of this published research:

Rapid and selective erasures of certain types of memories in the brain would be desirable under certain clinical circumstances. By employing an inducible and reversible chemical-genetic technique, we find that transient CaMKII overexpression at the time of recall impairs the retrieval of both newly formed one-hour object recognition memory and fear memories, as well as 1-month-old fear memories. Systematic analyses suggest that excessive CaMKII activity-induced recall deficits are not caused by disrupting the retrieval access to the stored information but are, rather, due to the active erasure of the stored memories. Further experiments show that the recall-induced erasure of fear memories is highly restricted to the memory being retrieved while leaving other memories intact. Therefore, our study reveals a molecular genetic paradigm through which a given memory, such as new or old fear memory, can be rapidly and specifically erased in a controlled and inducible manner in the brain.

Well.
~

Open source once against illustrates the dangers of putting our elections in the hands of Diebold and other black box voting technology companies:

“Ballot Browser, an open source Python program developed by Mitch Trachtenberg (yours truly) as part of the all-volunteer Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, was instrumental in revealing that Diebold counting software had dropped 197 ballots from Humboldt County, California’s official election results. Despite a top-to-bottom review by the California Secretary of State’s office, it appears that Diebold had not informed that office of the four-year-old bug.

Shocked!

~

Homebrew is better.

I spent no small amount of time this year revising and improving my shot-to-publication workflow for my photo coverage of pro cycling races.  It’s an enormously time consuming process, and I’m still looking to improve it.  Reading this (recent) history of pro photog filing systems makes me rather thankful for today’s tech.

~

Speaking of photo tech – Polaroid is done making instant film today.

Almost 60 years after Polaroid introduced its iconic instant camera, the company will stop manufacturing the film Dec. 31. Remaining film supplies are expected to dry up sometime next year.

“Shake it like a what?”, the kids ask.

130k Troops in Iraq? Let a Stringer Cover It

By

On December 31, 2008

In Distribution, Society

Armchair Generalist notes (with the appropriate adjectives) the decision by the three major American broadcast networks to pull their full time correspondents from Iraq.

Gonzales: “At that point, I didn’t care.”

By

On December 31, 2008

In Law, Politics, Society

Perhaps it says more about my gullibility than anything else, but this WSJ interview with former AG Alberto Gonzales leaves me almost speechless:

“What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?” he said during an interview Tuesday, offering his most extensive comments since leaving government.

During a lunch meeting two blocks from the White House, where he served under his longtime friend, President George W. Bush, Mr. Gonzales said that “for some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror.” (emphasis supplied)

I just . . . I just don’t know.  Maybe the clue to his problems comes at the very end of the piece:

In one of his final acts before leaving office, Mr. Gonzales denied he was planning to quit, even though he had told the president of his intention to resign. Asked about the misleading comment Tuesday, he said: “At that point, I didn’t care.”

At that point?

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