July 2011
15 posts
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Federal Government Indicts Former Demand Progress... →
coderspiel:
Moments ago, Aaron Swartz, former executive director and founder of Demand Progress, was indicted by the US government. As best as we can tell, he is being charged with allegedly downloading too many scholarly journal articles from the Web. The government contends that downloading said articles is actually felony computer hacking and should be punished with time in prison.
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Maven: the build tool that takes more time to build and configure than the actual application it’s building. Somehow—and maybe this is just personal bias—it doesn’t seem like xml just vomited into a wiki should count as documentation.
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Short Science Fiction: The Phone
Preface: Sometimes I daydream short fictions. I liked this one.
I pick up the phone in the middle of the night and on the other end is
my Grandmother, light-years away. “Your Grandfather,” she says through
tears, “has passed on this morning, threw a clot and had a heart—-”
The line fuzzed out and went dead. I called Grandmother back; she
answers and there are no...
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There are a trio of fighter jets making low altitude circles around Rochester, NY. They look like F/A-18s. There are no armaments loaded: a training exercise? I find military aircraft to be utterly compelling devices for the skill needed of the designer, maintenance crew, the operator and technical mastery of its engineering. The sheer number of people which must be coordinated to even sustain the...
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The manner in which Puppet manages its ssl certification is an atrocity: dropped requests, broken revoking and more obscure error messages forwarded from the bowels of openssl than I can shake a stick at. Such problems are so obtuse that I’ve found it more simple just to purge puppet and puppetmaster from my cluster machines and start over from scratch. Clearly this will not fly once...
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I rather wish the Amazon Kindle was connected with some sort of lending library. Especially with regards to current events, buying a hard-copy text for $50 is far too much but so too $15 for a Kindle version, if even one such exists. My American Library copy of Thoreau’s longer works is well-thumbed and increasingly taking on the character you might expect of a book found at the bottom of a...
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Letter to my Senator
On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 3:32 PM, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand Senator@gillibrand.senate.gov wrote:
July 7, 2011
Dear Brian,
Thank you for writing to me with regard to legislation that would give the federal government the authority to turn off portions of the internet in the event of a major cybersecurity incident. I understand your concerns.
In the 21st Century, access to the...
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Nature -- "...why scientific programming does not... →
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Bandicoot -- a set-algebra language →
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