So, John McCain and a bunch of Presidential hopefuls have set up MySpace pages in order to connect with the oh-so-cool younger voters. It seems that one of McCain’s staffers decided to use a nice-looking template for his page. Said staffer made a little whoopsie though - they linked back to the template designer’s images. For those not familiar with web design etiquette, this is generally considered to be in poor taste - you’re stealing another guy’s bandwidth.

Hilarity ensues.

McCain loves the hot girl-on-girl action, apparently.

Don’t hotlink images.

Class dismissed.

Came across an interesting article about airline carryon limits.

To me, the fundamental problem is that you can’t trust the airlines to safely handle checked baggage, and they won’t guarantee the safety of your items in checked baggage (at least, without ridiculous charges). Airline baggage handlers seem to have sticky fingers, which is absolutely intolerable. Probably the only way to ensure the security of checked baggage would be to:

1) Increase airline liability to some “safe” amount that would cover, say, a bag of professional photographic equipment. That’d probably be $25,000. In the state that the baggage-handling world is today, that would probably cost the TSA and the airlines billions of dollars a year. right now, I think you get ~$2,000 on domestic flights, with no coverage for “valuables” like electronics, and you still get hassled if you make a claim. I’m not going to check a camera on vacation if there’s a chance I would be without it. About the only thing electronic that goes in my checked baggage are chargers.
2) Your bag would need to be under constant surveillance, and you would have the unquestioned right to personally review the surveillance of your bag with the airline/TSA in case of loss/damage. Unfortunately, this requires a video surveillance system like on “Las Vegas” - that is to say, totally unrealistic.
3) Anyone who touches baggage or has access to the baggage areas gets all of their personal belongings inspected every time they enter/leave the airport, like UPS does at their handling facilities. They also have a “1-strike” policy on theft, and are additionaly subject to criminal penalties if caught.

Of course, some of the fault lies with travelers. Some business folks will take their standard 21″ rollaboard bag as well as a wheeled laptop bag, which is usually 2/3 the size of the rollaboard. That should get them dinged. A shoulder-style laptop bag ahould be the upper limit for us. For the non-frequent travelers at the back of the bus, charge them for the oddly-shaped items that disrupt the nice orderly row of rollaboards.

Maybe only frequent travelers (Premier/Gold types) get 1+1 allowances. The infrequent flyers get 1 bag, or 2 bags that conform to the stricter European-type carryon allowances (8 kg / 18 lbs).

Ok…we now return you to your regularly scheduled useless information…

Courtesy of the BBC, the rules of advertising. Some choice entries:

12. Children will not eat fruit or vegetables. Ever.

19. Professional people have strangely trivial preoccupations, e.g. a female barrister who is morbidly obsessed with finding a healthy snack bar.

23. Women never merely hop in and out of the shower, instead preferring to act out some sort of soapy Dance of the Seven Veils.

1. Men are obsessed with sex but will forego sex in order to watch football or drink beer.

Nice to see someone in the media business actually gets it as far as making media available for public consumption. Too bad they’re on the wrong side of the pond. My favorite bit is at the end of the article:

In 2003, when the BBC switched off the encryption on its satellite feeds, allowing anyone who bought a receiver (including the French and Belgians) to watch free satellite TV, the studios went nuts, saying that they would lose licensing revenue from continental Europe.

Hollywood swore it would boycott the BBC: No movies for you!

The BBC stood fast — after all, anyone with a camera can be a filmmaker, but to be the BBC, you need 29,000 employees and 78 years of history — and when the studios’ fiscal year wrapped up, they came, hats in hand, to the BBC, asking if they couldn’t please have some of the money they were accustomed to for satellite licensing.

Meanwhile, over here in the good old USA, I have to resort to hacking my TiVo in order to copy movies off to DVD and edit out the commercials. Why? TiVo kowtowed to the entertainment industry, and stores all of the shows it records encrypted. Fortunately, said encryption was trivial to bypass, and thanks to my StarzHD subscription, I have a nice selection of near-DVD quality recordings.

Then, I bought the new Dave Matthews Band CD, “Stand Up”. It’s one of those non-”Red Book” compliant audio CDs that contains extra crap for copy protection. Again, trivial. I bypassed it by holding down the Shift key while insterting the CD into my computer. I’d like to think it’s the schlubs over at RCA/BMG that are the tools behind this, and not DMB, but a relatively taping-friendly band like DMB that’s popular enough they might as well have a printing press spitting out $100 bills in Dave’s basement ought to be able to “Stand Up” to their label.

It’s not like I’m seeding BitTorrents of the album - all I want to to make high-quality AAC files to feed to my iPod. Stop treating me like a criminal.

Courtesy of the NY Times, an article on employers and blogging.

There’s a lot of gray area around what you can say about your employer in a public forum. Personally, I tend to err on the side of caution. Talking about cubicle layouts and maybe the occasional Dilbert-esque moments are about all I’m going to get into about Kraft. Certainly nothing technical, because that would a) be highly inappropriate, and b) bore the pants off anyone who doesn’t have a background in food science/engineering. Anything I do say about the work I do is basically public information. For instance, I can say that we add Vitamin A to some varieties of cream cheese - but that’s nothing proprietary - it’s on the ingredient line if it’s in there.

That’s my take on it - if you think that what you’re blogging might be inappropriate, it probably is.

Came across a great article on identity theft over at c|net. Here’s a snippet:

Financial institutions need to be liable for fraudulent transactions.

They need to be liable for sending erroneous information to credit bureaus based on fraudulent transactions. They can’t say that the user must keep his password secure or his machine virus-free. They can’t require the user to monitor his accounts for fraudulent activity, or his credit reports for fraudulently obtained credit cards.

Those aren’t reasonable requirements for most users. The bank must be made responsible, regardless of what the user does.

If you think this won’t work, look at credit cards. Credit card companies are liable for all but the first $50 of fraudulent transactions. They’re not hurting for business; and they’re not drowning in fraud, either. They’ve developed and fielded an array of security technologies designed to detect and prevent fraudulent transactions. And they’ve pushed most of the actual costs onto the merchants.

I agree completely. Discover caught a transaction on my account last year - in the middle of a bunch of typical transactions, they saw a $500 purchase at an Old Navy in Buffalo, NY or someplace nearby. $500 isn’t an unusual amount for me on the credit card…insurance, etc. And, they’ve even called a couple times when they saw something suspicious (like the day I had breakfast in Chicago, lunch in Memphis, and checked into a hotel in New Orleans that night). Never had the bank call about a charge.

I still like the idea of having two-factor authentication for banking / financial transactions, though.

Wired had an interesting article on the future of toilet design today. All I can say is that it’s about time. I hate low-flow toilets. I probably have to break out the plunger at our house at least twice a week. We’ve got bathroom remodeling in our future, so one of these better-designed toilets will hopefully replace our current one.

The dual-flush idea is one that actually works pretty well - pretty much every toilet in Australia had one of these, and even the high-power flush used the same amount of water as a US low-flow. Never had to plunge any of those.

Update Summer 2005: We bought and installed one of the American Standard Champion toilets. 3 months running, and no clogs yet.

A rather humorous bit I came across in the last edition of Tuesday Morning Quarterback, the NFL’s column that talks football and occcasionally diverges, as seen here:

Last week, the column noted Taco Bell’s “grilled carne asada steak” means “grilled roasted meat steak.” Eric Lund of Anaheim, Calif., home of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim — which translates as “the the Angels Angels of Anaheim” — reports the city boasts a King Pollo Chicken restaurant. As pollo is chicken in Spanish, the name translates as King Chicken Chicken. Jonathan Clough adds that Starbucks offers “chai tea latte.” In India, chai means “tea served with milk,” while latte means “milk” in Italian. So the translation of “chai tea latte” would be “tea with milk with tea with milk.”

Will marketing wonders ever cease? Of course, I work for a company that makes a fat-free cream cheese, which is an oxymoron permitted by US food labeling regulations. Fat-free? Self-explanatory, and defined in 21 CFR 120.10. Cream cheese? Legally required to contain a minimum of 33% fat (21 CFR 133.133). Cream by itself? Legally required to contain at least 18% fat (21 CFR something-or-other)

Then there’s something like a reduced-fat butter, which we can translate as “reduced fat fat”.

Nice to have someone over at ESPN cheerleading for the Illini today.

It was nice to walk past the section of the office that has a lot of Michigan State alumni this morning and just smile.

Course, Dickie V still can’t give us all props:

However, I feel that the Illini will not run the table in the regular season. They have eight games left, four at home and four on the road.

Against who, exactly? We play at Michigan, Penn State, Iowa, and Ohio State. They’re all sub-.500 teams in the Big Ten, and we already thumped the latter three. Iowa just lost their marquee player for the season, too, so count them out. Michigan just got blown out by Purdue, so they’re not much of a threat. At home, we’ve got Indiana, Wisconsin, Northwestern, and Purdue. Already beat Purdue and Wisconsin on the road (at least Wisconsin played us close). No one’s going to win who’s not wearing orange at Assembly Hall this year.

The odds don’t exactly favor Illinois running the tables (17 wins to get the national championship), so I’d like to see Illinois drop a game in the Big Ten tournament. Losing to Wisconsin or MSU there won’t prevent Illinois from getting a #1 seed in the Indianapolis/Chicago bracket. The loss will get them motivated and set to run the tables in March. 38-0 would certainly be nice, but I’ll take 37-1…just as long as win #37 is the finals in St. Louis.

Just an interesting article on the development and the guts of the best-selling MP3 player in the world.

Found a great article by Sen. John McCain about this. Definitely worth a read.

The age old question - is it soda or is it pop? Finally, an answer.

I’m originally from soda country (Madison County, IL), am currently (for 2 more days) living in soda country (Lewis County, NY), and then moving into pop countrry (Cook County, IL). Fortunately, the Chicago area has enough transplants that it’s not firmly pop.

It is kind of weird how there’s a huge pocket of “soda” centered around St. Louis, MO and Milwaukee, WI. Wonder why that is?

Every now and then, I watch Law & Order reruns on TNT while I’m eating dinner. A columnist in the Sun-Times excerpted some of Lenny’s (one of the cops) great crime-scene 1-liners as he’s leaving for yeat another of the L&O spinoffs (I predict the series will in some way shape or fashion be on rerun through 2050). My personal favorites:

Still bruised from romance: “My second wife always wanted a walk-in closet. Now I finally got one. Trouble is, I live in it.”
When the detectives find a possible suspect hiding in his closet clutching a golf club:”You got a permit for that putter?”
As a suspect asks if he’s kidding: “If I was kiddin’ you, I’d be wearin’ a fez, and no pants.”

After watching that cheesy “10.5″ mini-series on NBC this weekend, I came across this website dedicated to the physics of movies:

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics

Movie physics are of course not to be confused with the cartoon rules of physics I’ve blogged about previously.

Movies that get “good physics” reviews? Road to Perdition, Seven Years in Tibet. Movies that suck? Well, Star Wars Episode 1, Armageddon (I know Marcie, you still like it ). I’m adding 10.5 to the list.

When I was a kid, I’d play video games at a friend’s, since my parents wouldn’t get me a Nintendo. When we’d play for hours, our thumbs would get sore, a condition we called “Mario-itis” (yep, I was a geek back then, too).

Turns out that maybe Mom and Dad should’ve gotten me one:

Video Games Enhance Surgical Skills

All those years on the couch playing Nintendo and PlayStation appear to be paying off for surgeons. Researchers found that doctors who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made about 37 percent fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery and performed the task 27 percent faster than their counterparts who did not play video games.

Buy your kids a video game, and they might become doctors one day. If you don’t, they go on to do despicable things like food engineering

…doing research around Guinness. Researchers have shown that the bubbles actually can fall down the sides of the glass without violating laws of physics.

Using a super-slow-motion video camera — able to record 750 frames a second — Stanford University scientists with a penchant for some cold Guinness have confirmed that beer bubbles do fall.

But careful analysis of the tape has revealed that, while bubbles are lighter than beer and should rise, the laws of physics need not be rewritten after all.

“The answer turns out to be really very simple,” said Richard Zare, a professor of natural sciences at Stanford.

He said the old axiom, “What goes up, must come down,” actually holds true.

“In this case, the bubbles go up more easily in the center of the beer glass than on the sides because of the drag from the walls. As they go up, they raise the beer, and the beer has to spill back, and it does.

“It runs down the sides of the glass carrying the bubbles — particularly little bubbles — with it, downward,” Zare said.

Of course, this does involve a lot of hard work…

But Zare and postdoctoral student Andrew Alexander were skeptical, so they set out to test the theory by “analyzing” beer at both the pub and in the lab.

“Andy and I first disbelieved this and wondered if people had maybe too much Guinness to drink,” Zare said.

Nice to know my hometown has such a great national reputation.

Oddly disturbing:

Ohio salad arrives with piece of thumb

As someone who works around food all the time, and deals a lot with ensuring food processes are safe, it’s just a bit disturbing that this sort of thing could happen.

…if everything in the world got good all of a sudden? Would Google News look like this?

I came across this rather funny article about California’s perception of the rest of the U.S.

Of course, other places in the US have the same problem. When I went to college at UIUC, I think a few people in my dorm freshman year didn’t realize there’s a lot of Illinois which is south of I-80. Glen Carbon is not next to Naperville, folks. Get on I-55 and drive 4 hours. Then you have the conversation that goes like this:

Me: Where’re you from?
Them: Chicago.
Me: Cool, what neighborhood?
Them: Aurora.

(For those unfamiliar with Chicago, Aurora is one of the far western suburbs…call it 30 miles out. In terms a Californian would understand, it would be a resident of somewhere like Mountain View saying they lived in San Francisco.)