Hilarity ensues.

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

Don’t hotlink images.

Class dismissed.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.