During these holidays, I watched quite a bit of light stuff on the internet. Being partial to British comedies, I enjoyed watching some that revisited some of the well known ones, with the writers, producers and stars talking about their early lives and how they came together on these shows. [Read more…]
One of the things I dislike about the end of the year are the endless retrospectives of the year gone by and the innumerable lists of the year’s best and worst. I skip over almost all of them. [Read more…]
Today comes a story about a talk that privacy advocate Jacob Appelbaum gave at a conference where he says that the NSA has the ability to tap into everyone’s iPhones.
Independent journalist and security expert Jacob Appelbaum on Monday told a hacker conference in Germany that theNSA could turn iPhones into eavesdropping tools and use radar wave devices to harvest electronic information from computers, even if they weren’t online.
Appelbaum told hundreds of computer experts gathered at Hamburg’s Chaos Communications Conference that his revelations about the NSA’s capabilities “are even worse than your worst nightmares.”
“What I am going to show you today is wrist-slittingly depressing,” he said. [Read more…]
The Onion’s head film critic Peter K. Rosenthal reviews It’s a Wonderful Life. He is just like me. I too hate it when people in films do something mind-bogglingly stupid just in order to drive the story along. (Language advisory) [Read more…]
It is quite impressive how the allegedly gridlocked, fiercely partisan, do-nothing Congress that supposedly seeks to block president Obama’s every move, can get together quietly with him to agree on sweeping powers that endanger our constitutional protections against arbitrary and indefinite arrest and detention by the government. [Read more…]
Bigamy, the act of one person getting formally married with a civil marriage license to two different people, is a crime in the US and most countries. I had always thought that polygamy was the same act carried out with three or more people. No doubt I had been swayed by the parallel with mathematics where the prefix ‘bi-‘ signaled two and ‘poly-‘ signaled an indeterminate number that was more than two. [Read more…]
Barrett Foa as Mitt Romney sings his version of the song I Believe from the show The Book of Mormon. (This performance is from October 29, 2012, just before the last presidential election.) [Read more…]
RadioLab had a good program this week on altruism and how nice behavior could emerge out of natural selection. The first part dealt with the tragic story of George Price, the eccentric but brilliant scientist who developed an equation that showed why someone might sacrifice their life for another. But he personally could not deal with the conclusion that all altruism was not a freely chosen act. [Read more…]
Former CIA agent Philip Giraldi gets together with former colleagues from the agency around the holidays and on these occasions tries to understand how they can support the anti-constitutional, anti-human rights, war criminal polices that have now become routine actions of the US government. [Read more…]
Newton’s first law of motion, that an object will continue in its current state of motion unless acted upon by an external force, can be used as a metaphor about how changing the status quo is harder than maintaining it. It seems to apply in law too, where the status quo carries with it a weight that puts a heavier burden on those trying to change it than those trying to maintain it. This was manifest in the case involving Utah’s same-sex marriage. [Read more…]