bitmonger

Ok, so if you haven't heard the FDA is banning flavored cigs.

omg.

I don't smoke, but this is one of the dumbest things I've seen in a while.

Of course, menthol is excluded (incidentally Phillip Morris helped write the bill)...
but cloves are not.

Seriously, this feels a lot like ... you should ban mostly my competitors favors, no really you should they're bad...

The coverage I am seeing actually talks about cloves as the gateway cig for children.

WTF.

But wait it gets "better". (I use the word here as zim does ... "Made the fires worse? ... or better!")

from npr:

"If there's a loophole, it's for what the FDA calls "bona fide pipe tobacco," which can still be flavored. Put that in your pipe and smoke it."

So wait, people can't buy filtered clove cigarettes, but they can buy clove tobacco and roll unfiltered cigarettes to smoke. This is the dumbest thing I have read in a while.

Disgusting.

Pharma is not pretty I know that.
This is beyond the pale.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090809231252693

Background:

Neurontin is a fairly safe anti-epilepsy drug. It has a comparatively low side-effect profile and its
hard to overdose on. It is not the world's most effective drug, but the side effects are not bad. In fact my sister took this for a long time for epilepsy. Anyway, P-D decided they needed to make more money off the drug. AED (anti-epileptic-drugs) don't make the big bucks. So they did a lot of bad things and including most recently sending a some shady guy to a witness's house the day before he was to testify against them...

Anyway the article is huge. This particular case was dismissed, but the testimony is damning to the P-D/Pfizer.

( Here are some of the things that got me... )

Pennsic was awesome as usual and I feel nicely refreshed. I really needed that vacation. It was great to see everyone and I had a blast.

Unfortunately, my car seems to have developed a short (or really a short it had has gotten worse). I will have to play the 'find the electrical needle in the haystack' game at some point in the near future to make it reliable again...

As a result I didn't get to say goodbye to everyone I wanted to before leaving. Thankfully, I did make it home without a tow which is awesome.

Very nice presentation at TED showing how many things many bright people think are wrong.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_s

I don't like simple narratives for social problems and I like that this presentation partially for that reason. It is a great presentation on health care, economic fairness, across and within countries makes a good case for looking very carefully at data.

He starts by comparing he students performance to 'chimps' on questions where the student has to pick the right country out of two countries where there is a factor of 2 difference of performance between the two. His point is people's notions are too simplistic and sometimes just wrong or dated, and later makes the point that variation within countries and continents is too large for one size fits all geography based approach.

Very neat data visualization.

So Statestats lets you do something like google trends, but look at the geographic trends. It also produces a variable correlation for things like literacy and "voted for obama" and whatnot although I am not sure how those are collected and what they really mean.

For some reason, I think this is really awesome. So I like the idea of putting terms that frame issues somewhat to see what the political opinions look like geographically. I will try some non-political ones later.

The first one I tried was 'Freedom of Speech'. That was not like Obama's EV map, but you can clearly see the different regions of the country stand out in similar blocks of color.

Anyways much fun (for me at least :P).

I think it would be fun to see what some normal/unexpected terms that correlate to the map as well, but I've only started looking. One of the relationships on the map I thought was interesting was 'freedom of speech correlates well to cold weather. Which is amusing.

If anyone finds any interesting maps let me know.

I will have to try some more interesting maps later.

Ok.

This drm shit is starting to seriously annoy me.

WTF, Apple.

What happened to all your talk about DRM being anti-consumer?? ... cause it still is.

I think I have now decided my next laptop is not going to be an Apple. I do need to think about this a bit, but I this is serious shit I do not want to support. I don't rent DVDs and rip them, but I get all this BS shoved down my throat. It already feels like I am supporting an evil bully by following the law.

The RIAA/MPAA so consistently misrepresent and violates law it sickens me. (Copy != Distribution for example)

It saddens me to see Apple not only adding this crap, but saying they are going to push it on their catalog. How many people have DisplayPort Home Theatre projectors/TV with HDCP, and why should I need it?!

Its like la-la land or something. This is so not even a sane threat model.

Such BS.
The courts need to wake up.
The congress needs to kill this DMCA bullshit.

Where are we supposed to shove our old projectors, btw?

I've been interested in visualizations more lately. Strange maps has all sort of interesting conceptual maps and visualizations on it. The first one I ran into was this 50 state GDP map. Each state is replaced with a nation of the same approximate GDP. This map caught my eye today. It shows cotton production in 1860 vs 2008 election district results.

Sorry, if all my posts have been political, but I am obsessed now.

Nate makes an interesting argument about prop 8. Basically, it passed in 2000 as well (and was struck down) and the point is it passed by less votes this time. So, the gap is closing, and things are moving forward where they matter in terms of public support. Its just not quite there yet, but it is getting better not worse each year.

Wow.

I don't watch TV much.

I have heard more about Keith Olbermann than I have actually heard him, but I am glad to see this kind of voice on TV.

Ok, so I see all this information in CNN's election center. All kinds of results have little notes on them saying stuff like 'updated 3 minutes ago', but with no sign of an actual update. Often I know there is some date when a recount or some other event will occur, but CNN never shows this date or lists the date of the last real update. Fail.

CNN still hasn't awarded the 1 EV in from Omaha's to Obama yet. Which while not exactly a big deal, if they claim to be updating things, what are they updating?? They keep showing incorrect EV counts on
the front page every time I visit. Double Fail.

Anyway, for those who haven't been addicted to it this election like me, fivethirtyeight.com is awesome. I have been pleased that Nate and company has continued provide my fix after election day so far.

I was thrilled at the election results last night, and I still feel very good about the long term impact that Obama's registration campaign, Obama, and the number of people who choose Obama, and
the changes we see already in the political map of this country.

However, I was saddened to see the ballot initiative results. There is some good news in here, but also some sad news.

( Ballot Initiatives )

Garick

From xkcd

I haven't finished reading this yet, but so far this is the coolest security paper I've read in a long time...

http://citp.princeton.edu/memory/

Wow.

Garick

Perhaps that was the question, all along... http://rename42nd.org/

This is a cool tribute.

Garick

I can feel the sanity. Yhup there it goes.

http://lolthulhu.com/

From the perlipc man page...

     But you don't actually have to make two pipe calls.  If you
     have the socketpair() system call, it will do this all for
     you.

         #!/usr/bin/perl -w
         # pipe2 - bidirectional communication using socketpair
         #   "the best ones always go both ways"

 

If you want to see it yourself ..

$ man perlipc | grep -A8 -e '^ *But you don'

I saw this and it made me feel good.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070621204444692

I particularly  liked the 'view source button'.

I think OLPC is shaping up nicely..

So, I've almost done this for years. Lets see if it takes.