Monthly Archives: May 2006

Reviews

The latest figures on podcasting

Rick Klau, VP at FeedBurner, published the latest podcasting figures at this post on their Burning Questions blog.

FeedBurner now handles 44,889 podcast feeds (three of those are mine) and over 1,598,988 people subscribe to those feeds. The two bar graphs show the amazing growth that has occurred in the past 15 months. Wow!

I couldn’t have done it without FeedBurner, either. I detailed why I love and use FeedBurner in this post. You’ll see why when you read it. FeedBurner gives me the sort of peace of mind that one can get when he knows important documents are locked in a thick safe somewhere. No matter what happens to my web hosting, and no matter how many times I’ve got to switch my original feed URL, my FeedBurner feed stays the same, and my subscribers don’t have to concern themselves with my problems. It’s just plain nice!

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Thoughts

The NSA wire-tapping scandal

I wrote about the wire tapping issue back on the 8th of April, and it looks like the it’s resurfaced big time. Just today, I read this USA Today article. Senators Leahy and Specter picked up the stoy, then CNN picked it up as well. Now the Washington Post published the results of a telephone survey that says most americans (60% or so) support the NSA’s collection of information on telephone calls.

It seems like all that’s happening is that massive amounts of data are getting crunched at the NSA, for statistical purposes, in an effort to try and determine patterns in terrorist communications, but the NSA (including Gen. Hayden) and the Bush administration have been going about it all wrong. As the USA Today article details, they used strong-arm tactics on the phone companies in order to get them to cooperate. When Qwest wouldn’t, they accused them of compromising national security and told them they wouldn’t get any more classified contracts… Is that the way to treat someone who has legal and understandable doubts about its customers’ privacy? I think it’s shameful.

So let me see if I get it straight. The government gives you classified contracts if you jump through their hoops, and once you get used to the taste of steady government money, threatens to yank them from your plate if you won’t compromise on your ethics. It looks to be a pretty good tactic, which works great on most executives. After all, every one of the phone companies but Qwest capitulated and handed over their data.

It’s all very sad. The NSA’s methods are classified, but I for one have a hard time seeing how one can gather real data about terrorists (people who are, for the most part, already flagged and monitored) by crunching through the phone calls of the average law-abiding citizen, unless you’re trying to make sure this same average citizen isn’t a terrorist.

Maybe it’s about establishing a “noise floor”, and that’s why they need a statistically-relevant mass of data? Once they’ve compiled a database of the common conversations of regular folks, anything out of the ordinary will spike above the “noise floor”, raising a flag for further examination. Just my uneducated guess. The method sounds good, but the manner in which they’re going about securing the data is, as I’ve said above, wrong.

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Thoughts

Quote for today

Aristotle – “What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.”

I think he had his finger on the problem, didn’t he? Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we ought to do it. We’ve got the power of judgment, we can think for ourselves, let’s use our brains and make informed decisions. And let’s learn to say no when something doesn’t agree with our belief system. The point is to stop blindly doing things, and to reason it out for ourselves why it is we are doing something, in particular when that something will have consequences on others.

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Thoughts

Pet snakes in the Everglades

I thought I’d mention this Wired News article while I was on the subject of the Everglades. As if things aren’t bad enough down there with pesticide run-off, drought and species extinction, we now have pet boa constrictors roaming around and tussling with the alligators. Guess who’s behind this latest mess? Yup, you guessed it, it’s people. Forget invasive species, we’re the number one threat to both ourselves, and the planet.

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Events

I-95 is to be closed for days in Florida

A wildfire which has been burning since April 21 has now managed to close down I-95 for several days down in Florida, in the Daytona Beach area, from Port Orange to Edgewater. According to the FL Division of Forestry, 84 fires were still burning throughout the state on more than 36,800 acres. The fires are to be blamed for several deaths and multiple car accidents as well.

I lived in South Florida from many years. Could it be that the effects of over-development are starting to make themselves felt? The draining and covering up of large portions of the Everglades has been blamed for recent droughts, and as we know, droughts are at the root of wildfires.

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