Have no practical use for it.
Camera is not included.
(I wonder if you could build a business around this device.)
Can’t afford it.
May 6th, 2013Chester, Chester…
May 6th, 2013Eric Toth is allegedly a bad guy. He stands accused of being a child molester and child pornographer. (I use the word “alleged” because he has not been convicted yet, though the evidence against him appears to be pretty strong.)
Toth was indicted on these charges in 2008 and went on the run. He managed to avoid capture, even though he was featured on “America’s Most Wanted” and made the FBI “10 Most Wanted” list, until a few weeks ago. Authorities found him in Nicaragua and shipped him back to the US to face charges.
Why do I note this here? Because there’s an Austin connection: Toth lived here for a while…
More:
He was invited to speak at a SMBNation conference in October, but skipped the country instead.
One of the big questions on my mind (and I’m sure other people in Austin are asking the same thing): did I ever meet this man?
I’m just going to point out that if you do a carefully crafted Google search using the phrase “banker once upon a time” and using the “site:smbnation.com” parameter, you’ll get results. And those results match the last name Toth was using when he was captured. (In Nicaragua, he was going by “Robert Shaw Walker“.)
I share some of the qualms the WP has, which is why I’m not directly linking to the bio on SMBNation. But I want to point out to the Posties that they’re not quite as clever as they think they are; the art of crafting Google searches like that is hardly arcane or mysterious.
(Also, SMBNation? You might want to address this somewhere on your site.)
Week of Gatsby: Day 1.
May 6th, 2013In honor of the forthcoming movie, I am declaring this week the “Week of Gatsby” on WCD. Mostly for my own personal amusement.
Today’s entry: The Great Gastby for NES, a browser based game in which you wander around Gatsby’s party, throwing your hat at various targets and searching for the titular character.
(Yes, I am planning to see the movie. Yes, in 3D. “Argo” was the last thing I saw in a theater, and I figure I could use the diversion. Even if it is a pile of crap.)
(And, yes, as it happens, I do like the book. A short defense of it is here.)
“Firing” watch
May 5th, 2013P.J. Carlesimo out as coach of the Brooklyn Nets.
I put “firing” in quotes because Carlesimo was acting as an interim coach: as you may recall, the team fired Avery Johnson in December. (Wasn’t he great in “Spenser: For Hire” and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”?)
Carlesimo went 35-19 as interim coach, and the Nets did go to the playoffs. But apparently that wasn’t good enough, and the team is looking for a change.
Random notes: May 5, 2013.
May 5th, 2013Mildly interesting NYT article: Revisiting L.B.J.’s Austin, One Address at a Time. I would have liked for this article to be a little longer, but some of the places I have in mind (such as El Patio) are actually associated more with Mrs. Johnson than the president.
Weer’d is at the NRA convention, so I’m going to step on his “Gun Death” territory: we must ban the deadly killer assault limos! Nobody needs a high capacity vehicle to get anywhere: you can get by with a Smart Car!
(Also.)
Obit watch: May 4, 2013.
May 4th, 2013Random notes: May 4, 2013.
May 4th, 2013I feel sure I’ve written before about the Feds and their effort to shut down the Mongols Motorcycle Club by…seizing their trademarks. Because, of course, not having a logo will deter members of the Mongols from engaging in criminal activity, and they’d never think of something like adopting a new logo, or doing without. After all, how can you make meth without a snazzy logo?
Oddly, though, I can’t find that post. But by way of Reason‘s “Hit and Run”, I have discovered a couple of updates:
- The Feds first effort to seize the Mongols trademarks failed. Badly.
So not only did the government not get what they were looking for, they have to pay out a quarter million dollars worth of taxpayer’s money
and clean up the garbage. - Typically for the Federal government, if it doesn’t work, do it harder: they’ve filed to seize the trademark again.
In other news, I was considering writing an extended rant about the Statesman and their forthcoming paywall. But now I don’t have to: Lawrence has saved me the trouble, in a post with charts and graphs and words and all that good stuff. I commend it to your attention.
Random notes: May 2, 2013.
May 2nd, 2013Jimmy Savile isn’t the only British entertainer caught up in scandal:
I don’t want to seem like I’m trivializing this. But going on:
Among the people caught up in this:
Crap. Crap crap crap crappity crap.
May 1st, 2013Freewheeling Bicycles, official purveyor of bicycles, accessories, and repairs to sportsfirings.com, is closing at the end of May.
This makes me sad. There are other bike shops in Austin: REI in particular isn’t a bad place to go. But the people at Freewheeling were always nice and helpful to me, and the store felt like it had a personality. That’s something lacking at REI, or Bicycle Sport Shop, or pretty much all the other shops I’ve found in Austin.
Obit watch: May 1, 2013.
May 1st, 2013TMQ Watch: April 30, 2013.
April 30th, 2013And so we come to the end of the TMQ NFL draft interregnum. What messages does TMQ have for us this week? After the jump…
Ring ring ring, open phone.
April 29th, 2013Great and good friend of sportsfirings.com and valued commenter lelnet left a long comment on last night’s cellphone post. Because his comment represents a lot of work and thought (and I believe in rewarding hard work) and because I’m afraid it will get lost in the shuffle, I’m promoting it to a blog post (with his permission).
You can already buy, off the shelf at Fry’s, a “phone” that does essentially what you’re talking about, using available wi-fi networks to connect with Skype and make calls through that, without any involvement of the cell providers. (Yes, I know…Skype is a proprietary protocol and would be unacceptable to Stallman. The firmware is also closed. But since it’s provably _possible_, one could do it with open standards if one saw a market.)
The problem is that it doesn’t scale well. Getting a reliable wi-fi signal is pretty easy…in the sorts of places one is likely to have access to a _wired_ phone whenever one wants one. Building a wi-fi network that covers the places one actually needs mobile connectivity from is a massively harder problem, due to the range limitations of unlicensed spectrum.
It _might_ be possible to do it using amateur frequencies, _if_ you could get regulatory approval to open those up to use by the general public. Which, of course, would involve fighting off both the whole telco industry and at least 80% of the amateur radio community. Considering that the latter group is where you’d be trying to recruit most of your network engineers from, it seems like it’d be a bad idea to begin your plan by irrevocably pissing them off, even if you magically assume that you’ll be able to out-muscle the telcos in Washington.
The last mile is a hard problem on several different dimensions, some of them physical and some of them political. But there is something you _could_ do…
Build an Android (or, if you like, Replicant) phone, pre-configured to send all its traffic through an encrypted VPN to an anonymizing end-point. Purchase connectivity for it on an existing cell carrier’s prepaid plan. Disable the cellular voice service, and have it send and receive calls exclusively through VoIP connectivity to an Asterisk or FreeSwitch server, either run by the same entity that does your anonymizer, or run yourself on a cheap colo server stuck in a rack in some country you doubt is ever going to care enough to spy on you.
Your cell provider can easily determine that Charles Udall Farley (or whatever name you gave them when you signed up…it’s prepaid, so it’s not like the name you give has to pass a credit check) pushes a lot of data around, but they’d have no way of inspecting the content. They’d have a record of Mr. Farley’s movements around their network, but no way to associate that with you, or even with the phone number you make and receive calls on. An Open Source OS on the phone addresses the “remote bugging” fears. It doesn’t depend on you personally running any software that RMS would find objectionable. And since you can make and receive calls from anywhere that you’re able to get a data signal off a cell tower, it’s still useful if your car breaks down by the side of the road, instead of just in your home and office, like a wi-fi-only device would be.
(I came up with this plan for a team of spies in a novel my wife is writing. But although to my knowledge no such phone exists today, there’s absolutely no barrier to someone building one tomorrow. And both the technologies and the services required to support the back-end of it are already available for purchase in the real world right now, at prices comparable to or better than what people who already had cell phones in the mid-90s were paying for service then.)
The only thing I’d add to this is that I, personally, have no interest in pissing off the amateur radio operators out there; both because it is not good strategy, as lelnet notes, and because I happen to be one myself. (KF5BFL, in case anyone was wondering, but don’t look for me; I don’t have any transmitting equipment at the moment.)
Jimmy Casino.
April 29th, 2013Once upon a time, there was a man named James Stockwell who lived in Orange County.
Mr. Stockwell led a colorful life. He ran strip clubs on the Sunset Strip in the 1970s. He was also involved in credit card fraud and counterfeiting. Mr. Stockwell went away for a while.
When he came out of prison, he started a chain of hotdog stands called “Cowboy Hotdogs”. He raised a million dollars for his hotdog stands. But “Cowboy Hotdogs” folded; worse yet, Mr. Stockwell admitted that he stole $412,000 from his investors.
Mr. Stockwell, also known as “Jimmy Casino”, also ran the Mustang Topless Theater in Orange County. (Strippers, always with the strippers.) By 1987, he was in a bind: the IRS was going to shut down the Mustang because of “millions of dollars in unpaid taxes”, he didn’t have the money to make restitution payments to the “Cowboy Hotdogs” investors, and he owed other folks money. Serious other folks.
25 years later, a man named Richard Morris Jr. is standing trial for the murder of Jimmy Casino. The investigators in the case matched DNA from Morris to DNA recovered from Casino’s girlfriend, and arrested him in 2008.
I’m looking forward to the book about this case.
Spider-Man, Spider-Man…
April 29th, 2013If this had happened in New York City, I’d blame Julie Taymor, Bono, and The Edge.
Obit watch: April 29, 2013.
April 29th, 2013Dr. Kenneth I. Appel, noted mathematician.
Dr. Appel is famous, along with Dr. Wolfgang Haken, for their 1976 proof of the four-color map theorem. Their proof was significant for two reasons:
- The four color theorem was a major unsolved problem in mathematics.
- The Appel/Haken proof was the first major mathematical proof that used computers in the process.
The Appel/Haken proof was rather controversial at the time:
I would have been 11 at the time, and I remember this being a big deal. I even remember trying to read the Scientific American article about the four color proof, and it being more than a little above my head. I’d love to go back and read that article now, but (of course) it doesn’t seem to be available online unless you’re willing to cough up money to Nature.
(When did Nature acquire the Scientific American archives? Did I miss that?)