An Ohio appellate court has upheld the felony hacking conviction of a man who was found guilty of unauthorized access for misusing his computer at work.

This case supports the very very bad idea that it is a crime to do something with a computer that you weren't authorized to do with it. This idea would have people go to prison with felony convictions for reading MemeStreams from work. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Court Upholds Hacking Conviction of Man for Uploading Porn Pics from Work Computer | Threat Level | Wired.com

n Massachusetts, a young woman makes genetically modified E. coli in a closet she converted into a home lab. A part-time DJ in Berkeley, Calif., works in his attic to cultivate viruses extracted from sewage. In Seattle, a grad-school dropout wants to breed algae in a personal biology lab.

These hobbyists represent a growing strain of geekdom known as biohacking, in which do-it-yourselfers tinker with the building blocks of life in the comfort of their own homes. Some of them buy DNA online, then fiddle with it in hopes of curing diseases or finding new biofuels.

In Attics and Closets, 'Biohackers' Discover Their Inner Frankenstein - WSJ.com

Is there a 3rd party twitter app that builds a link page based on my follows? If not, someone should build it. It would be my start page.

I've been saying that twitter is the closest anyone has come to MemeStreams. These applications roll the links people in your twitter network have tweeted. The result may be more valuable than following twitter itself - particularly if these apps are well designed. I haven't had time to play around with them yet.

Twitter Link Page

Five months later and it happens again... my internet is down. The router (an SMC Barricade) that I hooked up during the previous debacle is now unable to obtain a DHCP lease from Comcast's network. This always seems to happen on a weekend...

So, I replaced the SMC with my Belkin. This is the exact same Belkin that Comcast's first and second level technical support insisted MUST be malfunctioning last December because it was unable to obtain a DHCP lease from their network at that time. It works just fine. I'm back up.

The SMC goes into my toolbox - inevitably in a few months I'll wake up and my Belkin will again be unable to obtain a lease from Comcast, and I'll replace it with the SMC, which will work just fine.

My previous explanation of this problem erred in terms of providing a lot of irrelevant technical detail about the difference between the DHCP process that I was seeing from my laptop and my Belkin. I'm now operating off the exact same Belkin that was not getting a lease in December, and it performs DHCP in exactly the same way that it did in December, but it now gets a lease just fine, and I now have a different device that cannot get a lease.

The simplest explanation is that Comcast's network is refusing a lease to my router's MAC address. Other MAC addresses can get a lease just fine. This condition appears to be temporary, but it lasts more than 24 hours and thats as long as I'm willing to wait for it to clear.

This is most likely a configuration problem with their DHCP server - my first guess is that it is not allowing devices with old leases to obtain new ones, but of course I can't troubleshoot this myself, and Comcast refuses to take it seriously. If I was a sadist I'd call Comcast's technical support so that they can tell me, again, that my router must be broken. I've got better things to do today.

I wonder how widespread this problem is. I wonder how many Comcast customers go through router after router thinking that they must be pieces of junk that fail constantly, when, in fact, there is a problem with Comcast's network. Hopefully, some victims of this problem will find this thread and be saved a lot of frustration.

RE: Comcast's DHCP is STILL broken

A First-Class stamp now costs 44-cents, 2-cents more than last week.

Eva Jackson, Inland spokesperson for the Postal Service, says rate increases will be an annual thing.h

Stamps increase again.

While there’s plenty to criticize in that post-9/11 law, it doesn’t contain any provision that abrogates a defendant’s right to a trial...

The boy’s mother, Annette Lundeby, has even acknowledged in interviews that her son has been formally charged, has a court-appointed attorney, and has already made appearances in front of a judge.

Bloggers, TV, Go Nuts Over Misleading ‘Patriot Act’ Arrest Claim | Threat Level

flynn23 wrote:
It makes me sick.

Complete non sequitur, but this CNN story is like a poster child for news media hypocrisy. They talk and talk about all the myths that were born of news media sensationalism of the incident and then they engage in exactly the same sort of sensationalistic tone:

I referred to him — and I'm dating myself — as the Eddie Haskel of Columbine High School," says Principal Frank DeAngelis, referring to the deceptively polite teen on the 1950s and '60s sitcom Leave it to Beaver. "He was the type of kid who, when he was in front of adults, he'd tell you what you wanted to hear."

When he wasn't, he mixed napalm in the kitchen .

Was that comment about napalm really necessary? Does it help promote a better understanding of why this happened?

The bottom line is that Harris was a psychopath. He had mental illness that is most likely biological in origin that made it impossible for him to feel empathy. No external factor made him what he was. The story dances around this subject but does not hit it head on. This is a clinical disorder that effects a large number of people. It cannot be treated and it has terrible consequences.

If you want to reduce the risk of this kind of thing happening, the best way to do that is to advocate more funding for psychiatric research. I don't understand why all of the people who have been motivated to do something about Columbine never zeroed in on that simple answer. We are not spending enough money on understanding and treating these illnesses, and they are baddly misunderstood by the general public.

Donate to NARSAD, the International Mental Health Research Organization, or the American Mental Health Foundation.

Columbine

After nearly four months of frank, honest, and open dialogue about the failing economy, a weary U.S. populace announced this week that it is once again ready to be lied to about the current state of the financial system.

Nation Ready To Be Lied To About Economy Again | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Paul Graham:

Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

I've gotten old enough that I now understand why adults seek to escape reality. Paradoxically, I think I was better at escaping reality when I was younger.

Lies We Tell Kids

We just launched a new search feature that makes it easy to find and compare public data. So for example, when comparing Santa Clara county data to the national unemployment rate, it becomes clear not only that Santa Clara's peak during 2002-2003 was really dramatic, but also that the recent increase is a bit more drastic than the national rate:

Official Google Blog: Adding search power to public data