Like everyone else in the universe, I’m in a fantasy football league. (Currently undefeated at 8-0). Yahoo encourages “smack talk” in it’s leagues, and being me, I decided to provide the nerdiest smack talk I could think of each week. This week I’ve been searching for something to say, and coming up empty. I searched the internet and realizes that no one seems to have a collection of nerdy smack talk anywhere. This is of course an unconscionable omission, and I’m going to rectify that right now. Submissions encouraged:

I believe that I have discovered the longest trip one can make with google maps connecting only two points. (And not using the “avoid highways thing – that’s just cheating). My trip begins in the Naval base in Key West Florida, and ends by the Beaufort sea in Alaska, and covers 5,644 miles. (While there are other more far flung towns in Alaska, it appears that none of them are accessible via roads). If anyone can find a longer trip (and Europe is okay to use), let me know.

Thanks to some hints from Michael (see the comments), we’ve managed to extend the ultimate path to 6,366 miles. Sounds like the ultimate road trip to me – who’s in?

This is simply the most incredible play I’ve ever seen. Admittedly the defense does seem to give up before the play is done, and it is D-III, but it’s still amazing.

go us!

I was reading a book on the halakha of pregnancy and childbirth today. In the chapter on what to do if a woman goes into labor on shabbat, the author mentioned that payment for a taxi should be prepared in advance and kept in an envelope. The part that confuses me is that he then continues to explain how it is better to have one large bill (live a $5 bill), than multiple smaller bills (like 5 $1 bills). He doesn’t explain why though, and the footnote simply says “משום ריבים בשיעורים” (I may be spelling it incorrectly), which, if my translation is correct, means that the author is worried about there being a disagreement about the amount of money, but frankly I have no idea what he’s talking about, and why there is any halakhic problem. As far as I can tell the envelope should count as one item (which is admittedly mukztah), and it shouldn’t matter how many bills are in it.

As I think about it more, I suddenly wonder if I’m not misremembering, and it said “משום ריבוים בשיעורים”, which would imply that the author disagrees with my final premise, and it saying that each individual bill counts as a violation of halakha. Next time I’m back at Hillel I’ll have to check.

Eh, I suppose They could have done a lot worse.

I have 20 weeks to convince my wife that this is a good idea.

Someone else sees the irony in this – right?

Not spending enough time with your spouse? Get a new one to ignore!

Of the RIAA’s various lawsuits against people for file sharing, exactly one of them has reached a jury verdict. A woman was found guilty and fined $222,000 for sharing 24 songs online. While the verdict is clearly ridiculous and will almost assuredly come down on appeal, the interesting thing is that the RIAA thinks their tactic of suing their customers is working despite evidence to the contrary.

The truth is, the entertainment industry has always been afraid of new technologies – the VCR, the DVD, the Diamond Rio (which you can think of as the first iPod), filesharing, and even the MP3 format itself. Heck, they even tried to sue search engines once. If they would embrace new technologies instead of trying to fight the inevitable, they might actually be better off.

Piracy is frequently a function of how much time and money people have. College students who have lots of time but little money will pirate. People who work long hours and get large salaries will purchase media because it’s easier. You can never eliminate piracy entirely, but you can reduce it by giving people cheap and convenient alternatives. The TV industry has started making their shows available online with commercials. It’s convenient, cheap, and generates a new revenue stream for the networks. The music industry has started to do that with iTunes, but it’s still just one very specific method of legally getting music which is tied into a specific software (and therefore hardware) platform. The real trick to reducing piracy is not to sue your customers, but rather to give them what they want legally in a manner that makes you money.

As an information security professional, one of the things I recognize and try to hammer home is that security must be transparent to the user. If security becomes an annoyance people will find a way around it. (And the truth is that when confronted with an obstacle even the dumbest of people becomes remarkably creative – how many times have we all seen doors propped open in the most unusual ways to circumvent technologies which are supposed to prevent it?).

case in point, the antivirus software which is installed by default on all corporate systems. It runs a complete antivirus scan pretty much whenever it wants, which completely ties up the computer for hours on end. (That’s called multitasking in the Windows world). It also has a nasty habit of constantly labelling my thunderbird mail as a virus each time I get a virus email. It then quarantines my inbox file, effectively deleting my inbox and forcing me to go into the Symantec quarantine to restore it. (This happens at least once a week). Since the settings are all mandatory and set by the corporate office (for “security” reasons of course) I have no ability to control them to make them more palatable. Ultimately I decided to simply disable the antivirus program entirely. This is a perfect example of how more complete yet invasive security measures are actually worse than less complete yet less invasive security measures. If the antivirus software allowed me to set a better time to run, let me defer scans, or let me set up exceptions I would still be happily using it. Instead I’ve decided to remove it completely.