Monthly Archives: November 2005

When Is That Flight Going to Arrive?

This entry was posted in Transportation on by

One of the handy helpers that the internet has brought us is the ability to track airline flights via sites like Flight Arrivals and Flight View. No more arriving at the airport to find that the flight will be three hours late.*
New on this front is FlightAware. They claim

Founded in March of 2005, FlightAware is the first company to offer free flight tracking for both private and commercial air traffic in the United States. FlightAware’s proprietory flight arrival time algorithms combined with our powerful, intuitive, and reliable web-based interface yield the most capable and useful flight tracking application on the Internet.

I just gave this a quick test drive and it is pretty nifty with lots of info available. The registration was a pain but, then, that’s a good reason to have a pseudonymous email account. One downside of this service today is poor to non-existent international tracking.
As usual, your mileage may vary. Check’m out.
Via A Guy In New York.
*Though you need to check early because flights can be 45 minutes early as we found out a while back. We checked about an hour before arrival and found out the plane was landing in 12 minutes and it was going to be a 40 minute drive to the airport.

Will cheney’s Torture Policy Lead to A World You Want to Live In?

This entry was posted in cheney on by

Larry Johnson argues that cheney does not understand the real world:

I think Dick Cheney has been watching too many Hollywood flicks that glorify torture. He needs, instead, to get on the ground and talk to the folks he is ostensibly trying to empower to torture.
….
If you inflict enough pain on someone they will give you information, but, unless you kill them, they will hold a grudge. As far as the information goes there is no guarantee it will be correct.
What real CIA field officers know from their work with actual sources is that whatever short term benefit can be derived from torture will be offset by the new enemy you have created. It is better to build a relationship of trust, no matter how painstaking, rather than gain a short term benefit that puts you on par with a Nazi concentration camp guard.

Perhaps Johnson underestimates cheney who certainly doesn’t intend that his victims will walk free any time soon. No, they will best end up dead or at worst be stashed away in a secret gulag until the end of the never to end war on terror. If the latter, cheney will be long gone and will have left to our children the task of cleaning his mess.
Read the rest.
Via Talking Points Memo.

Now, here is something I need….

This entry was posted in Creativity Personal Psychology on by

…all too often!
Professor Solomen’s new book: How to Find Lost Objects.
Principle one:

Something’s lost, and your first thought—your basic instinct—is to look for it. You’re ready to start rummaging about. To hunt for it in a random, and increasingly frenetic, fashion. To ransack your own house.
This is the most common mistake people make.
And it can doom their search from the start.

See, you and I both learned something right away. Tonight, I will read through the rest of his Twelve Principles.
Via boingboing.

Don’t Play Sony CDs in Your PC

This entry was posted in Intellectual Property Law Music Technology on by

Better yet, don’t even buy them until Sony stops a whole bunch of bad behavior:

the EULA does not disclose the software’s use of cloaking or the fact that it comes with no uninstall facility. An end user is not only installing software when they agree to the EULA, they are losing control of part of the computer, which has both reliability and security implications. There’s no way to ensure that you have up-to-date security patches for software you don’t know you have and there’s no way to remove, update or even identify hidden software that’s crashing your computer.
The EULA also makes no reference to any “phone home” behavior, and Sony executives are claiming that the software never contacts Sony and that no information is communicated that could track user behavior. However, a user asserted in a comment on the previous post that they monitored the Sony CD Player network interactions and that it establishes a connection with Sony’s site and sends the site an ID associated with the CD.
I decided to investigate so I downloaded a free network tracing tool, Ethereal, to a computer on which the player was installed and captured network traffic during the Player’s startup. A quick look through the trace log confirmed the users comment: the Player does send an ID to a Sony web site.
….. (go to above link to see screen shots)
I dug a little deeper and it appears the Player is automatically checking to see if there are updates for the album art and lyrics for the album it’s displaying. This behavior would be welcome under most circumstances,…

Let’s see: hidden software, no easy way to uninstall, lying about how the software works, and,well, there may be more that we don’t know about yet. I do think no purchase is the right action: Boycott Sony music CDs!
And, I disagree with mark’s assertion that checking for album art and lyric updates “would be welcome under most circumstances.” It should only be welcome if the system owner specifically asks for it to happen and given the extremely limited value of this information on a day to day basis such requests should be very rare.
Via MU at Running Scared.