Bush Memorial Sewage Plant?

It's qualified for the November ballot in San Francisco.

New Diebold flaw: Election result leaked.

Exposé by The Onion ("America's Finest News Source").

See also: these and this.

Decisioning

Today I received a flyer for a conference with the theme "Enterprise Decisioning Comes of Age." I consider this neologism an example of superfluous verbizationing, since perfectly good words already exist for what I infer that decisioning means, e.g., deciding and decisionmaking.

Hyperverbizationing was already underway in the 1960s, when authoring started replacementing writing, and architecting replacementing designing. [1] It perhaps reached its peak during IBM's "architecturalization wars," when there were no neutrals: You were either prorearchitecturalizationing or antirearchitecturalizationing. [2]

PS I'm not registrationing for this conference.

[1] And, among computer designers, architecture replaced the more accurate façade.
[2] Although there was some precedent in antidisestablishmentarianism.

Why didn't I think of that?

Mitt Romney, Presidential candidate and Governor of Massachussets, has come out against REAL ID for citizens. He thinks we should instead have an ID card for illegal aliens.

I think this idea has real potential. There are lots of other kinds of ID it would be good to have some people carry. Fees for issuing the IDs could even be a profit center for the states. Why not Terrorist IDs? Drug Dealer IDs? Burglar IDs? Drunk Driver IDs? Income Tax Evader IDs? Philanderer IDs? Bookie IDs? Democrat IDs?

"I've got a little list, I've got a little list."

When police wanted to make a quick judgement on a suspect, they could just check his/her collection of IDs, rather than looking her/him up in the database.

Of course it would be necessary to make it a federal crime not to carry and show all your IDs.

Why buy a star name, when you can get your own integer?

I'm sure you've received many offers from "star catalogs" to name a star just for you or one of your loved ones. Well, Ed Felten has a new service that will provide you with your very own proprietary integer.

Upsides:

• It's free!
• Your rights are protected by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

Downsides:

• There are more than 100K times as many 128-bit integers as there are estimated to be stars, so it's not quite such an exclusive club.
• You can't publicize your integer, it's a secret key.

I've already gotten mine, generated by the VirtualLandGrab technology inspired by the AACS LA. I don't guarantee that I'll protect mine as viciously as they promise to protect theirs.

Form 1040-CI

I think this form was originally created by Brian Reid.

Programming without a license?

On January 26, 2007, Icelandic programmer David Josephssen was convicted in Diagon, Texas, of practicing software engineering without a license. I have been unable to locate credible evidence of an earlier conviction for this offense anywhere in the world, so this is likely to be a precedent-setting case, both for licensing of programmers and for jurisdiction on the Internet.

I have written a column for the April issue of the Communications of the ACM. Non-members of the ACM can access it through Peter Neumann's Inside Risks Archive.

There is also an eyewitness account of the trial.

Updated at 16:55 to add: As Alert Reader has pointed out, "texasdirt" reports that the case has been closed by the "emergency execution" of David Josephssen. The licensing and jurisdiction issues will have to wait. Meanwhile this is a tragedy for the Josephssen family.

Biotechnology Fable

"When good cows go mad," by Lore Sjöberg in Wired, fancifully explores the unintended consequences of dealing with the unintended consequences of dealing with the unintended consequences of ...

Accu Terror Forecast

Bruce Schneier calls it "security theater." Here's a projection of where we're heading. Worth watching.

A guide to grading exams

Daniel Solove has it down to a science.

If only we could decide elections with equal precision!

Iran to host conference on whether the world is round.

Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is hosting another conference, this one "to examine the scientific evidence supporting the Zionist hypothesis that the world is round."

Ahmadinejad already had called the voyages of Magellen and Drake myths and said that world maps should show the world as flat, "as revealed in the Holy Quran."

"There will be a conference that will research the topic of the shape of the world and all its dimensions in the future," according to a statement on the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA).

The statement did not say when the meeting would take place or who would be involved but said it would be sponsored by Iran's Foreign Ministry and the Organization of the Islamic Conference "and in consultation with other countries to pursue this issue."

Privacy Innovations

HP sponsors "privacy innovation" award.
HP CEO Hurd approved "sting" by company investigators.
HP shares drop 5.2 percent after reports link Hurd to leak probe.
HP's chief executive linked to journalist probe.
More Questions Arise Over HP Scandal.
H-P Shuffle, a Step Back For Corporate Reform.
One question keeps coming up: Where was Mark Hurd during all of this?
News results for HP Privacy.
[Some sites require registration.]

The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech

Thanks to Brian Randell for pointing me to this speech by John Gordon.

It contains fascinating inferences about the private lives of Alice and Bob, based on what has been published about them in papers on coding theory, but goes on to other fascinating topics, including one of the best versions of the phonetic alphabet (actually, an abcedarian) that I've ever seen:

A for 'Orses
B for Mutton
C for Yourself
D for Mation
E for Brick
F for Vescence
G for Police
H for Consent
I for Lutin
J for Orange
K for Teria
L for Leather
M for Sis
N for Mation
O for A Muse of Fire
P for Ate
Q for A Song
[R seems to have been omitted, maybe R for Mo?]
S for Something Else
T for Two
U for Mism
V for La France
W for Mism
X for Breakfast
Y for Lover
Z for Yourself
[better Z for Breeze to avoid the repetition with C?]

Edited to add: For explanations of any of these you find cryptic, plus a wide selection of alternatives, click here.

They listen and they care.

I don't normally post links to animated cartoons, but this one is too good not to.

Note: I had to temporarily turn off my adware blocker to view it, but it was worth it.

'05 Annual Performance Evaluation for Albert E.

Peter Norvig imagines century-old performance review, rendered in a currently fashionable format.

CIA Realizes It's Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years

An ONION exclusive:

LANGLEY, VA--A report released Tuesday by the CIA's Office of the Inspector General revealed that the CIA has mistakenly obscured hundreds of thousands of pages of critical intelligence information with black highlighters.

According to the report, sections of the documents--"almost invariably the most crucial passages"--are marred by an indelible black ink that renders the lines impossible to read, due to a top-secret highlighting policy that began at the agency's inception in 1947...

Australian International University website

For all academics, former academics, students, and former students, this website repays close study. Truly, no university has previously managed to achieve all of these goals.

Thanks to Brian Randell for bringing it to my attention.

Rapacitas Bona Est

Updated March 20, 2008 to add: This website appears to have changed hands since I made this post. Use the Wayback Machine to see previous versions.

The Ithaca Address

A "blast from the past." The following is from William A. Whitaker's talk on "Ada--The Project" at the second History of Programming Languages conference.

I would like to close with a bit of re-creation of history. There was a conference in Cornell in 1976, which was the first time that a group of people who would eventually work on the Ada effort were assembled to address the WOODENMAN requirements at the time, writing a variety of papers, and so on. At the end of the first day of the conference, there was an after-dinner speech that was given by Jim Horning, who some of you may know. At the time he resided in Canada. I think he is in the U.S. now. Here from the proceedings it said, "Just after dinner on the first evening of the workshop, a tall gaunt and bearded man rose quietly and moved toward the front of the hall. He looked tired and worn as though exhausted by his long arduous journey from the night before. As he turned to speak, a hush fell upon the room. And with a soft and solemn voice, he began, 'Four score and seven weeks ago, ARPA brought forth upon this community a new specification conceived in desperation and dedicated to the proposition that all embedded computer applications are equal. Now we are engaged in a great verbal war, testing whether that specification or any specification so conceived and so dedicated can long be endured. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a proceedings of that battle as a final resting place for those papers that here gave their ideas that that specification might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. And now it is for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored papers, we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these papers shall not have been written in vain. That this specification under DoD shall have a new birth of reason and that programming of common problems, by common programmers, in common languages shall not perish from the earth.'"

The Aceville election controversy

Today seems like an appropriate time to revisit a column I wrote for the Communications of the ACM last year about the controversial election in Aceville, Ohio.

"The story of the Aceville elections has received some attention in the national press, but it is worth considering from a Risks perspective. This column is based on reports by AP (Affiliated Press, Unusual Election Results in Ohio Town, 2/30/04) and Rueters (Losers Question Ohio Election, 2/30/04). The Aceville, OH, municipal elections last February -- the city's first time using the SWERVE electronic voting system -- led to the election of the alphabetically first candidate in all 19 races. This is an astonishing coincidence. Furthermore, every winning candidate, and Measure A, garnered 100% of the votes counted."

"Ohio Supervisor of Elections Ava Anheuser expressed no surprise that the alphabetically first candidate won every race. 'Don't you believe in coincidence?' she asked. 'This is an example of Adam Murphy's Law: "If it's logically possible, sooner or later it's bound to happen." AAVM downloaded the totals from the voting machines three times. There's nothing else to recount.' "

On a somewhat different topic, note today's report on the Cisco/Nabisco "merger of equals."

With a straight face: Mac Mini vs. PC

A Divisiontwo article takes an irreverent look at the Mini. Conclusion:
"So is the mini a maxi value? For me, clearly, no. When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware--none of which are available for the Mac platform--it doesn't make sense for me to 'switch' to a Mac at this time. But will Apple's famous marketing team be able to sell the the emperor an invisible computer anyway and turn the mini into a maxi hit? That's the question that remains to be answered."