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Omaha World Herald Makes School Remove Christmas Message

The Omaha World-Herald published a story about a Lincoln public high school who wrote “Remember the Reason for the Season” on their electronic bulletin board in front of the building. The ACLU contacted the school’s principal to request that the message be removed, and the school complied.

I can understand why some parents might not want that sign above the school. While I don’t personally have a problem with it, I’d feel uncomfortable if my kids’ school ran a similar sign that appeared to endorse Islam, Hinduism, or other religions. And as it turns out, the high school in question does have Jewish and Muslim students whose parents probably weren’t thrilled with the message.

Buried in the article, though, was an interesting nugget:

The ACLU was alerted to the sign by a World-Herald reporter who called to ask if anybody had complained about it. The marquee is along a well-traveled city street near the school.

Although many travelers had seen the sign in their daily commute, there were no complaints or any other evidence of offense until OWH’s own reporter triggered the investigation and created the story. I think the school did the right thing in not choosing one religion over another, but I think the newspaper was completely wrong to spark a controversy where none apparently existed.

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On Generated Versus Random Passwords

I was reading a story about a hacked password database and saw this comment where the poster wanted to make a little program to generate non-random passwords for every site he visits:

I was thinking of something simpler such as “echo MyPassword69! slashdot.org|md5sum” and then “aaa53a64cbb02f01d79e6aa05f0027ba” using that as my password since many sites will take 32-character long passwords or they will truncate for you. More generalized than PasswordMaker and easier to access but no alpha-num+symbol translation and only (32) 0-9af characters but that should be random enough, or you can do sha1sum instead for a little longer hash string.

I posted a reply but I wanted to repeat it here for the sake of my friends who don’t read Slashdot. If you’ve ever cooked up your own scheme for coming up with passwords or if you’ve used the PasswordMaker system (or ones like it), you need to read this:

DO NOT DO THIS. I don’t mean this disrespectfully, but you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s OK! People not named Bruce generally suck at secure algorithms. Crypto is hard and has unexpected implications until you’re much more knowledgeable on the subject than you (or I) currently are. For example, suppose that hypothetical site helpfully truncates your password to 8 chars. By storing only 8 hex digits, you’ve reduced your password’s keyspace to just 32 bits. If you used an algorithm with base64 encoding instead, you’d get the same complexity in only 5.3 chars.

Despite what you claim, you’re really much better off using a secure storage app that creates truly random passwords for you and stores them in a securely encrypted file. In another post here I mention that I use 1Password, but really any reputable app will get you the same protections. Your algorithm is a “security by obscurity” system; if someone knows your algorithm, gaining your master password gives them full access to every account you have. Contrast with a password locker where you can change your master password before the attacker gets access to the secret store (which they may never be able to do if you’ve kept it secure!), and in the worst case scenario provides you with a list of accounts you need to change.

I haven’t used PasswordMaker but I’d apply the same criticisms to them. If an attacker knows that you use PasswordMaker, they can narrow down the search space based on the very few things you can vary:

  • URL (the attacker will have this)
  • character set (dropdown gives you 6 choices)
  • which of nine hash algorithms was used (actually 13 — the FAQ is outdated)
  • modifier (algorithmically, part of your password)
  • username (attacker will have this or can likely guess it easily)
  • password length (let’s say, likely to be between 8 and 20 chars, so 13 options)
  • password prefix (stupid idea that reduces your password’s complexity)
  • password suffix (stupid idea that reduces your password’s complexity)
  • which of nine l33t-speak levels was used
  • when l33t-speak was applied (total of 28 options: 9 levels each at three different “Use l33t” times, plus “not at all”)

My comments about the modifier being part of your password? Basically you’re concatenating those strings together to create a longer password in some manner. There’s not really a difference, and that’s assuming you actually use the modifier.

So, back to our attack scenario where a hacker has your master password, username, and a URL they want to visit: disregarding the prefix and suffix options, they have 6 * 13 * 13 * 28 = 28,392 possible output passwords to test. That should keep them busy for at least a minute or two. And once they’ve guessed your combination, they can probably use the same settings on every other website you visit. Oh, and when you’ve found out that your password is compromised? Hope you remember every website you’ve ever used PasswordMaker on!

Finally, if you’ve ever used the online version of PasswordMaker, even once, then you have to assume that your password is compromised. If their site has ever been compromised — and it’s hosted on a content delivery network with a lot of other websites — the attacker could easily have placed a script on the page to submit everything you type into the password generation form to a server in a distant country. Security demands that you have to assume this has happened.

Seriously, please don’t do this stuff. I’d much rather see you using pwgen to create truly random passwords and then using something like GnuPG to store them all in a strongly-encrypted file.

The summary version is this: use a password manager like 1Password to use a different hard-to-guess password on every website you visit. Don’t use some invented system to come up with passwords on your own because there’s a very poor chance that we mere mortals will get it right.

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Stop The E Parasite Act

This is the letter I just sent to my representative, urging him to vote against Hollywood’s E-PARASITE Act:

Congressman Fortenberry, please vote against the appropriately-named “E-PARASITE Act” being proposed by Rep. Smith, TX. It’s the counterpart of Senate Bill S.968, the “PROTECT IP Act”.

This flawed legislation seeks to criminalize civil offenses and reverse our Constitutional presumption of innocence for the benefit of a tiny — but very vocal — coalition of Hollywood special interest groups. The Internet has brought untold billions of dollars to our economy and democracy to distant shores. Let’s not discard these advances for the benefit of a few CEOs who haven’t figured out how to do business in the new economy. Given technology legislation that’s supported by the AFL-CIO and opposed by Google, I’ll side with Google every time.

Please stop these parasites from destroying the Internet we built just so they can make a few more dollars before their obsolete business plans finish them off.

Thank you for your time,
Kirk Strauser
Norfolk, NE

Please let your own representatives know that we don’t want this terrible legislation.

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Making DOS USB Images On A Mac

I needed to run a BIOS flash utility that was only available for DOS. To complicate matters, the server I needed to run it on doesn’t have a floppy or CD-ROM drive. I figured I’d hop on the Internet and download a bootable USB flash drive image. Right? Wrong.

I found a lot of instructions for how to make such an image if you already have a running Windows or Linux desktop, but they weren’t very helpful for me and my Mac. After some trial and error, I managed to create my own homemade bootable USB flash drive image. It’s available at http://www.mediafire.com/?aoa8u1k1fedf4yq" if you just want a premade ready-to-download file.

If you want a custom version, or you don’t trust the one I’ve made — and who’d blame you? I’m some random stranger on the Internet! — here’s how you can make your own bootable image under OS X:

Relax!

There are a lot of steps, but they’re easy! I wanted to err on the side of being more detailed than necessary, rather than skipping “obvious” steps that might not be quite so easy for people who haven’t done this before.

Download VirtualBox and install it

  1. Download VirtualBox. I used version 4.1.4. The version available to you today might look different but should work mostly the same way.
  2. Open the “VirtualBox-[some-long-number]-OSX.dmg” disk image.
  3. Double-click the “VirtualBox.mpkg” icon to run the installer.
  4. Click “Continue”.
  5. Click “Continue”.
  6. Click “Install”.
  7. Enter your password and click “Install Software”.
  8. When it’s finished copying files, etc., click “Close”.

Download FreeDOS and create a virtual machine for it

  1. Download the FreeDOS “Base CD” called “fdbasecd.iso”. Note: the first mirror I tried to download from didn’t work. If that happens, look around on the other mirrors until you find one that does.
  2. Open your “Applications” folder and run the “VirtualBox” program.
  3. Click the “New” button to create a new virtual machine. This launches the “New Virtual Machine Wizard”. Click “Continue” to get past the introduction.
  4. Name your new VM something reasonable. I used “FreeDOS”, and whatever name you enter here will appear throughout all the following steps so you probably should, too.
  5. Set your “Operating System” to “Other”, and “Version” to “DOS”. (If you typed “FreeDOS” in the last step, this will already be done for you.) Continue.
  6. Leave the “Base Memory Size” slider at 32MB and continue.
  7. Make sure “Start-up Disk” is selected, choose “Create new hard disk”, and continue.
  8. Select “File type” of “VDI (VirtualBox Disk Image)” and continue.
  9. Select “Dynamically allocated” and continue.
  10. Keep the default “Location” of “FreeDOS”.
  11. Decision time: how big do you want to make your image? The full install of FreeDOS will take about 7MB, and you’ll want to leave a little room for your own files. On the other hand, the larger you make this image, the longer it’ll take to copy onto your USB flash drive. You certainly don’t want to make it so large that it won’t actually fit on your USB flash drive. An 8GB nearly-entirely-empty image will be worthless if you only have a 2GB drive. I splurged a little and made my image 32MB (by clicking in the “Size” textbox and typing “32MB”. I hate size sliders.). Click “Continue”.
  12. Click “Create”.
  13. Make sure your new “FreeDOS” virtual machine is highlighted on the left side of the VirtualBox window.
  14. On the right-hand side, look for the section labeled “Storage” and click on the word “Storage” in that title bar.
  15. Click the word “Empty” next to the CD-ROM icon.
  16. Under “Attributes”, click the CD-ROM icon to open a file chooser, select “Choose a virtual CD/DVD disk file…”, and select the FreeDOS Base CD image you downloaded at the beginning. It’ll probably be in your “Downloads” folder. When you’ve selected it, click “Open”.
  17. Back on the “FreeDOS — Storage” window, click “OK”.

Install FreeDOS

  1. Back on the main VirtualBox window, near the top, click “Start” to launch the virtual machine you just made.
  2. A note about VirtualBox: when you click the VM window or start typing, VirtualBox will “capture” your mouse cursor and keyboard so that all key presses will go straight to the VM and not your OS X desktop. To get them back, press the left [command] key on your keyboard.
  3. At the FreeDOS boot screen, press “1” and [return] to boot from the CD-ROM image.
  4. Hit [return] to “Install to harddisk”.
  5. Hit [return] to select English, or the up and down keyboard arrow keys to choose another language and then [return].
  6. Hit [return] to “Prepare the harddisk”.
  7. Hit [return] in the “XFDisk Options” window.
  8. Hit [return] to open the “Options” menu. “New Partition” will be selected. Hit [return] again. “Primary Partition” will be selected. Again, [return]. The maximum drive size should appear in the “Partition Size” box. If not, change that value to the largest number it will allow. Hit [return].
  9. Do you want to initialize the Partition Area? Yes. Hit [return].
  10. Do you want to initialize the whole Partition Area? Oh, sure. Press the left arrow key to select “YES”, then hit [return].
  11. Hit [return] to open the “Options” menu again. Use the arrow keys to scroll down to “Install Bootmanager” and hit [return].
  12. Press [F3] to leave XFDisk.
  13. Do you want to write the Partition Table? Yep. Press the left arrow to select “YES” and hit [return]. A “Writing Changes” window will open and a progress bar will scroll across to 100%.
  14. Hit [return] to reboot the virtual machine.
  15. This doesn’t actually seem to reboot the virtual machine. That’s OK. Press the left [command] key to give the mouse and keyboard back to OS X, then click the red “close window” button on the “FreeDOS [running]” window to shut it down. Choose “Power off the machine” and click “OK”.
  16. Back at the main VirtualBox window, click “Start” to re-launch the VM.
  17. Press “1” and [return] to “Continue to boot FreeDOS from CD-ROM”, just like you did before.
  18. Press [return] to select “Install to harddisk” again. This will take you to a different part of the installation process this time.
  19. Select your language and hit [return].
  20. Make sure “Yes” is selected, and hit [return] to let FreeDOS format your virtual disk image.
  21. Proceed with format? Type “YES” and hit [return]. The format process will probably finish too quickly for you to actually watch it.
  22. Now you should be at the “FreeDOS 1.0 Final Distribution” screen with “Continue with FreeDOS installation” already selected. Hit [return] to start the installer.
  23. Make sure “1) Start installation of FreeDOS 1.0 Final” is selected and hit [return].
  24. You’ll see the GNU General Public License, version 2 text. Follow that link and read it sometime; it’s pretty brilliant. Hit [return] to accept it.
  25. Ready to install the FreeDOS software? You bet. Hit [return].
  26. Hit [return] to accep the default installation location.
  27. “YES”, the above directories are correct. Hit [return].
  28. Hit [return] again to accept the selection of programs to install.
  29. Proceed with installation? Yes. Hit [return].
  30. Watch in amazement and how quickly the OS is copied over to your virtual disk image. Hit [return] to continue when it’s done.
  31. The VM will reboot. At the boot screen, press “h” and [return] to boot your new disk image. In a few seconds, you’ll see an old familiar “C:" prompt.
  32. Press the left [command] key to release your keyboard and mouse again, then click the red “close window” icon to shut down the VM. Make sure “Power off the machine” is selected and click “OK”.

Convert the VirtualBox disk image into a “raw” image

  1. Open a Terminal.app window by clicking the Finder icon in your dock, then “Applications”, then opening the “Utilies” folder, then double-clicking “Terminal”.
  2. Copy this command, paste it into the terminal window, then hit [return]:
/Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/Resources/VirtualBoxVM.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxManage internalcommands converttoraw ~/"VirtualBox VMs/FreeDOS/FreeDOS.vdi" ~/Desktop/freedos.img

This will turn your VirtualBox disk image file into a “raw” image file on your desktop named “freedos.img”. It won’t alter your original disk image in any way, so if you accidentally delete or badly damage your “raw” image, you can re-run this command to get a fresh, new one.

Prepare your USB flash drive

  1. Plug your USB flash drive into your Mac.
  2. If your Mac can’t the drive, a new dialog window will open saying “The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.” Follow these instructions:
    1. Click “Ignore”.
    2. Go back into your terminal window and run this command: diskutil list
    3. You’ll see a list of disk devices (like “/dev/disk2”), their contents, and their sizes. Look for the one you think is your USB flash drive. Run this command to make sure, after replacing “/dev/disk2” with the actual name of the device you picked in the last step: diskutil info /dev/disk2
  3. Make sure the “Device / Media Name:” and “Total Size:” fields look right. If not, look at the output of diskutil list again to pick another likely candidate and repeat the step until you’re sure you’ve picked the correct drive to complete eradicate, erase, destroy, and otherwise render completely 100% unrecoverable. OS X will attempt to prevent you from overwriting the contents of drives that are currently in use — like, say, your main system disk — but don’t chance it. Remember the name of this drive!
  4. If your Mac did read the drive, it will have automatically mounted it and you’ll see its desktop icon. Follow these instructions:
    1. Go back into your terminal window and run this command: diskutil list
    2. Look for the drive name in the output of that command. It will have the same name as the desktop icon.
    3. Look for the name of the disk device (like “/dev/disk2”) for that drive and remember it (with the same warnings as in the section above that you got to skip).
    4. Unmount the drive by running this command: diskutil unmount "/Volumes/[whatever the desktop icon is called]"
    5. This is not the same as dragging the drive into the trash, so don’t attempt to eject it that way.

Copy your drive image onto the USB flash drive

  1. Go back to your terminal window.
  2. Run these commands, but substitute “/dev/fakediskname” with the device name you discovered on the previous section: cd ~/Desktop; sudo dd if=freedos.img of=/dev/fakediskname bs=1m
  3. After the last command finishes, OS X will automatically mount your USB flash drive and you’ll see a new “FREEDOS” drive icon on your desktop.

Add your own apps to the image

  1. Drag your BIOS flasher utility, game, or other program onto the “FREEDOS” icon to copy it onto the USB flash drive.
  2. When finished, drag the “FREEDOS” drive icon onto the trashcan to unmount it.

Done.

  1. You’re finished. Use your USB flash drive to update your computer’s BIOS, play old DOS games, or do whatever else you had in mind.
  2. Keep the “freedos.img” file around. If you ever need it again, start over from the “Prepare your USB flash drive” section which is entirely self-contained. That is, it doesn’t require any software that doesn’t come pre-installed on a Mac, so even if you’ve uninstalled VirtualBox you can still re-use your handy drive image.
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Taken To The Cleaners By Abe's Detailing

I read a nice newspaper story a while ago about Abe’s Detailing in Norfolk, NE. When I wanted to have Jen’s minivan detailed as a present, I thought I’d give Abe’s a try and made an appointment for the $45.99 “express detail”. When we picked it up later, the van looked nice, but they wanted to charge us for the $159.99 “presidential detail” that they performed instead.

I told the employee that I’d ordered the cheaper package. He said I must have talked to his brother and that his brother wrote it down wrong, and still wanted me to pay the full price for the wrong job.

I will never darken the doorsteps of Abe’s Detailing in Norfolk again. If you choose to do so, I highly recommend you get a written estimate in advance.

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Guest Post By Gabby It Snowed

It snowed!I went outside today and played! bet I would have stayed out there if it had snowed more and if my feet didn’t freeze, I would have stayed there longer!

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Guest Post By Gabby Crazy Squirrel

I was at grandma’s house last weekend, and there was a power outage.Turns out, it was a squirrel chewing on the power lines, and got electrocuted.We found out when my Uncle Brian came in saying,“There’s a dead squirrel that was chewing on the power lines.“When I heard that I fell on the floor laughing!That squirrel is nuts!Or at least was nuts…

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Just Get Home Already

While waiting for Jen to return from a conference, I thought about calling her to get her estimated time of arrival, or her ETA. I realized she might be might be pretty far away still and thought I better ask for an estimate of the accuracy of the estimate, or meta-estimate: her META. Hey, neat! META can be a recursive acronym for “meta-ETA”, so it also references the nature of the acronym itself, sort of making META a meta-acronym, which truly makes it both meta and META.

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Guest Post By Gabby There Here

Grandma and Grandpa got here yesterday!My camera is working again to!I took a picture of a mirror,and when I saw the picture I saw me and my camera flashing!Anyways,I am very exited!They’re staying 2 weeks!

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Open Letter To KCAU TV

As of mid-August, I can’t watch the local ABC affiliate TV channel over my satellite dish because they tried to jack up the rates they charge Dish Network for carrying their channel. Never mind that their advertisers pay them by the number of viewers, regardless of whether that’s by antenna, cable, or satellite. Dish Network could almost get away with asking KCAU to pay them for the task of handling all the transmission details. Anyway, here’s a letter I wrote to KCAU’s president:

As you mentioned on your website, I could watch your programming over-the-air for free. While your position regarding Dish Network makes sense on the surface, it falls apart quickly. They are redistributing your signal at no cost to you while you still collect money from advertisers. Frankly, they’re doing you a favor by handling your broadcasting. Imagine that you could still get the same advertising revenue without having to pay for transmitters and the associated electricity and personnel. Nice, huh?

Since you’re not directly paid by viewers regardless of whether they watch by rabbit ears or by satellite dish, you can hardly claim to be losing money with the latter. In the mean time, your viewership is lower by the number who can no longer receive your signal (and you’re crazy if you think I’d downgrade from a crystal-clear satellite signal and DVR to a snowy analog antenna). The other local network affiliates must be rubbing their hands together with glee as you throw away your audience.

Finally, consider that a five-minute Internet search returns downloadable versions of current programming. While I personally don’t (yet) consider that a viable option to local programming, as of today that would be the easiest course for a lot of your viewers who have been cut off.

Please allow Dish Network to resume broadcasting your signals at no charge to you so that I can go back to watching “Lost”. Thank you.

Sincerely, Kirk Strauser

I have no particular feelings for either company, but Dish Network’s position in this one case seems by far the most reasonable of the two.

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Guest Post By Gabby I Went To The Lake

We took a trip to Grandma’s house on Thursday last week, and on Saturday we went to the lake.A couple hours before we left we went boating.It took a long time for me and my friend to get off the tube. And when I did get off the tube I asked the boat driver if we could stop the boat and swim fora while. When we left the lake it was a long drive back to grandma’s house, and I almost fell asleep!I had half a hamburger and went to bed.

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Dropkick Murphys The Meanest Of Times

This is kind of a hard review to write. Short take on the music: it’s brilliant. If you like Irish folk or punk, you’ll like “The Meanest of Times”. However, I just can’t get past the awful recording quality, and by awful, I mean truly, utterly terrible.

As though the music industry didn’t have enough problems to deal with, such as the string of lawsuits against its customers, the major labels have been busy with something called the “loudness war”. The thinking is that the louder music is played, the better most people will think it sounds. In an effort to make their CDs sounds better than their competitors’, the companies are recording music as loudly as possible. There’s nothing inherently bad about turning up the volume, but they try to squeeze out a few extra decibels by smoothing out the sound so that even the quietest sounds can blow out your speakers.

“The Meanest of Times” is a sad example of this. You’d think that a bunch of angry Irish punks would rattle your fillings, right? Nah. The music is painstakingly compressed until you can tell that someone’s playing the drums, but can’t quite make out the kick or snare.

Track 8, “(F)lannigan’s Ball”, starts with an aggressive bass line. After the first two notes, you know it’s going to be noisy. Too bad the drums kick in then, and the total sound of the bass line and the drums would have been too loud because the sound engineer already had the volume up all the way, so the compressor kicks in to mute both of them. Instead of THUM—THUM—THUM, we get THUM—THUM—splut.

So, there you have it. The music is wonderful, but the sound quality is horrible. “The Meanest of Times” could have been the soundtrack to a riot, but it’s been successfully tamed for the “Matlock” crowd. If your grandpa ever asks what punk music is, give this to him.

We already suspected that Warner Music Group hates their customers, and this just proves it. Go see Dropkick Murphys live if you can and buy lots of their stuff, but don’t bother with this album.

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Baseball Chatter

Hi! You’re the guy who sat behind me at my 8-year-old daughter’s teeball practice. I thought you’d want to know that you were talking loudly enough for everyone to hear you, including the coaches. I mean, we could all tell that’s why you were bitching so loudly the whole time, and I figured you’d be happy that you were heard.

Now, I’m sure you’re an expert in the game. You definitely sounded like it from 30 feet away! Still, I thought perhaps you might appreciate a few clarifications:

  • When our daughters were sitting on the ground talking to their coach, she was explaining terms like “offense”, “defense”, and “sportsmanship”. I know you thought she should have been teaching them how to play baseball (because you said so firmly and repeatedly), but I’m certain she meant well.
  • You were rather bothered that the coach didn’t teach the girls how to bat by lifting their front foot to swing harder. Rest assured, should our daughters advance beyond the first week of girls’ 8-year-old teeball, their future coaches will show them this technique.
  • Although you and I are past our athletic primes and the bases seem farther apart than they used to, I don’t think it really takes fifteen seconds to run from each base to the next. In fact, I’m fairly positive I could hop that fast with a broken ankle. I only mention this specifically because you sounded quite authoritative as you explained this to your son and everyone else on our bleachers, and may wish to update your calculations.

While I’m sincerely honored to have been the recipient of your shared wisdom, I respectfully request that during future practices you endeavor to please shut up and watch our little girls play. Thanks!

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In Defense Of The Model M

There are few joys in life like using something that is the perfect expression of its intent. Each trade has its representative tools, and their common trait is quality, even if it’s not obvious to the casual observer, and often counterintuitive. The best tools in a category are almost always the least flashy, and rarely the ones a new practitioner would choose.

The Model M keyboard is like that: it’s loud, ugly, heavy, and utterly lacking modern niceties like buttons to change your sound volume or check your email. And yet, it has that transcendent feeling that’s hard to explain, that sense of rightness where you realize that you’re using the best that’s ever been made, that every change since then has been superfluous and cosmetic. With time, the loud clacking becomes the background music of your work, the harmony that tells you that your thoughts have become words. Its beige boxiness yields to elegant simplicity and the realization that true beauty is born of function, not appearance. The sheer weight of the thing turns to solidity and the confidence that it will stay where you put it. The dearth of features becomes the singleminded dedication to the parts that really matter and a proud disregard of unneeded distractions.

A tool attains its peak when a craftsman forgets that he’s using it because it has become an extension of himself. Thus the humble Model M has become the iconic favorite of hackers everywhere, an ode to the engineers who grasped for excellence and acheived it.

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Shades Of Green

In Nebraska’s May 13 election, two Green Party candidates ran for Douglas County Commissioner, District 3. Between them, they received one vote. How stoned do you have to be before you forget to vote for yourself?

At least neither can accuse the other of splitting the election.

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Sue For Mayor

I’m voting for Sue Fuchtman for mayor of Norfolk. I know her personally, and she’s the sort of intelligent, decent, detail-oriented person we should have making city decisions. The other candidates might be alright, but I’d rather see someone elected that I’m genuinely excited to have in office.

Vote for Sue. I will.

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Fun With Software Licenses

Did you know that you’re probably not allowed to make backups of your computer? It’s true, if you believe in the legal fiction known as “End User License Agreements” (or EULAs), which are those annoyingly long contracts where you have to click “I Agree” before you’re allowed to install some program or another.

For example, here’s a snippet of the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) End User License Agreement:

2.3 Backup Copy. You may make one backup copy of the Software, provided your backup copy is not installed or used on any computer.

Nice, huh? If you install this software, its EULA forbids you from making more than one backup copy. This is a deal-breaker for business which keep multiple backup archives from days, weeks, and months past. According to this agreement, you could hypothetically alter your corporate storage system to ignore each of the files that would be installed, but realistically no one would ever even attempt this.

This is just one more reason to be grateful that EULAs are almost universally believed to be legally unenforcable. However, unless you’re willing to tell a jury that you don’t think you’re bound by such an agreement, remember that every piece of software with a similar license is a potential time bomb. Theoretically, you could be sued just for having it, even if you probably wouldn’t be found liable.

Fans of commercial software often talk about the “impracticality” of Free or Open Source Software, but the alternatives are starting to look a lot worse.

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Hot About Warming

Global warming is real. Forget the arguments about what’s causing it. Forget trying to figure out whether it’s going to be good or bad. Forget wondering what should be done to stop it. The fact of the matter is that the Earth’s atmosphere has been getting measurably warmer for quite a few years and shows every sign of continuing.

I don’t remember when I first heard of global warming, but I do know that it became a political football soon afterward. Sadly, it seems like the issues around it have turned into a screaming match about whether it even exists. This is silly and needs to stop so that we can figure out what to do next.

I am not an atmospheric scientist. I’m pretty sure I don’t even know any. I do follow science news rather closely, though, and it’s become obvious to me that almost all scientists agree that the Earth is warmer now than it was a decade ago, that the decade before was even cooler, and that the average temperature has been trending upward.

I’ve also noticed that while scientists agree that global warming is real, the only groups who disbelieve it are political in nature (including some that I’m usually a part of; more on that later). When presented with a scientific question, I’m more likely to trust experts in the field than politicians.

Along those lines, those politicians who refuse to accept global warming tend to dismiss it as a conspiracy of liberal meteorologists. To me, that idea is just asinine. I was a science major in college, and one of the things I learned very well is that it’s almost impossible to get a bunch of researchers to agree on something. No matter how obvious the statement, someone will nitpick it to death and argue until someone is able to demonstrate that the statement is most likely true. Because of that, there are a few reasons why this vast left-wing conspiracy is beyond silly:

First, there is an enormous body of evidence supporting the idea of global warming. Most people seem to think that science is about proving theories, when in reality the exact opposite is true: scientists do their best to disprove hypotheses and only the ones that stand the test of time are elevated to theories. For example, a lot of physicists have made careers of trying to show that some of Einstein’s ideas were wrong. Because so many scientists have tried and failed, those ideas are generally accepted as accurate and used as the basis for other theories. If anyone designed an experiment that demonstrated flaws in his theories, that person would win the Nobel prize and be given all the research money they could ever want to run other experiments.

Well, the same is going on for global warming. Researchers from around the world have studied climate data with a fine-toothed comb to look for flaws and anomalies that would show that our atmospheric temperature hasn’t been rising. The fact that no one has been able to convincingly do so is a strong indicator that the scientific consensus is correct.

Science is driven by a need to understand the world around us. Possibly the only stronger motivation for researchers is fame. Those Nobel prizes don’t only go to physicists; lots of climate researchers would love to see their names in the big journals and on newspaper headlines.

Finally, the scientific community is brutally harsh to its own members who knowingly publish false or misleading results. Even allegations of wrongdoing are sufficient to ruin a lot of careers. No researcher wants to get caught submitting shoddy work or invalid data as the punishment is severe and thorough.

So take your pick of reasons: whether from fear of being caught lying, personal ambition, or of a dogged determination to find the truth, it’s just not possible for such a large body scientists to almost entirely claim that global warming is taking place unless they have reason to believe it really is happening.

On thing that drives me absolutely nuts is when people confuse climate with weather when they’re actually different subjects. “How can scientists know what the climate will do ten years from now,” they’ll say, “when they can’t even guess what the weather will be next week?” The best analogy I’ve heard involves boiling a pot of water. Climate is like looking at that pot, seeing that it’s on a burner, and using a thermometer to see how fast it’s getting hotter. Weather is like trying to figure out where the first bubble will form on the bottom.

Another common misperception is that global warming is the same as universal warming. It’s not. A lot of researchers have started referring to “climate change” to more accurate describe what’s happening. Basically, as the atmosphere grows warmer, the jet stream moves around, ocean currents shift, and weather patterns change. As some spots on the planet will get much warmer, others will get cooler. The important part is that the average temperature is increasing, even taking into account localized drops.

Think of it like the refrigerator in your house. Anything that uses electricity creates heat — that’s just the nature of energy. Your refrigerator uses that electricity to shift some heat from inside itself into the rest of your home. But even if you left the door open, because of the electricity consumed by the motor and turned into heat, the average temperature inside your house will go up.

My last weather-related pet peeve is people who think that unusually cool days are proof that global warming isn’t true. Equally bad are ones who believe that warm days prove that it is true. It sounds dumb and is very unflattering. If you do that, stop.

A recent report claimed that the trend to warmer temperatures has reversed and we are actually headed toward a cooling period. The problem here is exactly the same as with weather versus climate, discussed above. The only difference is that the time intervals involved are a year or two instead of weeks. Now, don’t get me wrong: I sincerely, wholeheartedly hope that this turns out to be correct and that we’re moving toward the same average temperatures our society has learned to handle over the last few centuries. We already know how to deal with the status quo and that’s definitely the easiest outcome to manage. However, it’s important to remember that it’s still too early to know whether this was a one year fluke or a long term change, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably lying to you.

The most vexing part of the whole subject is why this is such a politically charged issue. Now, I understand the difficulty of agreeing upon an acceptable response to the problem, or even whether it’s a problem at all. However, I just don’t see why global warming’s existence is even in question outside scientific circles. To me, that’s like arguing that nuclear fission is a lie because to accept it would mean that people can build nuclear bombs. Our feelings about the implications of the facts are immaterial to whether the facts themselves are correct.

I think it’s the height of absurdity that a person’s opinions on scientific topics depends on their political leanings. I’m not even sure how views on the matter became so sharply divided along political lines. Since when did a bunch of hippies become true believers in science? And what prompted industry to turn its back on the very idea instead of embracing new markets and a shift to cleaner, cheaper power? This could so easily have gone the other way, but the sides have been chosen and neither shows any sign of wavering. As a conservative, I’m irked to no end that my cohorts have ceded the intellectual high ground to groups who were preaching granola and pyramid power a few decades ago.

In a nutshell, I wish politicians would quit making this an us-or-them issue and accept or reject global warming on scientific grounds. As of right now, that means accepting it. Within the circles of experts on the subject, almost everyone believes that the Earth is getting warmer and will continue to do so. To continue to argue otherwise on emotional grounds does nothing but marginalize the people who should be stepping up to address the issue.

Whether global warming is a problem, whether we caused it, and whether we can do anything about it are questions requiring serious debate. This can’t happen until we accept that it is real. It is. Now lets move forward, shall we?

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Why Is Cloning Bad?

I haven’t figured out exactly why human cloning is a bad thing that should be opposed. It intuitively feels wrong, but that’s a pretty poor standard to go by. In nature, human clones are all over the place — we just call them twins. But even if someone wants to clone themselves as a way to have children, why not? It doesn’t seem inherently different from in vitro fertilization and most people accept that.

Someone please help me out on this one. Why should I be opposed to human cloning?

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Nebraska Wants To Adopt Your Kids

Senator Brad Ashford of Omaha has proposed criminalizing the act of keeping your kids home from school. This is abhorrent for many reasons, and should be withdrawn from consideration immediately.

Deputy Douglas County Attorney Kim Hawekotte and Ralston Public Schools social worker Steve Snodgrass, both active in truancy prevention in the Omaha area, said the proposed language change will make it easier for schools to identify students who are being improperly excused.

“By taking that sentence out,” Hawekotte said, “the schools have to react when a youth isn’t in school, no matter what the reason. You want the system to kick into place to make that determination.”

No, Ms. Hawekotte: you want the system to kick in. Our kids rarely miss school for non-medical reasons. However, sometimes we take advantage of educational opportunities that require a day or two of absence. As parents, this is our privilege and responsibility. It is not your job to second-guess our decisions.

As introduced, LB 1159 would get law enforcement, including the county attorney, involved earlier by making it an infraction to be the parent of a truant child. The first offense would prompt a $50 fine, the second, $100. The third would be considered a Class III misdemeanor, punishable by up to three months of jail time and a $500 fine.

We are considering taking a long weekend to Mt. Rushmore or Yellowstone National Park near the end of the school year. For various reasons, we might possibly have to make that trip while class is still in session. Mr. Ashford, your plan would require our school system to investigate us as criminals and fine us for teaching our kids first-hand about our country’s history, geology, and geography. Will you be passing a bill to take our kids on an equivalent field trip? Or will they simply miss out on that experience because likeminded senators deem themselves better parents to our kids than we are?

“If you’re not in school, you’re not learning,” said Ashford of Omaha, chairman of the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Ashford, that’s one of the most offensively ignorant things I’ve read in a while. Formal education is critically important, but I assure you that my children learn outside the classroom. From teaching my kids to write computer programs, to learning French together as a family, to taking trips to national monuments and museums, they are learning.

I don’t want to downplay the need for kids to attend school as required, but completely reject your asinine assertion that their education ends when I pick them up from school.

The solution is simple: don’t fix what’s not broken, especially when the fix would cause even more problems. If a child is suspected of truancy, investigate that child. If a school system is unable or unwilling to do so, then address that problem. Don’t create an assumption of guilt every time a child misses school, though. You are not my kids’ parent. I am. Irk you though it may, I know more about what’s best for them than you do.

This bill puts State above Parent. Kill it.