Maszman Speaks!

I finally added my Flickr stream to the right side­bar. It’s likely to be mostly snap­shots from my Zire, so that explains the quality.

NOAA is defend­ing itself against crit­ics over the lack of tsunami warn­ings claim­ing it didn’t have the phone num­bers or staff to warn all the affected nations.

Their pri­mary job, obvi­ously, is to keep watch out for US ter­ri­to­ries and the Indian Ocean is not on their list. But given the fact they did know some­thing, there has to be a bet­ter way.

The RIAA and MPAA hire con­tract com­pa­nies to seed P2P net­works with bad files that look like legit­i­mate ones. But lately, one of those con­trac­tors, Over­peer, has been using popup ads and spy­ware that get around the Win­dows DRM. If you grab files from the pop­u­lar net­works, make sure you have all your “pro­tec­tion” updated.

Here’s what hap­pens when you replace knowl­edge of prod­ucts with bar­codes: Two Ten­nessee cou­ples charged in a $1.5 Mil­lion price-switching scheme. No one in the stores can eas­ily rec­og­nize the switch, it’s all just num­bers to them.

Ambu­lances could be run­ning with Vir­tual Doc­tors that will use satel­lite links to beam patient data to trauma cen­ters out of reach of con­ven­tional com­mu­ni­ca­tions chan­nels. Cost, how­ever, is a major stum­bling block, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that most ambu­lances that far away are prob­a­bly in poorer rural areas.

On the pass­ing of Jerry Orbach, read some prime Lennie Briscoe quotes.

And con­sider get­ting a PSA check.