The Happy Moron

A somewhat frightening BBC story from my link archives:
It turns out that if you’re clever with a webpage, you can pretend to be a visitor’s PC for the purpose of finding out the ID number of their router.
Well, that doesn’t sound so bad. A little technical, perhaps, but not so bad.
Umm… unless Google happened to [...]

I just lack the motivation and the time to post.
So here’s a link -
a fascinating article for those who like to think about the quirks and foibles of humanity.

I’m posting this here for the benefit of my sister – she’ll probably stumble across it here. But you might enjoy it too

Cheating is a thin slice of human nature that doesn’t change. We can grow up, but we can’t grow out of it.
We want something. Our experience tells us it is a good [...]

Seth is brilliantly right today.
Ask any software developer, though, and they will tell you that Seth’s postulated 2 percent is invariably much greater.
2 percent is the minimum. The baseline. It only goes up from there.
Generally, however,  programmers don’t believe that they’re in the business of building relationships and connections and so the umpteen percent are [...]

But for a corporation, it just comes naturally.

… but it’s the comments that break my heart.

You don’t suppose giving Obama the Nobel Peace Prize will polarize America, do you?
I thought it was supposed to be a Peace prize.
I guess you can’t blame controversy. It’s going to happen among contentious people, whatever the spark. Still, irony like this is too good to waste

Posting has been sparse this week. I’ve chewed through my entire backlog of postable drafts and so I’m left scrambling.
I did run across this story on obesity though.
The findings appear to be fresh evidence of a phenomenon that health professionals have long suspected: as those around us get fatter, our perceptions of our own size [...]

We all make them. We can’t not make them. They’re how we make sense of the complexity of the world; how we understand what’s going on around us.
So when I saw this dude the other day, I immediately knew that he was going to kill me.
His attitude, his clothing, his swagger… They all told me [...]

Because it highlights real world evil.
I guess I chose to post this one because it’s a system evil. More particularly, it’s a system evil which abuses the poor because the poor are easiest to abuse.
In computer software, it’s a recognized fact that unless quality is explicitly designed and maintained, it won’t just evolve. You have [...]