Interesting Stuff

See what happens when the US advocates a policy of pre-emptive strikes? Now, Binyamin Netanyahu is advocating a pre-emptive strike against Iran if they haven’t been dissuaded to stop their nuclear reserach in a couple months. Although he is no longer prime minister of the country, he was back in 1996, and I think it likely that he could get elected again if he really wants to. His opinion carries a lot of weight in the Israeli government.

Right. I have to get back to Algorithms grading, so I can then get back to PerCog, so I can then get back to grad school apps, so I can get back to clinic, so I can get back to ACM, so… fuck. No sleep for Alan again.

It appears that Sony and First 4 Internet have attempted (rather poorly) to defend themselves over the rootkit issue. That doesn’t change the fact that this stuff isn’t mentioned in the EULA and is still nearly impossible to remove. I’m going to be quite surprised if this doesn’t turn into some kind of class-action lawsuit. It’s absolutely despicable.

So, with the Fellowship application hanging over my head, I’ve got ridiculous amounts of work, and I’m barely sleeping. So guess what I do? That’s right. I install Bridge Base Online through WINE. It’s amazing! I have to get more time, a regular partner (perhaps Carl and I could play some more, even though he’s in Cambridge for a year…), and play. In the meantime, I kibitzed what are apparently some of the world’s greatest players, including Jeff Hand who became the World Master of the World Bridge Federation about the time I was born. In particular, I saw one incredible deal:

East opened 2 Clubs, showing not necessarily clubs, but a damn good hand (I play 22+ HCP or the first 9 tricks, but this person apparently plays it a little lighter). South overcalled 3 Clubs to show a weak hand with long clubs and interfere with the partnership that had the majority of the points. East cuebid 4 Clubs to show a club void, support for any other suit, and game-going values. North, seeing a 12-card fit and a side suit to run, jumped to grand slam. West justifiably doubled, since North/South could have at most 16-ish points between them. A spade lead would have set the contract, but West lead a heart (which makes more sense than a spade from West’s perspective), and the contract was cold. Declarer ruffed the opening lead, drew trump, cashed the ace of diamonds and ruffed a low diamond. When the King fell, declarer could run the minor suits to take all 13 tricks. It was really incredible to see this come up randomly and then watch 4 world-class players handle it.

Right. Back to my essays… :-P

By the way, Paris is still burning…

First, the news:

The big story at the moment is that Sony installs rootkits on computers when you use their DRM’ed CDs. This was first discovered here but was confirmed here. This has really been all over the internet. The basic idea is that rootkits are small programs that are designed to hide their own presence and the presence of other programs from everyone else on a machine. They are mainly used by crackers to keep people from noticing that they have malicious software controlling their computers. Sony, however, seems to think it needs to hide their DRM software in a similar way. Moreover, when you try to remove this, it messes up the drivers for your CD-ROM. It also makes it easier for actual crackers to hide their software. Truly nasty stuff coming from such a public company.

We also have our usual scandals going on in the US (“Scooter” Libby is pleading Not Guilty), Canada (the Liberal Party has apparently been having a financial scandal involving kickbacks to certain companies, and almost everyone except Prime Minister Paul Martin seems to be involved), and the UK (David Blunkett resigned again over poor business practices, and his unpopularity is again rubbing off onto Tony Blair).

Now for me:

Again, boo NSF Fellowship essays! the plan is to just work through this weekend on them. However, once they’re finished, I have to study for the CS GRE and figure out the bus/subway system again (is anyone going to Cal State – L.A. on November 12? Can I get a ride?). I’m also now 3 weeks behind on my Algorithms grading, and it would be nice to get caught up on that before the end of the semester. Argh! Too much stuff! I have to make next semester easier. In the meantime, I fear you won’t hear from me again for at least a week…

Now that Harriet Miers has withdrawn her nomination amid conservative attacks, Bush has nominated Samual Alito to be Justice O’Conner’s replacement on the Supreme Court. He appears to be about as conservative as Scalia. One very interesting point that this article brings up is that the conservatives have continually requested the due process of confirmation followed by an up-or-down vote to confirm justices, yet that is exactly what they avoided with Miers. We shall see how this plays out.

As Special Prosecutor Patcrick J. Fitzgerald’s investigation draws to a close, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby has been charged with a number of crimes, including obstruction of justice, lying to the FBI, and lying under oath in front of a grand jury. Karl Rove, however, has not yet been charged, and it is unclear if he ever will be. Unfortunately, most of the details that Fitzgerald uncovered are not yet (ever?) available to the public.

I know I should have posted this several days ago. I’m not really on the ball right now, so you’ll have to make do.

eBay/PayPal bought Verisign! I suspect that this will be a good thing – if you’re going to have a company that specializes in e-commerce (and does it well), you might as well have it specialize in web security too. Let’s hope that few of the Verisign policies change because of this…Edit: Perhaps PayPal isn’t as great as I thought it was.

On an unrelated note, Kyrgyzstan has given the US the go-ahead to use their bases for even more aid and bombing runs into Afghanistan. You may recall that around the time that school started, the Uzbekistani parliament unanimously voted to kick the US off its air bases, and the US has been looking for another place to launch missions from. The planes will have to fly through Tajikistani airspace, but that shouldn’t really be a problem. I’m not quite sure why Kyrgyzstan did this, except possibly that they needed the money. However, I’ve never really thought of the country as being particularly poor. Any insights?

The US is considering beginning pulling out of Afghanistan (how many participles can I string together?) as early as this Spring! This would be great. I think the country is finally starting to pick itself up, despite all the problems with a constitution. Here’s hoping!

In other news, I’m not yet sure how I feel about John Roberts. From what I’ve heard, he seems like he’d be a pretty great Supreme Court Justice. However, I’m a little worried that most of his writings will not be released, so no one will be able to see most of what he has done in the past, and I’m equally worried that he hasn’t really expressed any of his views on anything except court cases that have already been decided (and his views on those are that the cases are already decided, so we should just uphold the previous rulings). If he actually approaches new cases with such an open mind and lack of opinion, that would be absolutely fantastic. I think it’s equally likely, however, that he could have views that would surely keep him from getting confirmed, but the Republicans have locked away all evidence of these views and Roberts himself is smart enough not to bring them up. This could go either way, but if he can be trusted, he’d be pretty great. Here’s hoping!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2005/08/18/BL2005081800744_5.html – this is long, but touches on a bunch of topics, several of which I hadn’t heard of before.

http://www.slate.com/id/2124603/?nav=tap3 – John Roberts appears to have improperly ruled in a case concerning whether the Geneva Convention applies to people at Guantanamo Bay (he should have excused himself from the case). Does this happen often? How would we even know? I think it’s pretty scary that you might have to question the impartiality of the judicial system.

Right. More later!

Woah. Yesterday was bridge club again, and it was the highest turnout that we’ve had since I joined. We had 2 tables going pretty much the entire time. It’s not enough to play a “real” game of duplicate yet, but we at least had to start keeping score (with one table where the partnerships switch every hand, there’s not much point in keeping score). So… yeah. We had about 13 people show up over the course of the evening, and even kept playing past 1:00. Sherri and I were partners for much of the night, which was a bit weird. Over the summer, she played regularly with someone she met at home, and got the hang of his style. However, this was a bit different than the way I played, so we kept getting some of our signals crossed. Oh, well. When I have the opportunity to start getting competitive (which won’t be until next semester, due to Systems lab conflicting with the start of the Unit551 games), I’ll get a regular partner and we’ll work out all of our quirks. There were some pretty good hands, though, and I had a great time. Hopefully, we can get our Monday games going like this too.

Well, I watched the presidential debate tonight. To be honest, I wasn’t that impressed with either candidate. Kerry pretty much just said “I have a plan” a lot (but not actually saying what sort of plan this was, or how it would work), while Bush dodged most of the questions (he didn’t answer the question about who he would put on the Supreme Court, he didn’t answer what mistakes he’s made or how he corrected them, he didn’t answer how he will protect people’s rights from the PATRIOT Act, etc).

In related news, my absentee ballot arrived today. I’ve found the notary on campus, so I’m pretty much set to vote. I had a bit of a scare last week when I opened my absentee ballot that I’d been saving for a while to realize that it was for the primary election, rather than the upcoming one. After panicking and firing some frantic emails to my dad, he got me straightened out, and explained how I should be getting another ballot soon.

Lets see… Stephen alerted me to the Stop-Loss provisions that have gone into legislature recently. They pretty much say that you can’t leave the armed forces for 3 months before or after your company is deployed. Since companies are pretty much deployed every 6 months, many people who were supposed to finish up their service have been forced to stay in the armed forces. A pretty good blog about it is here (the October 2 update Edit: this one). There’s a lot of shit going on in this country these days. I wish there was something I could do about it, but this kind of crap just seems so widespread. If anyone has an idea about how to actually get something done (note: this does not involve writing to my senator’s intern’s garbage can), I’d love to hear about it.