News from the Net

POLITICAL: It seems that the Washington Posts thinks Americans don't care about being spied on. Now, since I know that some people (won't name names) will assume that this statistic prooves that Bush is good and everyone else is spouting propaganda, let's look at the facts for a moment... first of all, who was represented?This Washington Post-ABC News poll was conducted by telephone May 11, 2006 among 502 randomly selected adults nationwide. Ok. According to the CIA, the USA has 298,444,215 people. Ok. That means that one out of every 594510+ people were called on the phone to represent them. IE: For every one person who disagrees with you, they take negate almost 600 thousand other opinions. Now, ignoring the fact that first year college statistics will fail you for saying that a phone-poll is representative (since you are automatically eliminating many poor), let's see what that number is similar to.Washington DC (according to the US Census Bureau) has 553,523 people.  According to the statistics, we can assume that EVERY SINGLE PERSON in Washington DC agrees with a single person called in Texas. Let's take it a step further. Again, US Census says that Portland has 538,544 people. One person in Texas decides what ever person in Portland (and most of Multnomah County at 672,161    people) think.  I don't know about you, but they definitely don't speak for me.

One of the chief security experts in the United States (Bruce Schneier) reports on a security hole in Diebold machines that would let a large number of people in our circle of friends (let alone people who cover things up for a living) install or change the software on the Diebold machines with 1-2 minutes of access to the touchscreens.

New Zealand has managed to make bio-diesel out of sewage.

VNC vulnerability found.

How about making light travel faster than the 'speed of light'?

Discussions about IT-based unions.

House Republicans, grabbing onto the scare surrounding MySpace, are trying to stop schools and libraries from allowing any site that says 'create profile' or 'forum'... Goodbye Slashdot, blogs, LiveJournal.  Hell, goodbye to most school club and council pages.

Google announced more services, including Co-Op and Trends.

Sarah	Its kinda funny about the phone poll thing.  Didn't anyone ever hear of the election results that were predicted incorrectly due to taking a phone sampling? Posted by Sarah on Fri May 12 08:34:00 PDT 2006