Events

Incompetence and cronyism, the handmaidens of the Bush administration (980 days left), explain its failure to create a working prescription drug program. Simply put, they (a) don't want government to work and (b) want to enrich their friends, as Paul Krugman underscores (sub.req.): [W]hile a straightforward addition of drug coverage to Medicare would have been good policy, it would have been bad politics from the point of view of conservatives, who want to privatize traditional social insurance...

In the four days since USA Today reported that the NSA has millions of phone records, millions of decent, hard-working Americans have said, "So what?" I think there are two reasons for this: first, data security seems like an esoteric and hard-to-understand sub-field of computer science, which makes people disinclined to think about the problem; and second, most people need concrete examples to understand things clearly. How about this simple, concrete example: ABC News is reporting today that...

I arrived in Nashua, N.H., from Chicago just a few minutes ago, and two hours later than anticipated because of rain. Lots of rain. In fact, it turns out, they've had more rain than during any May on record—and the month isn't even half-over: Two weeks into the month, rainfall totals in Concord were expected to wash out the May record of 9.52 inches set in 1984, Cannon said. Official totals have been tracked since 1864. I believe it has rained almost every day this month, and rain is forecast every day...

Reported by Bruce Schneier: The NSA would like to remind everyone to call their mothers this Sunday. They need to calibrate their system. Don't know whether that's funny or scary...

Here's some code I discovered while tracking a bug this morning: const string DATE_FORMAT = "M/d/yyyy"; string dateString = ConfigSettings.GetString("Some setting", DateTime.Now.ToString(DATE_FORMAT)); DateTime someDate = DateTime.ParseExact(dateString, DATE_FORMAT, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture); The DateTime.ParseExact method throws a FormatException if the string (dateString) doesn't exactly match the format string. I mean, exactly. So when dateString comes back from the configuration settings class...

A grand jury has indicted Republican Governor Ernie Fletcher on three misdemeanor charges of conspiracy, official misconduct and political discrimination: The jury also indicted former transportation Cabinet official Sam Beverage for perjury, which is a felony. And the jury also submitted to Franklin Circuit Judge William Graham 14 more indictments that are under seal. Those indictments cover crimes that may have occurred before Aug. 29, 2005 when Fletcher pardoned all administration officials except...

USA Today reported earlier that the National Security Administration has collected an enormous volume of phone records from AT&T, Verizon, and Bell South. Only Qwest refused the NSA's request: With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers' names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA's domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers...

The Chicago Tribune reports today that the Chicago Transit Authority has agreed to buy 406 new El cars for the Blue and Pink lines. The cars will have aisle-facing seating rather than the mixed seating arrangement currently in use (see the Tribune graphic). This is a long-overdue improvement on the Blue line, whose trains go to O'Hare. Struggling with luggage on the current trains causes pain; the new arrangement will alleviate it. The CTA expects the cars to roll by 2009, shortly after we have a new...

I heard on New Hampshire Public Radio this morning that—hang on———(sorry) I heard that tree pollen is peaking right now across New England.

Bruce Schneier linked to this Wired article about Radio Frequency ID (RFID) tags. It will fascinate or terrify you, depending on how thorough and disciplined you think the implementations will be. Choice passage: "I was at a hotel that used smartcards, so I copied one and put the data into my computer," Grunwald says. "Then I used RFDump to upload the room key card data to the price chip on a box of cream cheese from the Future Store. And I opened my hotel room with the cream cheese!" Cool...?