Events

After a couple of days in which I'm glad we keep bourbon in the 10th Magnitude office, Scott Hanselman's examination of working remotely seems timely: I see this ban on Remote Work at Yahoo as one (or all) of these three things: A veiled attempt to trim the workforce through effectively forced attrition by giving a Sophie's Choice to remote workers that management perceives as possibly not optimally contributing. It's easy to avoid calling it a layoff when you've just changed the remote work policy...

Two guys on vacation, new guys not starting yet, my day began at 7:25 this morning. At least Parker got a taxi to day care, sparing me the need to drive home tonight in a blizzard. So I'll just add these to Instapaper and hope I have to fly somewhere soon: Via Fallows, a long analysis of our complete bollixing of Afghanistan; Via Scott Hanselman, a Tumblr of 99 life hacks; and Nate Silver on the electoral college and the Democratic Party, partially explaining why Republicans, who have no policies to...

I don't have time to read these must-read articles: Noam Schreiber on Aaron Swartz Marlene Zuk on our fascination with the paleolithic Sean Flynn on Pope Benedict's butler Microsoft on the Azure outage a year ago (interesting because it may be related to last week's outages Jennifer Lawrence rocks Back to the mines...

From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. From this week's news: If calculations of the newly discovered Higgs boson particle are correct, one day, tens of billions of years from now, the universe will disappear at the speed of...

...or, my thought about the controversy surrounding the torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty: whether or not agents of the United States could have found (or, indeed, did find) Osama bin Laden without using torture does not matter one bit. Torture is wrong; no outcome that requires torture is worth the moral cost. But even if one were to accept the clearly false proposition that Osama bin Laden was the most powerful and dangerous criminal in the world, and even if one were to accept the flatly immoral...

Redondo Beach, Calif., resident Andrew Toth has build a mock-up of a 1970s-era jumbo: The new cabin - about 60 feet long, stretching from the airplane's nose to the front of the wing - is an almost exact replication of a 1970s and '80s vintage 747. In addition to first class, Toth installed 26 powder blue seats in what was called Clipper Class - a premium economy class section with extra legroom. Much of his plane is a former Japan Airlines 747 he rescued from storage space for retired airplanes in the...

Microsoft has suffered some unfortunate outages this week, first affecting SQL databases on Monday, and then yesterday storage: On Friday, February 22 at 12:44 PM PST, Storage experienced a worldwide outage impacting HTTPS traffic due to an expired SSL certificate. This did not impact HTTP traffic. We have executed repair steps to update SSL certificate on the impacted clusters and have recovered to over 99% availability across all sub-regions. We will continue monitoring the health of the Storage...

Security guru Bruce Schneier examines Papal election security: Probably the biggest risk is complacency. What might seem beautiful in its tradition and ritual during the first ballot could easily become cumbersome and annoying after the twentieth ballot, and there will be a temptation to cut corners to save time. If the Cardinals do that, the election process becomes more vulnerable. A 1996 change in the process lets the cardinals go back and forth from the chapel to their dorm rooms, instead of being...

Why does Amazon charge 30% less for some CDs ("includes free mp3 version of this album!) than for just the mp3s? Case in point, a back-catalog Dixie Chicks album, $9.99 for just the mp3s but $6.99 for the mp3s plus CD. My only hypothesis is that they want to get rid of the physical inventory, and they're willing to take a loss to do so. Any other guesses out there? (Yes, Dixie Chicks. I didn't know I liked them until Pandora sent them my way. In the last three months I've bought about a dozen albums...

This guy, who shared his Oscar ballot with Hollywood Reporter: Best Cinematography “I liked Life of Pi, but I’m suspect of any nominee that used a lot of CGI, since you can manipulate the photography so much. Lincoln was way too milky for me; I have that problem with almost everything Janusz Kaminski does. The Anna Karenina cinematography was totally unimpressive. Django Unchained was Robert Richardson, and he, in general, does far too much top-lighting for me. I’m voting for Skyfall because I want...