This blog is movin', new blog is at http://blog.computerjew.com/
(Update: Changed to a more friendly "subdomain" domain, the old address will still get you there.)
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Monday, September 19, 2011
Baruch Dyan HaEmes
My grandmother, Goldie Levine (Golda bas Avram A"H) just passed away. Baruch Dyan HaEmes. She was like a third parent to me. When I was in the hospital, she constantly asked about my well being, and when I failed out of college, she told my parents that they must give me a second chance and convinced them to do so. (I failed again, but it wasn't at all her fault.) Also, when I was a child, I spent a few summers with her in South Carolina, where she passed away at the age of 92 just a few days short of her husband's (A"H) yahrtzeit.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Who's fault was the near default? Or, the Gambling House's advantage.
This is how I see it, it was both Obama's and the House's fault, but primarily Obama's. It was not because of his having bad policies in the matter, but in his having very poor negotiation skills.
Obama held the debt ceiling limit negotiations to some extent for no reason, because he gave in almost completely to Boehner anyway. If he was going to do that, he shouldn't have contributed to making the crisis happen and should have gave in to Boehner at the beginning before it reached a crisis point, as the Speaker had offered him a similar deal to what we wound up with, minus some tea party stuff, earlier anyway - and he could have taken it with weeks to go.
Of course, the House could have given in to the President's demands, and likewise not delayed the debt ceiling limit, but why should they, when he was going to give in anyway?
Hindsight is 20-20, but if Obama wasn't, unlike Clinton with his government shutdown, actually willing to call the House's bluff, he shouldn't have gone to the gambling House in the first place. He should have instead chosen to surrender - on much better terms, at an earlier stage of the process.
Instead he held out for a "balanced package" that would never materialize for him and the Senate Democrat's slim majority he had behind it, which ended up causing the essentially wasted brinksmanship on the part of Obama, and the "gambling" House (gambling that Obama wouldn't, unlike Clinton, call their bluff) that led to the markets getting nervous.
It was the House's fault too, for also playing (successfully) at brinksmanship, but Obama chose to play politics when he didn't have a winning hand, he had the opportunity to do otherwise. Again, Boehnor and McConnell essentially got the same thing they offered earlier, plus even more concessions then they'd asked for, because the closer it got to the brink, the more sway the tea party got.
It would have been better for Obama, and even for the Democrats though perhaps politically they wouldn't have liked him giving in earlier, if he hadn't insisted on "not taking yes for an answer", as Boehnor somewhat cynically and inaccurately but on the whole correctly put it. (He ended up taking Boehnor's "yes" offer in the end anyway.)
He should have not tried to do the balanced approach thing - arguing over what, about 80 billion dollars annually (what 800 billion in cuts over a 10 year period means, not counting the smaller portion which is up to a committee that regardless of its composition will come up with smoke and mirrors for the remainder) - which is chump change on the Federal trillion-dollar annual level (that's thousands of billions, to put it in perspective, or tens of thousands of billions over a ten year period), but instead jeopardizing the faith people had in that trillion-dollar spending over whether there should be 10%, in the House plan that passed, or only slightly more of the budget, in Obama's failed proposals that included the admittedly balanced but unpassable taxation, cut over a ten year period! He, and the House, were playing high stakes poker for what in reality was low-stakes budget cuts.
Essentially, if you don't have a spine, and Obama didn't, you shouldn't play games with people who apparently did. Instead you should do what you did at the end, at the very start, quietly before the papers had gotten too excited, and saved everyone a lot of grief.
Of course, hindsight is 20-20. ;-)
Obama held the debt ceiling limit negotiations to some extent for no reason, because he gave in almost completely to Boehner anyway. If he was going to do that, he shouldn't have contributed to making the crisis happen and should have gave in to Boehner at the beginning before it reached a crisis point, as the Speaker had offered him a similar deal to what we wound up with, minus some tea party stuff, earlier anyway - and he could have taken it with weeks to go.
Of course, the House could have given in to the President's demands, and likewise not delayed the debt ceiling limit, but why should they, when he was going to give in anyway?
Hindsight is 20-20, but if Obama wasn't, unlike Clinton with his government shutdown, actually willing to call the House's bluff, he shouldn't have gone to the gambling House in the first place. He should have instead chosen to surrender - on much better terms, at an earlier stage of the process.
Instead he held out for a "balanced package" that would never materialize for him and the Senate Democrat's slim majority he had behind it, which ended up causing the essentially wasted brinksmanship on the part of Obama, and the "gambling" House (gambling that Obama wouldn't, unlike Clinton, call their bluff) that led to the markets getting nervous.
It was the House's fault too, for also playing (successfully) at brinksmanship, but Obama chose to play politics when he didn't have a winning hand, he had the opportunity to do otherwise. Again, Boehnor and McConnell essentially got the same thing they offered earlier, plus even more concessions then they'd asked for, because the closer it got to the brink, the more sway the tea party got.
It would have been better for Obama, and even for the Democrats though perhaps politically they wouldn't have liked him giving in earlier, if he hadn't insisted on "not taking yes for an answer", as Boehnor somewhat cynically and inaccurately but on the whole correctly put it. (He ended up taking Boehnor's "yes" offer in the end anyway.)
He should have not tried to do the balanced approach thing - arguing over what, about 80 billion dollars annually (what 800 billion in cuts over a 10 year period means, not counting the smaller portion which is up to a committee that regardless of its composition will come up with smoke and mirrors for the remainder) - which is chump change on the Federal trillion-dollar annual level (that's thousands of billions, to put it in perspective, or tens of thousands of billions over a ten year period), but instead jeopardizing the faith people had in that trillion-dollar spending over whether there should be 10%, in the House plan that passed, or only slightly more of the budget, in Obama's failed proposals that included the admittedly balanced but unpassable taxation, cut over a ten year period! He, and the House, were playing high stakes poker for what in reality was low-stakes budget cuts.
Essentially, if you don't have a spine, and Obama didn't, you shouldn't play games with people who apparently did. Instead you should do what you did at the end, at the very start, quietly before the papers had gotten too excited, and saved everyone a lot of grief.
Of course, hindsight is 20-20. ;-)
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Sony Security: Victim and Perpetrator.
I just got a message saying "A child of yours has created an account for Clone Wars". Apparently someone harvested my email address and is doing who knows what on a multiplayer game MMORPG game for children. (A lot of this sort of thing is scam artists and gold sellers on an MMORPG.)
I called up Sony, concerned that someone might be using my email as their identity to do illegal/immoral acts on it, or even something like a child predator who I could get in trouble for, and they at first told me "don't worry, someone probably misspelled their email address (even though their "handle" looked suspiciously random, lots of numbers) . After some firmness on the phone with them, they said they'd cancel the account, and even sent me an email message confirming that the account was canceled.
Today, several days later, after being informed the account was closed by them, I just got another message from that game, saying "your child has selected the nickname "Anakain Lightsayber" Apparently Sony Online, so recently the victim of a security break-in, doesn't mind if their free2play MMO game for children is used by scammers / child predators / whatever using other people's email addresses. I wish I had a lawyer on-call so I could make it stop. I always suspected that all many MMO game companies cared about were subscriptions, and that's why gold sellers, botting, and scammers thrived on all but a few of them, This confirms that. Unfortunately, this means that Sony Online is being a party to identity theft, and other criminal activity perpetrated against children as well, instead of just a victim of it as the well-publicized break-in of Sony's lax security demonstrated recently.
I called up Sony, concerned that someone might be using my email as their identity to do illegal/immoral acts on it, or even something like a child predator who I could get in trouble for, and they at first told me "don't worry, someone probably misspelled their email address (even though their "handle" looked suspiciously random, lots of numbers) . After some firmness on the phone with them, they said they'd cancel the account, and even sent me an email message confirming that the account was canceled.
Today, several days later, after being informed the account was closed by them, I just got another message from that game, saying "your child has selected the nickname "Anakain Lightsayber" Apparently Sony Online, so recently the victim of a security break-in, doesn't mind if their free2play MMO game for children is used by scammers / child predators / whatever using other people's email addresses. I wish I had a lawyer on-call so I could make it stop. I always suspected that all many MMO game companies cared about were subscriptions, and that's why gold sellers, botting, and scammers thrived on all but a few of them, This confirms that. Unfortunately, this means that Sony Online is being a party to identity theft, and other criminal activity perpetrated against children as well, instead of just a victim of it as the well-publicized break-in of Sony's lax security demonstrated recently.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
HTC HD2 Mango Beta 1
I installed a more recent version of this, and didn't choose the white wallpaper, but anyway... I figured this video was a lot more interesting than looking at my phone display a bunch of rectangles in a photo, and a lot less trouble than pulling out my own video camera. ;-)
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