Congressional representative Michele Bachman was recently granted a Switzerland citizenship. She calls the matter a non-story … but is it? Is it not disturbing that political leaders of the United States could theoretically have legal duties or binding interests to foreign lands? It is especially disturbing considering that upon becoming a congressional representative that a full clearance is granted (to anything and all compartments). When a large matter of national security falls into the “NOFORN” category, what kind of precedent is she setting for maintaining classified information? (Not that congress isn’t the source of nearly all leaks …)

Until the early 20th century, human babies survived on breastmilk (it may have been from a wet nurse, but it was still breastmilk). With the invention of baby formula, mothers in America largely trended away from breastfeeding relying instead upon the derived product to handle their baby’s nutritional needs. Around the 70s, the trend slowly began to reverse itself back to actual breastfeeding. Oddly enough, the social norm had changed definitively such that a woman breastfeeding her baby became something she did entirely privately, as if Americans couldn’t handle the image. The trend seems to have shifted yet again, with helicopter parents growing truly extreme in recent years. The latest Time magazine feature story (subscription required) highlights that not only has breastfeeding made a return, but mothers are continuing the process as their children grow through the toddler years.

Is there real validity in extending the health benefits of “mother’s milk” so long or will this generation of parents abnormally reduce their progeny’s independence and exposure growth?

How much is FaceBook worth? Investors are about to find out when the social media company goes public on the 18th. Indications are the stock will be offered between $28-$35 a share up front and enough shares are on the table to put the FaceBook’s value at nearly $100 billion. It’s principle owners stand to make a killing by selling their own stock options as part of the initial offering with estimates that founder Mark Zuckerburg could be sitting on $1 billion in cash that day. A mere eight years ago, Google went public with pre-IPO estimates predicting $2.7 billion to be raised worth of stock sales. Is FaceBook overpriced or can investors bank on another meteoric chance to “get in early?”

The service academies are in the news again, but this time it’s not for sports rivalry or academic value. Rape is the soup du jour, with allegations and lawsuits against both West Point and the Naval Academy. It’s obvious that such allegations are of a serious nature, but it is somewhat ridiculous for the plaintiffs to hold “personally responsible” (as per the article) the former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the former superintendents of the two academies and the current secretaries of the Army and Navy. The story indicates an overly pervasive culture of alcohol pressure and a hostile chain of command to which one could report sexual misconduct.

Watching a few of those old sit coms on cable the other day I was struck by how unfunny I now regarded shows that I thought were hilarious when they were new. The canned laughter seemed to be in the wrong places, and soon became so grating that I soon had to concede that I should no longer seek entertainment in that form.

Reflecting on this in bed, I wondered whether it is my sense of humour that has changed, or is it America’s, or am I imagining this and nothing has changed? So, giving up on sleep, I turned on the TV and on came the Letterman Show. The crowd goes wild as he enters the theatre and the whistles and screams continue as he attempts to get out his opening one-liners. I pay close attention to his words and it is all I can do to find some mild irony or satire, certainly insufficient to raise a smile in me. But the signs are clearly urging the audience to applaud because Dave is getting an ovation that would do credit to an opera star. I turn off the TV and sink into a depressing reflection that I have grown into an old fart who no longer shares the mainstream sense of humour.

I think sense of humour is a personal thing and no doubt it varies with mood, age, and life’s experience. I think also it is well established that it varies markedly from country to country, even in the English-speaking world. The old paradigm was that British humour was subtle, dry, and strongly influenced by class and status, whereas Americans find most funny things that are obvious: farce, and even slap-stick.

I think we are now conditioned to reward anyone who tries to amuse us with wild applause, cheering, and whistling. To do otherwise is rude and ungrateful, even if it is honest. Sadly, I think we de-valuing real humour to the extent that we are forgetting what it is. After all, who can define “funny”. I can’t, but (like most art) I know it when I hear, or see, it.

Like many others, I howled with delight at the Monty Python productions. Here was something new. Features like The Life of Brian" and “the Holy Grail” allowed you fill in much of the background from your own knowledge of history and religion. The shockingly, sacrilegious, and profane antics that would otherwise have been deeply offensive became nothing more than good humoured satire. The willingness to touch a raw nerve with “Always look on the bright side of life” was deeply shocking for Christians but hardly sacrilegious in intent. Michael Palin’s every sperm is sacred is the most cutting criticism of the Catholic Church’s teaching on contraception imaginable. And yet it is done in such an innocent good humoured manner that few could take offence, not even the most conservative Archbishops. Could they ever really make the case that the sentiments expressed are not true?

I recently noticed a comment from an OmniNerd user that posting media into an article wan’t easy. This quick How-To will address that issue with a demonstration of embedding a picture and a video.

How To Post Pictures

The first thing you need to do, is create a new article using the typical routine. Click on Submit New at the top and choose the Article type. The site will prompt you for the usual preliminaries, a title and some tags, after which you must click Save Draft and Begin Auto-Saving.

To put a picture into your article, start by clicking Edit / Upload Images for this Article. You’ll be brought to a screen like the one below. From here, you simply pick a JPG, GIF or PNG file from your computer and click Upload Image.

After a brief pause while the browser transfers the file to the server, you’ll see the page change to show your picture(s). The more pictures you upload, the more will be visible here.

You could just use it “as is”, but clicking on View/Edit will give you many more options. You can resize the overall image that is seen if the picture is looked at specifically or just resize the thumbnail that is displayed in-line with the article. Nobody ever really seems to caption or tag their pictures, but you can do this here as well. The next two options allow for the image to appear either left, center or right aligned with text flowing around it. If these options seem weird, please blame CSS.

There appears to be damning evidence for both sides; be it Google’s internal documents recognizing the possible copyright issue during the development of Android or Oracle’s admission that Oracle management decided it wanted to compete with Android prior to deciding to sue Google or even conflicting testimony from two former CEOs of Sun, the previous owner of Java intellectual property.

What is ultimately at stake is still debatable, but the editor-in-chief of Dr. Dobbs, Andrew Binstock has a few predictions in his article, Oracle and the End of Programming As We Know It. Perhaps not the most unbiased take, but a chilling look at the consequences of this battle of tech behemoths.

Supply chain security has been a hot topic of late, particularly with regards to America’s dependence on IT infrastructure manufactured overseas. Lately, reports haven’t pulled any punches in alluding to Chinese involvement in surreptitiously compromising equipment destined for the United States. Although the source has not been confirmed, Hewlett Packard ProCurve 5400 zl Switches have been identified as having shipped to customers with infected compact flash cards. Only particular batches of serial numbers after April 30, 2011 are amongst the infected lot. The malware does not have an impact on the switch itself but is believed to target PCs once a user removes the card from the switch and transfers it to a regular machine. The security announcement from Hewlett Packard can be viewed here.

BGP is the protocol that governs how routers between ASs (autonomous systems) share their routes with one another. It’s a peculiar protocol in that no network administrator necessarily trusts their counterpart, but is forced to accept what is advertised in order to see beyond their own network. That said, improper BGP messages can lead to all sorts of network mayhem – one of the most significant examples is laid out in great detail by OmniNerd’s own twabulldogg in Did China Hijack 15% of the Internet: Routers, BGP and Ignorance. Some network engineers have gotten together to come up with various solutions to solve the problem when BGP advertisements are irregular or false. One solution involves PKI certificates to vouch for authenticity but this technique involves an architectural change … and the Internet is nothing but slow to adopt change (cough IPv6 cough). The engineers are proposing an idea called ROVER (Route Origin Verification) which utilizes DNS and its myriad of available records to store route information and secure them with DNSSEC. An advantage of this approach is the architecture is already in place. A test program can be found at ROVER.

It’s relatively old news that employers do their research on interviewed candidates. They’ve done Google searches on them and checked them out on social networking sites like FaceBook. Some people finally jumped on the privacy bandwagon and locked down their accounts after realizing their drunken, topless keg stands from college are not ideal for prospective employers (or maybe it is). That didn’t stop the companies from demanding candidates turnover login information to their accounts – it’s even happened to people that were already employed as a condition of continued employment. Needless to say, this hasn’t sat well with … anyone. FaceBook has finally risen to the occasion and at least threatened to begin suing companies demanding illegitimate access to user accounts. One bill was already squashed in congress to make this illegal, but it was a rider on another bill. As such, the Social Networking Online Protection Act is being pushed again as an independent act.