OmniNerd

U.S. Healthcare: the Best, the Worst, and the Irrelevant

Brandon — Fri Mar 19 22:07:20 -0500 2010

“Healthcare” is big these day. Government, insurance companies, individual choices, personal lifestyles, money – all of them are players in what has been a complicated and controversial issue for a long, long time. (And somehow I doubt the upcoming vote will change that, no matter how it turns out.) People have strong feelings/opinions on the matter, and there doesn’t seem to be much middle ground.

Some want to change everything, to be sure everyone is “covered.” They feel for those who get lesser treatment because they don’t have money, and they can see the gross inefficiency of using emergency rooms as the nation’s Primary Care Physician. “We’re the worst,” they say. “We’re so rich and we can’t/don’t even take care of our own!”

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Human Behavior in Survival Situations

VnutZ — Fri Mar 19 13:26:20 -0500 2010

Some behavioral researchers recently made some interesting conclusions regarding human behavior for survival. They looked at survival statistics for two ill-fated ships, the Titanic and the Lusitania. Each ship sank within three years of each other carrying approximately the same number of passengers and with a nearly identical survival rate of 67%. The difference between the two was how long it took the vessel to sink; the Titanic went down in just under three hours while the Lusitania sank in eighteen minutes. The researchers were curious if there would be a commonality between the two with regards to who survived and based their analysis on a multitude of factors like passenger class, age, marital status, children, etc. They expected to find that a propensity for women and children to be granted lifeboat access with the greatest casualties in the middle-aged, single men down in steerage. Instead, they found nearly the exact opposite on the Lusitania and came to the conclusion that in a short span of time, self-preservation nearly trumps all notions of chivalry whereas with a long enough timespan to “calm down,” people begin behaving by social norms again regardless of circumstance.

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1024bit RSA Encryption Broken

VnutZ — Thu Mar 18 09:57:19 -0500 2010

RSA is pretty much the de facto name in public key encryption. They’ve long held open challenges to programmers to crack their keys going back to 1977 as a means of keeping track of what size key was necessary to maintain security. Currently, it’s been a common recommendation that 1024bit keys were still secure and many professional organizations have been brute-force attacking them for years. Some researchers at the University of Michigan have upended previous estimates on the security of a 1024bit key by recovering private keys from encryption hardware in a mere 104 hours. Their method involved a cluster of 81 Pentium 4s working an algorithm designed to detect error fluctuations (PDF) in calculations induced from chip faults. The process was helped along by inducing more faults within the chips by cutting the supplied voltage at key times.

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The Interstate Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution empowers Congress to regulate?

Brandon — Wed Mar 17 14:53:57 -0500 2010

Cast Your Vote - The Interstate Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution empowers Congress to regulate?

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Catholic Exorcist Points Finger at Vatican

VnutZ — Fri Mar 12 15:45:01 -0600 2010

You don’t often hear about the Exorcists of the Vatican, but recently Father Gabriel Amorth began pointing his finger. He’s been the chief Exorcist of the church for the past 25 years with more than 70,000 cases of possession under his belt. He insinuates the Devil having infiltrated into the Vatican with evidence being internal violence, pedophilia and other cover-ups. Amorth further goes on to describe the film The Exorcist as exaggerated, but an otherwise exact representation of the possessions he has encountered where he says all sorts of things spew forth from the victims, “Anything can come out of their mouths – finger-length pieces of iron, but also rose petals.” Naturally, his comments have not sat well with the Vatican.

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Ad-Blocking: Dueling Views

Jackson — Thu Mar 11 12:53:40 -0600 2010

Lately I have been playing around with extensions on Firefox (on Linux) and Chrome (on Windows). Chrome has a few really interesting plug-ins that I have played around with. One is an “IE Render” button, that will open a new Chrome tab and render it as if it were IE8. This may sound ridiculous, but some sites (like USAA until a few months ago) do not render correctly in Chrome, but do in IE. It totally works, so I convinced my wife to stop using IE8 completely. I consider that a big win.

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Scientology: We've had it with you

Occams — Mon Mar 08 19:01:22 -0600 2010

We have been giving the Mormons a hammering over the last few days. Although I find their beliefs highly improbable, it is hard not to admire their loyalty to them and their willingness to defend them. They say adversity makes us stronger, and this sect has had enough of that to become very strong.

For me, what is far more concerning are the pseudo religious cults that abuse their members and challenge us all through their defiance of our laws and societal values. Prime amongst these must be the fast-growing Scientologists whose depravity is becoming increasingly better understood.

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Hurt Locker vs Reality

VnutZ — Mon Mar 08 09:27:32 -0600 2010

The 2010 Oscars have come and gone and the outcomes were interesting. Many people were surprised when The Hurt Locker destroyed Avatar. It was viewed as a breakthrough for women as director Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director as her film went on to more awards like Best Picture. Therein lies the question.

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Winter Olympic sports?

VnutZ — Mon Mar 08 06:02:41 -0600 2010

Cast Your Vote - Winter Olympic sports?

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A Short Look into a Phishing Email

VnutZ — Sun Mar 07 13:03:11 -0600 2010

So the other day, I came out of the movie theater and checked my iPhone to see what I missed while being entertained by Alice in Wonderland. In my AKO mail was a curious looking message about North Korea having tested a missile with a nuclear detonation in Okinawa, Japan. The message indicated alerts being made for pending mobilization of military units. WTF?


Office of the Director of National Intelligence

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Cyber Security Challenges

VnutZ — Sun Mar 07 06:58:13 -0600 2010

The intent to defend America’s IT infrastructure is quite old, but often even new initiatives are so mired in secrecy that nothing ends up happening. Recently, the Obama administration declassified pieces of the Bush era Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative which was an effort to make sweeping changes to America’s security posture. A subsequent congressional review of the declassified portion concluded that while the plan had areas of significant merit, the declassified pieces presented various characteristics that were at odds with itself and along with hindrances to the development of solutions. For instance, the findings state the program was too secret for its own good (essentially nobody could work on it since nobody knew about it) and that R&D should be centrally managed by a specialized agency such as DARPA rather than parceled out piecemeal to competing academic environments.

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Internet Energy Savings

Brandon — Tue Mar 02 14:29:50 -0600 2010

While making a rare drive to deposit a check, I realized something: It’s possible the Internet will do more to reduce global warming and conserve energy than 2007’s Nobel Peace Prize winners: Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — combined. (Well, unless you count Al Gore as the inventor of the Internet, but I’m not going to go there.) It’s difficult, of course, to put a number on how much the latter two have done or will do to help reduce the amount of Carbon in the air – but in the end, I don’t think it makes much of a difference.

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Have you cheated (academics, work, etc.) to get ahead?

VnutZ — Mon Mar 01 04:36:03 -0600 2010

Cast Your Vote - Have you cheated (academics, work, etc.) to get ahead?

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Computing discussion you find yourself having most often?

markmcb — Mon Feb 22 04:20:36 -0600 2010

Cast Your Vote - Computing discussion you find yourself having most often?

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Most Irritating User

VnutZ — Mon Feb 15 04:59:02 -0600 2010

Cast Your Vote - Most Irritating User

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