After awl, their are spelling miss steaks that the che­quer can knot ketch.

The Prag­matic Programmer

From the BBC News RSS feed:

A man from Kent is found guilty of traf­fick­ing three teenage girls from Nige­ria into main­land Europe using African ‘juju’ witchcraft.

I can’t tell from this sum­mary whether some­one did a really poor job of sum­ma­riz­ing the case and it was really some­thing entirely dif­fer­ent from what this sen­tence describes, or if it’s actu­ally as appalling a mis­car­riage of jus­tice as that sen­tence makes it appear to be. The link in the feed is bro­ken, so I can’t find any more details.

If this really is what it sounds like, well, the British used to have a much bet­ter per­spec­tive on witches.

When you’re pro­tected by a government-granted monop­oly you can get away with doing some really strange things. Case in point: when I called Time Warner Cable to arrange for my cable ser­vice to be moved, they started out being very help­ful and say­ing that would be easy. Then when I told them the new address was in Austin, sud­denly they said they couldn’t trans­fer ser­vice out­side of Cal­i­for­nia. I had to dis­con­nect my ser­vice, then call up the num­ber for Time Warner in Texas (which the Cal­i­for­nia rep­re­sen­ta­tive didn’t know) and set up “new” ser­vice there–even though I’m just get­ting the exact same cable modem ser­vice I already have.

For added strange­ness, I have to take the equip­ment in my apart­ment (a cable modem and cable TV box) to their near­est store or I’ll be charged “equip­ment fees.” Strange, they seemed per­fectly will­ing to carry those boxes out to my apart­ment when I was set­ting the ser­vice up.

Ample ink is spilled over debat­ing whether the US media is biased in favor of Repub­li­cans or Democ­rats. It is nei­ther. The over­whelm­ing, dri­ving bias of the US media is sub­servience to power, who­ever hap­pens to be wield­ing it.

Glenn Green­wald

The Wrong Side Absolutely Must Not Win [reason.com]

It seems that the fans are get­ting worked up again about whether their team will win the Big Game. This arti­cle from the Rea­son Mag­a­zine web­site does a good job of putting their silli­ness in perspective.

→ Out­lawed by Ama­zon DRM.

Mar­tin Bekkelund on his friend’s appar­ent ban from Ama­zon for no reason:

Did she vio­late any terms? Ama­zon will not tell. Per­haps by acci­dent? Ama­zon does not care. The con­clu­sion so far is clear: Ama­zon closed her account, wiped her Kin­dle and refuses to tell her why. End of discussion.

The lan­guage in Amazon’s responses is painfully corporate-douchey. It’s even worse than Twitter’s recent blog posts.

I’m guess­ing Ama­zon won’t refund the full pur­chase price of all of the Kin­dle books she “bought” that Ama­zon now has stolen back from her, or the Kin­dle itself that she’s no longer allowed to use.

[Marco.org]

This is why it’s a very good idea to remove the DRM from every ebook you buy (not Kin­dle books, any ebook from any source) and back it up. Many com­ments on the orig­i­nal post pointed this out as well, and men­tioned Cal­i­bre, which is what I use for keep­ing track of my own ebook library.

My Mac Pro’s fire­wall sud­denly started block­ing ssh con­nec­tions for no appar­ent rea­son. I even­tu­ally fig­ured out that I had to set sshd-keygen-wrapper to “Allow incom­ing con­nec­tions” before it would start work­ing again. I’m guess­ing a recent sys­tem update suf­fered from overzeal­ous security.