Sam’s random musings

NSA Data Mining 1: If you aren’t against it, then you don’t really understand it.:

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!” - Sir Walter Scott

The NSA’s recently-revealed program to scour through and analyze the phone records of millions of normal and innocent Americans is apparently seen by my many of us to be perfectly okay. A Washington Post/ABC poll conducted on Friday, the day after the revelations, concluded the following:

The new survey found that 63 percent of Americans said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the effort. Another 35 percent said the program was unacceptable, which included 24 percent who strongly objected to it.

I was shocked by this report. 63 percent? Do these people have any idea what it is they are approving of?

“Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” - Benjamin Franklin

One of the things that the Bush Administration is counting on is that we Americans will be so afraid of the terror boogieman that we’ll think that losing our liberties is okay. He is basically appealing to our cowardice. It is this cowardice Ben Franklin was speaking of 250 years ago. But Trent Lott, apparently speaking for millions of other cowardly Americans, said in 2005 “I don’t agree with the libertarians. I want my security first. I’ll deal with all the details after that.”

This is not what the Founding Fathers were hoping for.

This is worth reading as are the many articles that are out there. There are so many uses for this information it will blow your mind. Also if you think that if only giving phone numbers makes it ok becausee there are no names and other information. Put your phone number into google. The government can do that too, and I am sure they don’t need google to do it

(Via graphpaper.)

Free Skype–for some:

Today, Skype announced free calls to all landlines and mobile phones in the US and Canada. The SkypeOut service lets you place phone calls your computer. Great freebie, very kind of them to offer this, but it’s not working for a large number of Skype subscribers. Is it working for you?

Report back here.

Trey cool, going to try this to call my Bro sometime soon

(Via Mac DevCenter.)

Power tool drag racing — why didn’t we think of this?:

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Household

As much as we support the use of power tools in safe, supervised areas far away from us, we can’t help but admire the crazies responsible for this year’s Power Tool Drag Racing event. The basic idea is to take a hand-held power tool, mod it up a bit (or a lot), and let it race against other devices in its own class down a plywood track. Hilarity ensues, and the contestants have some pretty amazing entries this time around. MAKE is on the scene, and the event seems to be providing just as much mayhem and adult beverages as were implied. If you didn’t make it down Sunday you’ll just have to hope they make this an annual event, since it really is so totally punk rock.

(Via Engadget.)

Plug: Evolution of Dance:

Evolution of Dance: Funniest thing you’ll watch all day. Posted plenty of other places as well, but it deserves a repost here. Pardon me while I go watch it all again.

This is pretty funny

(Via Firewheel Design: Sparkplug.)

Final release (v1.0) of Cake Migrations:

Didn't take me too long, so here is the final version of Cake Migrations in all its glory. As well as support for the creation and dropping of tables, the main changes are as follows: Add/drop columns insert and remove test data (rows) run raw SQL queries rest the migration DB schema and destroy migration files I think that pretty much [...]

Now this is very cool, a simple consistant way to define db migrations is really helpful, I imagine that PHPNut will put his own twist on this and bring it into the fold…

(Via The Meaning of Life, the Internet and Everything.)

Headline: Congress Targets Social Network Sites:

So here we go…let’s REALLY get around this messy job of educating our kids by just legislating away school access to not only MySpace but to any

…commercial Web sites that let users create public “Web pages or profiles” and also offer a discussion board, chat room, or e-mail service.

Including blogs, wikis, online gaming…

No joke. This is a bill offered up by a group of Republicans whose polling shows that now is the time to capitalize on the hysteria that a slew of fright-filled articles about social networking sites has wrought.

It really is worth reading both the Tim’s write-up as well as the original articles

(Via weblogged News.)

Really Easy Field Validation with Prototype:

Late last week I was working on a content submission form, and thinking about a good way to add unobtrusive validation using Prototype, similar to what the guys at Particle Tree have talked about in a couple articles earlier. I liked the approach the articles took and went looking for any libraries doing the same thing built on top of Prototype.

Enter Really Easy Field Validation. It lets you do the following with your form elements, using the class attribute to indicate what kind of validation is needed (assumes Prototype 1.5, included with Script.aculo.us 1.6.1):

This is really slick, lots can be done leveraging this library

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

Derick Rethans’ Blog: Debugging Protocol Shoot-out:

Derick Rethans has posted a shootout of a few of the debugging protocols out there, really a comparison between the debugger that Zend is using in its Eclipse PHP IDE and the DBGp package.

fairly basic but a good insight

(Via PHPDeveloper.org.)