Life of Smiley

Superhacker Max Butler Pleads Guilty When Max Butler was 25, curiosity led him to hack into Pentagon computers, where he promptly closed security holes he found, effectively making the network more secure. The Pentagon immediately hired Butler as their new head of network security. No wait, they actually put him in jail, where he met real criminals and taught them how to steal credit card numbers. What have we learned from this story? Not only does our justice system fail to deter criminal activity, it actually creates more sophisticated criminals The Federal Government is not interested in improving security , only in prosecuting offenders (that they know about) long after the breach occurs This is one of my biggest pet peeves: security by threat of prosecution . I would say this is the bureaucratic equivalent of closing the barn door after the horses have gone, but all they're really doing is scolding the horses. Bad horse! See that barn door? I'm going to leave it w

As governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin has a proven track record of bringing about change swiftly. Which is great, so long as you agree with her changes. From Bristol's Body, Sarah's Choice on Slate.com: Palin made her position clear last fall, when she denounced and sought to reverse an Alaska Supreme Court ruling that upheld the rights of teenage girls. "It is outrageous that a minor girl can get an abortion without parental consent," said the governor. ... The court affirmed that minors often needed guidance, that parents were entitled to provide that guidance, and that states could facilitate this role by notifying parents whose daughters sought abortions. But the law in question, the Alaska Parental Consent Act, went further. ... The justices concluded that the law "allows parents to refuse to consent not only where their judgment is better informed and considered than that of their daughter, but also where it is colored by personal religious belief, whim, or

Everything about this story is oddly hilarious to me. I mean, you know, except for the dead people.

At least, it seems obvious to me. But still an interesting read. Where are they? Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing. Such a discovery would be of tremendous scientific significance. What could be more fascinating than discovering life that had evolved entirely independently of life here on Earth? Many people would also find it heartening to learn that we are not entirely alone in this vast, cold cosmos. But I hope that our Mars probes discover nothing. It would be good news if we find Mars to be sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit. Conversely, if we discovered traces of some simple, extinct life-form--some bacteria, some algae--it would be bad news. If we found fossils of something more advanced, perhaps something that looked like the remnants of a trilobite or even the skeleton of a small mammal, it would be very bad news. The more complex the life-form we found, the more depressing the news would be. I would find it interesting, cer

Trying to Design a Truly Entertaining Game Can Defeat Even a Certified Genius Ted Castronova, a social scientist and professor at Indiana University, made a name for himself studying the economies of online games, going so far as to calculate the exchange rate between US dollars and EverQuest platinum. But he wanted to do more than study virtual worlds - he wanted to create one. So in 2006, armed with a $250,000 MacArthur Foundation grant, Castronova and a team of grad students got to work designing Arden: The World of William Shakespeare. The aim was to have players explore an Elizabethan environment, interact with characters from the Bard's plays, or just go to a tavern and wager a few farthings on card games like One-and-Thirty. The game was released last fall - to little fanfare. It seems something was rotten in the state of Arden. "It's no fun," Castronova says ruefully. "We failed to design a gripping experience." Really? It took a purported genius an