It’s a waste of time. Mark Pothier in the Boston Globe: Now, a study [link] has concluded what lots of us have long suspected: Many of these irritating security measures are a waste of time. The study, by a top researcher at Microsoft, found that instructions intended to spare us from costly computer attacks often exact a much steeper price in the form of user effort and time expended. “Most security advice simply offers a poor cost-benefit trade-off to users,” wrote its author, Cormac Herley...

This weekend marks the 300th anniversary of the Statute of Anne, the first modern copyright law. Understanding that the original intent of copyright law in the U.S. was to foster creativity, how do we think today’s copyright terms — life of the author +70 years — will help a dead person produce new creative works? We’re always talking about how this or that program impoverishes our children. Well what about impoverishing them by holding creative works from the public domain?...

Of all the speculation over who might be named to fill Justice John Paul Stevens’ Supreme Court seat, my preferred pick was voiced just now by Arianna Huffington on ABC News This Week: Elizabeth Warren. Ezra Klein names her, too: Harvard Law professor and financial regulation expert Elizabeth Warren, whose appointment would be an admission that many of the Court’s most consequential decisions are on economic and regulatory matters, rather than just on the cultural issues that tend to dominate...

AP is reporting that a plane crashed in dense fog over Russia early this morning killing all 96 people on board. Among the dead, President Lech Kaczynski and his wife along with some of the country’s top military and civilian leaders. The Telegraph: Poland has suffered more than is any country’s right. Its story is one of repeated occupations, partitions and tyrannies. Sixty years ago, almost to the day, 21,768 Polish army officers, intellectuals and senior civil servants were murdered by...

And now for some mildly diverting weekend trivia…. As Orlando braces for the arrival of 200 middle school Scrabble experts to compete for the $10,000 National School SCRABBLE® Championship today, long-time Scrabble fans are saying it’s time for a revolution. Why? A new version (called Scrabble Trickster) being introduced only in the United Kingdom allows players to use proper nouns, spell words backwards, steal letters from opponents, and place words on the board without connecting them...

Mashable: Apple has officially unveiled its new mobile advertising platform, iAds, the “seventh pillar” of the new iPhone OS 4.0. The new iAd platform, which we learned about just two weeks ago, will be built directly into the iPhone OS interface. During today’s iPhone OS 4.0 unveiling event at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, CA, Steve Jobs stated that the company is looking to change the face of advertising by concentrating it within apps rather than search — a dig at Google — and...

Nicholas Carr pushes back at smart geek objections to the locked down iPad: If Ned Ludd had been a blogger, he would have written a post similar to Doctorow’s about those newfangled locked-down mechanical looms that distance the weaver from the machine’s workings, requiring the weaver to follow the programs devised by the looms’ manufacturer. The design of the mechanical loom, Ned would have told us, exhibits a palpable contempt for the user. It takes the generativity out of weaving. And...

Is the business model — the place where money is made — IN the wires, or ON the wires? A network 100 times faster than what we have today would make an HD movie downloadable in minutes. Even more interesting are the products and services we can’t imagine. Telecom analysts say we don’t need a network that fast and wouldn’t use it. The telecom business model is about playing the cards they’ve got. They certainly aren’t interested in building a foundation for...

Kelefa Sanneh wades through Rich Benjamin’s, Searching for Whitopia; Nell Irvin Painter’s, The History of White People; David Roediger’s, How Race Survived U.S. History and Christian Lander’s, Stuff White People Like [website] to wonder in a New Yorker essay, Is white the new black? This conclusion should make you want to read the entire article: Yes, whiteness is a social construct, and not (as race scientists used to think) a biological essence—but then so, too, is every...

On this day, at this time, 42 years ago in the Memphis, TN, Mason Temple, Martin Luther King Jr. was delivering the last speech of his life. It’s come to be known as “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” That most famous of passages: And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days...

There are a few Democrats left in the south. U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson (GA-4) is one of them. Here he’s questioning Robert Willard, commander of the U.S. fleet in the Pacific, at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week on the impact of more American troops on the island of Guam: “My fear is that the whole island would become so overly populated that it would tip over and capsize.” If you haven’t seen it (it’s making the rounds today) do watch it: Johnson now...

In The Atlantic, Wayne Curtis pronounces, Moonshine is back! This time in a hipster guise: [R]efined moonshining hasn’t died—in fact, it’s booming today, taken up by a new generation, mostly in big cities and micropolitan towns. Practitioners make tiny batches not to resell, but mostly to see what sorts of goodness they can concoct. “It’s the same people who drove the home-brewing trend, and they’re just as dorky,” Watman said. “It tends to attract tattoo guys and the more outré...

New Scientist asks about yesterday’s New York Federal District Court ruling that patents on two genes linked to breast cancer are invalid: Is this the end of gene patenting? The ACLU and its supporters, including the American Society for Human Genetics and the American Medical Association, contend that the patents never should have been awarded because the genes are natural. They argue that women may be denied tests if they or their doctors can’t afford the tests. By owning the patents,...

That from a NYTimes graphic accompanying their story on state debt woes growing too big to hide. Via Tim O’Reilly, “Always seems to be the ones *talking* small govt….” Continue the conversation @jwindish #TMVcomments. Or email me at joe-AT-joewindish-DOT-com. I won’t be able to respond to every email, but I will publish follow-up posts featuring reader feedback, including feedback that disagrees with me.

A fairly effective comeback to those who say Al Jazera is biased: We are not, definitely, like channels whereby we mix comment and opinion with the news. I have been watching the debate about the health care in this country, and I can tell you frankly that a lot of channels, when they are debating this issue, it’s very clear for me, who’s coming from outside this country, that they are taking sides. It is not the case in Al-Jazeera. That from Al Jazeera Director General Wadah Khanfar. He was...

No fan of the rules around applause in classical concerts, Alex Ross says let our applause be heard: Emanuel Ax, not a showboating pianist, complains on his website: “I am always a little taken aback when I hear the first movement of a concerto which is supposed to be full of excitement, passion, and virtuoso display (like the Brahms or Beethoven Concertos), and then hear a rustling of clothing, punctuated by a few coughs; the sheer force of the music calls for a wild audience reaction.”...

Harris interactive headlined, “Wingnuts” and President Obama, for a poll finding that large numbers of Americans hold extreme views of our president: It finds that 40% of adults believe he is a socialist. More than 30% think he wants to take away Americans’ right to own guns and that he is a Muslim. More than 25% believe he wants to turn over the sovereignty of the United States to a world government, has done many things that are unconstitutional, that he resents America’s...

AP is reporting he flew in overnight and stayed only a few hours, all in darkness. Obama met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his Cabinet at the presidential palace. This was his second trip to a war zone as commander in chief.

In a press event today, he was forceful in contrasting his own actions with those of Democrats who have been harassed: House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) angrily lashed out at Democratic leaders for their handling of reported threats against members of Congress Thursday, accusing them of “dangerously fanning the flames” by blaming the GOP and confiding that he has also been the recipient of threats. [...] “I’ve received threats since I assumed elected office, not only...

Watching Germany as Ireland settles some, I was taken by surprise by this case in Wisconsin: Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit. That’s the lead as reported in the NYTimes, but it hardly captures the true unfolding...

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is close to announcing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell changes: “I think he is prepared to offer a way ahead on that subject this week,” Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, told reporters Tuesday. Gates will address “the changes that he is going to be making to the department’s policy to provide for a more humane enforcement and application of the law,” Morrell said. Gates directed the Pentagon’s legal counsel in February to explore ways to...

A trend? Georgia Rep. Phil Gingrey (R): “When we say start over, we don’t mean throw everything out – throw out the baby with the bath water. We mean, take the best of this bill and combine it with our ideas like buying insurance across state lines and equalizing the tax treatment and creating high-risk pools. “Of course, all of the language regarding electronic medical records I’m in favor of. So I might not fully agree with completely repealing and starting over.” Newt Gingrich and...

Seeing is believing… Er, okay. So I mosey on over to her facebook page: With the president signing this [blah, blah, blah] takeover of our health care system [blah, blah, blah] We’re going to reclaim the power of the people [blah, blah, blah] We’re going to fire them [blah, blah, blah] thanks to their destructive government-growing policies. [blah, blah, blah] [blah, blah, blah] Come November, we’re going to print pink slips [blah, blah, blah] We’re paying particular attention to...

LATER: The market at work — t-shirts featuring the VP’s quote are now available. No word yet of one featuring the press secretary’s tweet… The Caucus Blog reports on VP Joe Biden’s “overly effusive aside to President Obama.” On an open mic: “Mr. President, this is a big … deal,” he said, adding an adjective between big and deal, that begins with ‘f.’ … For whatever reason, Fox News is claiming boasting rights that it was the first to report...

These are historic political times. C-SPAN has long been the definitive chronicler of that history. Last week C-SPAN opened up its historical chronicle to the world. The full C-SPAN archive is now available at C-SpanVideo.org and — bloggers take note — you can search, clip, excerpt and embed it. That’s 23 years of history through five presidential administrations; 160,000 hours of video (and some audio). The NYTimes: C-Span has been uploading its history for several years, working...