Applications are unfortunately quite readily able to abuse this a fair bit; a (recent, as of August 2010) example being
Evernote.

Evernote, and Why You Need to Think About Permissions describes the problem:

The Evernote app requests a fair number of permissions. Some make sense, such as the INTERNET permission (kinda important for a Web service). Some are a bit dubious, such as needing both coarse and fine location data.

It definitely demands too much permission, with two cross-sections that are troublesome

• It asks for “the world” up front
• It asks for permissions it shouldn’t need For instance, it shouldn’t need access to contacts – it should merely offer to share data, which pushes data to a boundary where the user, at run time, can choose whether or not to allow the data out.

In addition, some of the permissions ought to be optional.

1. If you want to record locations on your notes, then granting access to location data may be a reasonable thing to do.
2. If you don’t want to record locations, then Evernote doesn’t need that access.

Unfortunately, at present, you don’t have any of those shadings, your options are mighty binary:

1. Grant Evernote all the capabilities requested
2. Reject the access, and don’t install it.

I suggest that there is another shading that would be useful, notably for INTERNET access (and probably also for filesystem access), which is to “tie down” what places the application can go.

• Evernote probably only needs to access evernote.com
• Twitter only needs access to twitter.com
• Shuffle (a GTD-like application) may access a domain of the user’s choice to synchronize data.
• Web Browser needs the “wide open” Internet.

I expect that filesystem access could similar be tied down:

• A file browser (such as Astro) might legitimately access “everything”
• Most applications should be restricted to their own directory

Alas, I didn’t get around to it in time for the license change which essentially eliminates interest in it. The precis of the change: You’re free to download it, and use it for as long as 90 days, but then, you’re expected to pay Oracle for a service contract.

I guess the good news is that I didn’t waste any time on something I’d have to be “sunsetting” by the end of June 2010.

Nope, not “April Fools.”

Locals complained that this is terrible and demonstrates that the city does not care about public safety.

I suggest that this is not nearly as obvious as it might seem.

By all means, helicopters are “sexy”, but that certainly isn’t good enough to justify it!

Helicopters can help solve some specific problems quickly, but there are perhaps three metrics by which they mayn’t actually be worthwhile.

• Do they solve more crimes? If not, then that is a strike against choppers.
• Do they merely catch some perps more quickly. Is faster truly worth the money? Do faster catches save them from extra crimes being committed? That may be nice for would-be victims… How does it actually affect the budget?
• What would be the expected outcome from the addition or loss of the equivalent money spent on cops on the ground?

After all, it may be that a dozen extra guys (and ladies) walking or driving beats, 8 hours a day, 200-some days per year, may do more good than an aircraft sprinting around for a couple hours a day.

The answers are in the details…

The terrorists don’t necessarily care if people get killed; blowing things up, killing people, and such, are merely tactics to a goal. The goal is that they want us filled with terror, and that’s what’s happening.  When we are fearful, they have succeeded.

America has had the moniker “Land of the Free, and Home of the Brave” – the responses to terrorism are smashing away at both of those. This isn’t to say that there aren’t brave people; the handling, by police, emergency services, and the military demonstrate that they have plenty of men and women that are plenty brave.

The trouble isn’t a lack of brave people to cope with emergencies.  The trouble is that the rest of the people are getting fearful and panicked.  That is leading to ridiculous results, going as bad as the recent airboard mutiny, where passengers, suspicious about a couple of passengers that they thought may have spoken Arabic, left the plane, refusing to fly until security personnel removed the “offending” passengers.

This was, in reality, a case of not-terribly-latent racism, combining with incompetent suspicion and paranoia, preying on the fears that people are not refusing to accept. The “aviation expert” observed that “We are in a paranoid time, but vigilance by ordinary people is important.” I disagree – this situation demonstrated that the paranoid vigilance of incompetent ordinary people causes real problems.

There were complaints after the incident of the “underpants bomber” that President Obama did not do enough soon enough; it seems to me that he should have consciously waited a while, so as to demonstrate a refusal to be drawn into a panicked response, and then emit a speech including the following sorts of points:

• Happily, security preparations were good enough that this particular incident did not go very badly.
• Unfortunately, as there are an unlimited number of possible targets, it is effectively impossible to secure them all, as hard as our fine people may try.
• The goal of terrorists is to instill terror – whether there is destruction is incidental.  If we, as a people, are shaken by this incident, then they have succeeded, even though there was no death or destruction.  The successful injury to our spirit represents success to them.
• We must not minimize the hurt to the individuals injured by terrorist events – we must help and support them.
• But we must not allow the possibility of injury to destroy our spirit.  When the American people succumb to the fear mongering that was the goal of the terrorist, we commit three errors:
  1. As a nation, we allow them to succeed
  2. We injure ourselves. The cost of wasted time that results from some of the panicked reactions has been enormous, and the time wasted can never be regained.
  3. We dishonor the efforts and preparations of our armed forces when we panic

There’s a pretty awesome blog entry on this here. The awesome quote:

This is seldom highlighted in a country perversely convulsed by, and that can’t seem to get enough of, fantasies about being besieged by terrorists.

“This” being that about the only thing that didn’t cause more fatalities than terrorism was shark attacks. And yes, indeed, the popularity of the TV show “24″ demonstrates the fixation on this fantasy.  Things that regularly cause vastly more fatalities than terrorism include:

• Alcohol whether via
  • Alcohol poisoning
  • Fatal injuries resulting from intoxication
• Violent deaths stemming from the recent economic troubles, whether due to
  • Job loss
  • Foreclosure
  • Inability to pay rent
• E Coli bacteria
• Car accidents
• Airplane crashes due to
  • Pilot error
  • Inclement weather
  • Structural failure
  • Improper maintenance

Republicans seem happy to find any reason they can fabricate to say that Obama is a bad president; I think that the fact that he didn’t make a firm statement about this situation points to him being weak. It is possible to work past weakness, but it requires effort…

Well… A “distressed leather-covered book.”

Well… Perhaps it makes one look like an arrogant yuppie .  And maybe the word “distressed” ought to get applied to other things than just the cover of the book .

In any case, I took a somewhat similar approach in building a Moleskine iPod case for my iPod Touch. (Not using a real Moleskine, but rather one of the Moleskine-like notebooks that Google has been giving out scads of at conferences like PG East and PGCon over the last few years.)

Ironically, one of the stated selling points of the BookBook is that

Being individual and different is what Macs are all about…

Of course, it a lot of people buy this, then they’re specifically not being “individual and different.”  The more people that buy it, the less “individual and different” it gets.

I’d still like one, though not necessarily specifically for a MacBook.  There is likely the rub…

On the one hand, it strikes me as something of a “commercial loss” for the vendor not to sell it in sizes suited for other sorts of laptops.

On the other hand, they are a little pricey ($80 USD), and I suppose that there may not be a huge market for overpriced “too cool for school” cases for other sorts of laptops.  There’s some indication that MacFans are willing to buy up all sorts of ludicrously overpriced merchandise that others mayn’t be so willing to overpay for…

It has Way Cool technology. Notably, they use lasers to project scenes onto clouds of water mist, then add zooted characters, many aboard little ferries or sprawled across a constructed mountain. Lots of cases of Mickey “teleporting” around.

Unfortunately, the story leaves a lot to be desired. It starts auspiciously, essentially with the intro to Fantasia. If they continued down that road, it would seem super to me.

Alas, they instead muddle it all up. Mickey falls into his dreams, with the two possible directions:

1. Presenting his happy dreams, or
2. His nightmares.

This misses 3, heading down the sensual/sexual road, of course! Not that that would be a good part of the “family-friendly” facade, so I’ll not knock Disney overly for this lack!

Unfortunately, this is where the never-ending muddle begins. Apparently, Mickey dreams assortedly about Pocahantas, Beauty and the Beast, where “battle” bits of the tales are presented. Then, the scary nightmare emerges with evil dragon, genie, and witches cry jeopardy. A very peculiar world view that does not make much coherent sense.

Of course, as this is all Mickey’s dream, he trivially “pops the bubble” to assert a happy ending. Evidently, Mickey’s nightmares are not terribly persistent! Rather unlike the sorts of nightmares that keep adults up at night…

On the one hand, they lost the popular vote to the Democrats. That surely suggests that the Republicans are further to the “right” than the American people as a whole, and that they should be developing more centrist policies, right?

But the Fall 2009 elections have shown the party shifting to the right, not towards the centre.

This has been striking me as a suicidal move, that the Republicans are headed in a direction that will make them less and less relevant, less and less capable of offering meaningful opposition to the Democrats. No doubt Democrats would be rather pleased at that, but it seems a bad thing to me not to have a loyal opposition. (I suspect the major parties in Canada and the US are getting less and less keen about considering opposition to have merits: another story…)

Possibilities seem to include:

1. The Republicans essentially need to crash and burn before something new appears.

It is possible that this is so, but it seems unlikely that the players would be just letting things burn. Thus, it is plausible that this is happening, but as result, not intent.

2. They can’t get a new policy direction until they have new leadership.

Unfortunately, the Liberal implosion in Canada shows the problem in this – they have spent the last couple years desperately trying to tell Canadians that the New Conservative Party is bad and that we should give power back to the Liberals. Unfortunately, without explaining their policy proposals, people have little concrete reason to imagine them a good choice… And this is not unlike the Republican’s challenge…

Perhaps what needs to happen is for the GOP to elect new leadership, who having shown they know how to “speak (to the) right,” may then be trusted by the party to make the compromises required to win an election. Which happen to mandate a bit of a swing to the left…

It combines:

• The use of PGXS to enable building C-based extensions
• Standardized metadata about any given module

It assumes the use of some specific technologies, which probably warrants some further discussion (because people are sure to have vigorous disagreement about some of them, not because his choices are bad, but because people are a problem!):

• PGXS, which is a given that seems entirely apropos
• JSON as a data format for the metadata
• A choice of pg_regress or pgTAP regression tests.
  (Aficionados of other test frameworks may think differently!)
• HTML documentation
  It’s worth observing that PostgreSQL contrib material has been trending towards use of DocBook.
  Other analogous structures like CPAN have developed formats such as POD that enable multi-format output, as well as the notion of transforming documentation into deployable man pages.

None of the possible differences are forcibly objectionable; they’re just different options that may be worth considering.

See also…  David Wheeler’s Blog

It has exceptionally good presentations of military tactics, miles better than TV and Hollywood nonsense.

The one that particularly caught my eye was how the Hans guarded Buck when he was captured. None of the usual TV nonsense – they had two sets of guards:

1. Firstly, a guard at his side. As we can always expect, even on TV. Close enough to usually stop the prisoner. But with the risk of being overpowered, of course!
2. Secondly, a layer of guards that are forbidden to get within reach, but no more than 40 feet away. Too far away to be overpowered.

Buck does not overpower these guards to escape. And my intelligence is not insulted .

The “Han” of this tale are evil, but they are not idiots. Unlike Hollywood writers…

Since western democracies have come to eschew “head taxes”, generally in favour of
A) Sales taxes (of sundry forms!)
B) Income taxes
C) Of late, governments have gotten keen on charging fees for services (as for passports, licenses, and such)

People of varying political stripes may argue over the individual merits (or demerits) of these, for instance over whether or not they are progressive or regressive taxes. That may matter, but not for this argument…

In troubled times like these, there is a good thing about all of these sorts of taxes (contrast with relatively fixed property taxes…) which is that taxation naturally falls when the people haven’t as much money to pay out as taxes.

I have heard complaints levelled notably at Stephen Harper that he didn’t lower tax rates to help people during these times. I disagree – the tax systems (at least at Federal and Provincial, and in the US, states) are already designed to reduce the tax burden.

When incomes and spending increase, tax collection will naturally increase, as a direct consequence, and this is a good thing.

Unfortunately, we now come to budgets…

Governments try to set budgets, and talk of balancing them, and all of the preceding represents a direct enemy to that balance.

When the budget is set, they do not know what sales and income taxes will truly come in, and tax collection amounts are sure to be affected by factors that will not emerge until later. The practical effect is that these levels of government are fabricating wishful tales whenever they claim anything about balancing of budgets.

Municipal governments have a somewhat different situation – property taxes tend to be more stable. Which is less helpful than one might hope, when municipalities are responsible for welfare coverage – that throws in a nice dose of postfacto variability to prevent predicting the balancing of the budget.

In any case, this indicates that the “balanced budget” idea is chasing a mirage.

So what shall we do, if balancing budgets is nonsense?

Simply: budgets should recognize the inherent sources of variances, and provide reserves to either add to (in good years) or to draw on (in bad years).

Providing reserves requires that there is a regular plan to charge a little more taxes to allow for this. This is anathema to today’s “neo-conservatives,” but that is another story…

Given reserves, it’s fine if there’s an extra snowstorm to clean up after – reserves were meant to cover such things. In a “light snow” year, it’s fine that