It's just my opinion, I could be wrong

There's an interesting trend going on in the online world these days: people are making sites less secure. It's not so much the casual sites, where a simple email and password are enough for access; it's more the financial sites and wanna-be "secure" sites that are making themselves less secure and more annoying to access. I don't get it... why would you want to make yourself less secure, especially as a financial institution? What benefit does it have for your customers to make their identity and financial information more easily stolen? Are you even aware that your online services are being transformed this way? Perhaps an example will help. Today, I converted by 401k access account to their new access mechanism. Previously, I used my SSN and a user-chosen password; easy to remember, unique, reasonably secure. Now, they have a custom username, two backup reset questions, and a security image. Not only did I have to write down all that information on the onli...

First and foremost, I think the ruling is a mistake; there's nothing in the Constitution which would extend the protections afforded to US citizens to foreigners, especially those actively opposed to the US. The court is creating new Constitutional protections, and that's not their job. Moreover, the new protections are going to be nothing but trouble for the military in the future, and one of the worst things we can do as a country is make it more difficult for our military to keep us safe. That said, I think Bush shares at least half of the blame for this idiotic ruling and precedent. As a blame Gore for politicizing Global Warming, turning it into a partisan battle, and thus allowing people to compartmentalize any actual evidence as political propaganda, so I blame Bush for creating a situation which forced the Supreme Court to make this ruling. It is against international law, and the spirit of America, to hold anyone indefinitely without a trial, the ability to rebut accus...

Caught a little bit of the Daily Show yesterday (good show, bit liberal but funny); they had a funny bit about the senate report on the pre-war Iraq intelligence, and how it was basically ignored by the mainstream media. I found it funny on a couple levels. The take that the Daily Show had, which was that it was a really important revealing report which was ignored, was amusing. On the other hand, the subtext was more interesting, in my opinion. For the actual report, the democrats on the committee basically wrote the accusations, the the republicans disagreed with all of them. So basically, the report was nothing more than partisan business as usual coming out of Congress, wasting time whining about how they (the democrats) don't like Bush. Which leads back to the mainstream media basically ignoring it. Maybe they thought it was above the comprehension level of their audience, but that's doubtful; the democrats seemed careful to boil down the partisan accusations into simplifi...

So the 500 page massive global warming bill, which nobody thought would actually get passed, and even if by some large-scale lapse of judgment did get passed, Bush would veto, got killed today. Proponents argued that it was important to codify their religious beliefs into US law so as to force them upon the rest of American. Opponents pointed out that the bill would do nothing to help man-made global warming even if it was a real problem, and would just export money and jobs out of the US. Both sides claimed victory, of course, with proponents expecting to re-launch another version of the bill when they have more believers in Congress, and a more liberal president. So far business as usual. However, one thing I found interesting was that one of the most accurate and insightful comments about the garbage legislation came not from a Republican, but from a moderate Democrat who voted against it. The Democrat, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, commented that the end-result of the bill would be t...