Blizza Blizza

Patrick Smith’s “Ask the Pilot” column this week is another must-read.

Someone hand Jim DeMint, the junior Senator from South Carolina, a dictionary with the words “irony” and “hypocrite” highlighted, fast:

[Southers] will not give me a straight answer [as to whether he would allow TSA employees to have collective bargaining rights]. This is all about politics and not security.

This is the same Jim DeMint who has been blocking the nomination of Errol Southers as head of the TSA because, as Joe Sharkey so eloquently put it, “DeMint, a former market researcher, has surveyed the situation and identified the real terrorist threat to America: Unions.”

Now who’s about politics, Jim?

From the Grey Lady:

“If the American government really wants to advance relations with Cuba, I recommend they leave behind the conditions of internal governance that they are trying to impose on us and that only Cubans can decide,” Raúl Castro said in his assembly speech.

So, Raúl, how about letting Cubans actually, you know, decide? No population in the history of the world has ever voted to uphold a Communist or totalitarian government in free and untainted elections, and it strikes me as unlikely that it’ll happen this time. (As far as I can remember; readers are free to point out obscure exceptions in the comments.)

The latest ruckus here in the Great Lakes area is about the Asian carp that are on the threshold of invasion. Chicago, and by extension, the rest of Illinois, claims they aren’t a big problem and aren’t as close as all kinds of scientific evidence says they are, while Michigan outdoors types are quite literally foaming at the mouth at the idea of 100-pound carp invading the already-devastated (zebra and quagga mussels, sea lampreys, etc.) Great Lakes ecosystem. Wisconsin is the latest of the Great Lakes states to file an amicus brief with the US Supreme Court in Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox’s request for an injunction to close a major shipping canal in Chicago. Minnesota and Ohio have already filed briefs in support of the injunction.

Notably absent from the list is Indiana, the state with the least shoreline along the Great Lakes. Of course, Indiana has already demonstrated it doesn’t give a crap about Lake Michigan anyway, when it issued a permit to BP/Amoco to dramatically increase its pollution output from the Whiting refinery south of Chicago.

So the two states with the shortest coastlines on the Great Lakes get to destroy them for the rest of us? Yeah, screw you, Illinois, and that Hoosier horse you rode in on.

I don’t really have anything to say here that this guy and Joe Sharkey haven’t already said.

Just to reiterate, though: if the bomb gets on the plane, we’ve already lost. Once it’s there, no procedure anyone can ever invent is going to stop someone from succeeding in bringing down an airplane.

Signing up for online access to Consumer Reports…

Why bother telling people passwords are case-sensitive if you only allow them to use all-lower-case letters in the passwords? Besides decreasing security (it cuts the number of characters required to guess the password roughly in half), it’s pointless — there’s no technical reason for forcing passwords to be all lower-case while simultaneously using case-sensitive comparison routines when checking them for accuracy.

OK, so I fixed that…and was promptly greeted with this:

Aside from the idiocy of telling the user the password is invalid before telling them the username is also invalid, it’s bad UI to present errors piecemeal like this. If there are multiple invalid parts of a submission, you should be telling your users all at once, so they can fix it all at once, rather than making them click multiple times and becoming increasingly frustrated each time. (I believe my exact exclamation after I was presented with this was “You dumb motherf*ckers!”)

WWMT again, this time with a mystery headline:

Broncos Roll, West sets NCAA Record

Go on, read the story. I’ll wait.

While I’m waiting, I’ll sit here repeating “who what when where why how” as a mantra.

OK, you’re back? Great.

Who? Brandon West.
What? Set an NCAA record.

The obvious follow-up question, one that I’m sure all the readers want to know the answer to, is, “What record did Brandon West break?”

Is that in the story anywhere? Of course not.

In what is easily one of the top five best local news stories of the year, a man has been arrested for trying to steal a hemostat from a hospital “to pluck [his] nose hairs”.

Police have also released a mug shot.

ABC News is running a nice little scaremongering piece which they say “call[s] into question the ability of the FAA and the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) to detect and purge high risk individuals from the list of approved pilots”. Ooh! High-risk! There are pilots out there who could kill you! Cower in fear!

Oh, wait. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Adobe’s public bug-tracking database URL (emphasis added):

http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/secure/Dashboard.jspa

Bonus security fail: the confirmation e-mail contains your password in plaintext.