retroCRUSH: The barely legal pleasure palace: “One of the great things about toys from a while back was that they were made with one thing in mind, playability.  Sure, they may have had lead paint, or would blow up in a kid’s face, but they sure were fun.  Once the Consumer Products Safety Commission got their mitts on everything, it all went downhill.  Toy guns were spray-painted orange, and the sharp edges of everything have been rounded down to safe boring nubs.  ”

(Via .)

great stuff. i always wanted one of those helicopters.

Ubu Roi Day!: “Great Stories, People, Books & Events in Literary History “On this day in 1896, Alfred Jarry’s avant-garde play, Ubu Roi, opened and closed in Paris. When Ubu came on stage with a large target drawn on his belly, a toilet-brush…”

(Via Words – big ones and little ones….)

wooo hoooo! pataphysics lives….

Today is Human Rights Day: “December 10 is Human Rights Day, so named by the United Nations in recognition of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. Some thoughts: Don’t forget Darfur. Or Tibet. In Pakistan:…”

(Via TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime.)

happy human rights day, don’t be surprised if your government considers ova or sperm to be human and not full grown adult humans…..

WSJ.com – Trying to Remember
New Passwords Isn’t
As Easy as ABC123: “Before joining Fortinet, Mr. Kwan spent 15 years as an internal techie for three Silicon Valley companies. There, he repeatedly saw human nature defeat well-intentioned computer-security rules. When he was called to work on a computer and the regular user wasn’t there, Mr. Kwan would pick up the keyboard. It was a good bet that he would find a password scribbled underneath. “We found a lot of bizarre passwords being taped all over the place,” he says.

The Sarbanes-Oxley law doesn’t mandate periodic password changes. Nor do the Securities and Exchange Commission rules implementing the law. Nor does the “guidance” issued by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the nonprofit corporation that Sarbanes-Oxley created to regulate audit firms. Nonetheless, password changes have become a standard feature of management strategies to demonstrate compliance with the law.

One impetus appears to be the IT Governance Institute, a Rolling Meadows, Ill., nonprofit that brings together tech executives from big companies with representatives of major audit firms. The institute’s “control objectives” for Sarbanes-Oxley list regular password changes as an “illustrative control” to prevent tampering with corporate financial systems.”

(Via .)

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you get workers put in near impossible positions. too many passwords ruins security on the human scale and does not increase security at all.