When USB accidents happen

The Risks Digest offers up a scary tale of what your cell phone may be doing to your laptop when you're not looking. Caveat emptor!

Do you buy meat thinking it's been carbon monoxided?

Regardless, you may want to read ABC News: Hill Debates 'Carbon Monoxide Meat' where you can learn that CO makes meat and fish look fresh indefinitely.

The FDA's David Acheson, who along with other FDA and USDA officials sat at a table covered with various samples of year-old meat that still appears fresh, and said that 'this particular issue is not a safety concern even remotely high on our radar screen.' He added that he believes that most people are aware that meat is packaged with carbon monoxide...

It just makes me wonder what exactly would make this a bad idea to officials; I can only guess their thinking...since it don't kill it's okay for corporations to add whatever they deem necessary to the food web.

20071117 info UPDATE: Even after reading about the scientific merits of the minute levels of CO exposure, I still think it's a slippery slope ... because of unanticipated consequences and strange coincidences. I still want greater assurances ... with regard to actual habits of those increasing numbers at the margins -- on the street, or unsupervised -- along with the unknown animals being fed whatever from who knows where ... ! I understand the need to save the many over the imagined or projected unknowns but recollections of efforts to track down mad cow disease makes me pause and ask do we really ever know what monsters we're creating.

this just in from Threat Level @ Wired Blogs

Security Researcher Wants Lube Maker Fined For Privacy Slip.

There are just so many delights in the headline even as I pity those affected by this April 2007 FUBAR. Among the 200,000 suffering are the San Franciscans so dramatically showcased here in the researcher's own Yahoo maps mash-up of the addresses that were sent a nice wet package of Astroglide.

All these tidbits, and more, available from Christopher Soghoian, an Indiana University School of Informatics grad student by day, and possibly a true masked superhero by night.

Play has begun to do real work

Speaking of class, the quote below, on virtual transactions, reminds me that there are no new stories, just repeated failures to learn.

Real-money trading harms the game, they argue, because the overheated productivity of gold farms and other profit-seeking operations makes it harder for beginning players to get ahead. Either way, the sense of a certain economic injustice at work breeds resentment. [emphasis mine]

And, doesn't that sound like a why for affirmative action? Inequality overtime breeds contempt and bad karma!

Real-money trading, or R.M.T., is the practice of "selling virtual [gaming] goods for real money", and there's a whole cottage industry serving those who can afford to pay to play.

The writer is Julian Dibbell who is forever mentally cross-linked to his 1993 "A Rape in Cyberspace" which I still have on its original newsprint, from The Village Voice. In this new tale he brings us "The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer" -- the outsourced minions who do the gamers' dirty work giving them the goods required to elevate their virtual existence.

Related:

• Some who study online games: Edward Castronova, Henry Jenkins, Nick Yee
• Castronova, Edward. "On Virtual Economies." Games Studies: the international journal of computer game research (December 2003).

Best analogy involving porn

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MySpace: bound to keep getting dirtier and uglier

We have this kernel by way of /. post that brought me to the Post's “OFF/beat” blog.

"MySpace Photo: Costs Teacher Education Degree
Teacher Sues For Diploma And Damages".

Regardless of the merits of the action's sentiment, do we really want to go down this slippery slope? If the institution in question actually has legal standing to re-direct a student's degree shouldn't more college students be very very afraid? Myspace...is just an moment away from whatever is the next administrative anathema.