Dan Walters: California budget relies on sham revenue – Inside Bay Area

As I was coming back from my mailbox, my negighbor and  I chatted about work. He told me he ‘took some days off’, but now he was going back. “Thank God”, he said “our budget is finally passed, did you hear” I smiled and nodded and went back to my house. As many other state workers here in Sacramento, my neighbor is relived that he is back to work. Bills are finally going to get paid, and the state has already begun scrambling to send out checks of back pay.

Is this really something to cheer about? I don’t think so. California tries to become innovator in many sector of our economy. We want to have stringent rules for the environment; we want to be pioneer in funding stem cell research etc… yet we cannot manage our spending. This budget does disservice to many part of our economy. Many social services suffer cuts. Schools’ spending limit is curbed. It still borrows money from future lottery revenue. Basically it puts a temporary band-Aid on our problem and defers solving the real problem for next year. More agony awaits next year as Democrats and Republicans battle it out over taxation and cutting funds from school. How a state, that cries over its poor performing schools, prides itself as a hub of technology is beyond me, but to not even have a budget that improves our schools that produce future engineers and scientists is a shame.

According to Sacramento bureau chief John Meyers, there are not many apparent winners from this budget. In fact, he says the winners are corporations.

Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee says “ Nobody could have dreamed up a less responsible, more gimmicky, sure-to-backfire state budget than the one California’s political leaders cobbled together and were jammed through the Legislature on Monday night to end a months-long stalemate.”

Well, we finally have a budget. I hope our leaders have learned some lessons and they will be prepared to balance our budget for next year… Yet I’m not so optimistic…

Should voters take some of the blame? …

Dan Walters: California budget relies on sham revenue – Inside Bay Area

collider shut down…

 

After spending 8 Billion dollars, and spent 20 years building the collider, I think it is a shame that they suffer such a set back, and to claim such an incident is “a minor setbuck” doe not make anysense to me at all…

“If you keep an eye on the big picture, we’ve been building the machine for 20 years. The switch-on was always going to be a long process,” James Gillies, Cern’s director of communications, told BBC News.
Atom-smasher down for two months: CERN…The world’s largest atom-smasher has been shut down for two months following a helium leak, just ten days after it was switched on amid great fanfare to probe the secrets of the universe.

My ‘parent moment’…

 

Last night when my daughter said she was about to lose to of her bottom teeth, I didn’t believe her.  She told me that many times before.  Ever since she saw a program about tooth fairy on PBS kids show, she couldn’t wait to loose her tooth so she can get money from tooth fairy.   She told me about my wife’s baby cousin who just lost her tooth and got money from the tooth fairy.  I asked her if the tooth fairy left her $1.00 she didn’t know, but she wishes she would get a dollar.  I said, I’m sure she will…

I am happy for her because she is excited.  I am excited because my baby is growing, but deep down, I am worried.  I can’t explain why I am so worried, but I am.  This year she started kindergarten; I was so psyched.  I was happy to see her in her uniform.  She said, “hurray I’m going to real school”, but after the first day of school, it was one of my toughest morning trying to get her up early… all that excitement, vanished.  It is funny how tired she is when she comes back.  It is not hard to put her to bed at night anymore, it is harder to wake her up and take her out of car so she can eat her dinner. 

 

Every year there are moments that cause my face to radiate with joy: when one of my daughters says or does something unexpected.  When my daughter started to tell me what vertebrae and in vertebrae animals were for example.  I said wow… I tried to fool her and said butterfly is called ‘not vertebrae’… she laughed and said daddy “it is called in vertebrae, don’t let anyone here you say that.” She cracked me up.   I call them parents’ moments.  Every time they happen, I feel more and more like a rookie dad.  I guess I will be a rookie at every stage for every milestone.  I asked them what life meant, just because I wanted them to talk, my youngest one (she is 3) said life … means family! She made her mom’s day.

New York Offers Drivers License with RFID Tag | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

  Slowly but surely RFID is creeping up in our daily life…

On March 2007 issue of IEEE’s Spectrum magazine, Kenneth R. Foster and Jan Jaeger explain the advantages of RFID as follows…“an implantable RFID chip, which is durable and about the size of a grain of rice, can hold or link to information about the identity, physiological characteristics, health, nationality, and security clearances of the person it’s embedded in. The proximity of your hand could start your car or unlock your front door or let an emergency room physician know you are a diabetic even if you are unconscious. Once implanted, the chip and the information it contains are always with you—you’d never lose your keys again”

There are several disadvantages to RFID of course, but mainly security/privacy is the biggest issue. When RFID started to appear in the market, we read how great it is going to be to retail business. Inventories were going to be easier, shop lifting was going to be harder, and the list continued. We imagined in a year we were going to wait at the cash registers only for few seconds because our shopping carts were going to be scanned before we know it, yet no explanation was given about its security. How hard is it to hack into one of this chips that might be implanted in me? Can someone just walk by and scan your information? RFID’s can be read with RFID within certain range of chip.  This makes them very risky.

Despite the privacy and security risks RFID brings, it was clear that manufacturers and government agencies are considering RFID for several applications. Its advantages are tremendous. There are several applications from shopping to airport security where RFID can play a big roll. Perhaps recognizing this, in May 2007

“The National Institute of Standards and Technology describes some potential dangers of implementing RFID and offers guidelines and best practices for mitigating the risks. ”

New York City’s move to offer RFID tag on driver license is just one of the proves that RFID are going to be part of our daily life.

New York Offers Drivers License with RFID Tag | Gadget Lab from Wired.com

McAfee: Brad Pitt fan sites may be bad for your computer

The consequences of celebrity craze …

 

“According to McAfee, when searching for “Brad Pitt,” “Brad Pitt downloads,” or Brad Pitt wallpaper, screen savers, and pictures, Internet users experience an 18 percent chance of stumbling upon sites containing malicious code. This includes drive-by malware that can infect your PC without asking you to download anything. Such social engineering, once reserved for e-mail, is now being used to populate search results with fake sites for these personalities”

 

 

 

McAfee: Brad Pitt fan sites may be bad for your computer

BBC NEWS | Technology | Warning sounded on web’s future

It is difficult to police the Internet because of its size.  As the size of the Internet grows, so will the number of users and the amount of information that will be appearing on the Internet. It is impossible to police the Internet or to monitor who is posting information or who is posting misinformation. Even if that would be considered, the ethics of it would be greatly debated.

The number of social networking sites – some providing news, some exchanging articles and others having patients and create social support groups—have greatly increased the number of Internet users rapidly.

The emergence of youtube have made user generated content one of the core ‘products’ of the web. Youtube is a perfect example of how news can be manufactured in a kitchen of someone and viewed by the whole wide world.

Besides social networking groups and user generated content, Internet has also flourished because of the rapid growth of intelligent web applications like AJAX. Such applications make Internet design fun, and they also enhance user experience of the web.

In general, web 2.0 is more interactive and more sophisticated. The amount of information one can gather of the Internet is enormous. Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s concern is greatly appreciated as one studies how fast the Internet is growing. I don’t know what is being done to let users choose the ‘right’ information; however, it is obvious that there has to be important measures taken to curb this problem.

Web sites such as SNOPES provide excellent resource to check against some urban legends that frequently surface the Internet; however, users might not know them easily. Here are some methods I think can be implemented for quick fact checking…

Intelligent agents – When one is reading an article, there should be some sort of program running in background that can easily provide references (or opposing views) to an information. For example when blogs are posted, if an automatic search is done on snopes.com and other websites references can easily be displayed on the side bar. If Google and other advertising agencies can easily search what we are reading and provide immediate advertisements, how difficult can this be to implement?

Education – improve our schools from early age, so students have the necessary research and critical thinking skills they need in order to distinguish what is true to what is not.  This is obviously the most important solution that goes beyond teaching our students on how to fact check information on the Internet.

I am not aware of the current research on Internet, and what is ahead, however Sir Tim’s worries are well appreciated by me.  I hope to see researchers introduce new and improved ways to vet information on the web.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Warning sounded on web’s future

 

California’s budget crisis could have ripple effect

After a record past due, California legislators finally came out with a compromise yesterday regarding our state’s budget.  Those who advocated for no extra tax seeming to be on winning end of this deal; however, we still have to wait and see if the governor is going to approve the latest compromise.  Although this will fix our budget temporarily, in a long run, we are more likely to face similar problems unless the systemic problem is fixed.  Perhaps this might be time where voters need to step in and fix how our state budget is handled.  With the 2/3-majority rule, we are more likely to be facing similar problems year after year.  Cutting from education and other important social services might not be a way to keep our local economy going.  It is important to understand that education is the backbone of our economy.  Globalization has made education one of the most important assets to have in order to have sustainable economy. 

California is the worlds 5th largest supplier of food and agriculture.   It is understandable that our economic crisis will have a ripple affect towards the whole nation.  I spoke with most of my neighbors who were worried about their pay being cut the federal minimum.  Temporary and contract workers have already felt the budget crunch, as they were the first to receive pink slips.  Just as we thought the mortgage crisis is about to get better, having such issues is disturbing. .

California voters need to think hard work towards fixing our budget issues before our budget deficit gets even bigger! 

California’s budget crisis could have ripple effect

Hadroon collidor hacked

As is, we don’t know exactly what the consequences of such large and expensive experiment is.  It seems like it was not secured enough for hackers to hack into the system…

If the controller is hacked just after few days of its launch, how much trust can we put on the result of the study? how will we know data was never compromised? … 

 

Hackers break into Large Hadron Collider computer

Researchers uncover new tool for building fake YouTube pages – SC Magazine US

To distribute malware using popular pages like youtube is yet another clever method implemented by this Internet crooks…

Researchers uncover new tool for building fake YouTube pages – SC Magazine US

Google launching its own navy? | The Register

Now this is ‘holistic view’ of contingency plan… 

Google launching its own navy? | The Register