Grab bag: Hacking and other sensible things

Interesting if retroactively obvious way to future-proof URL shortener links.

Chris Eng shows how crypto is done. Finishing in the top 3 isn’t too bad and whoever dreamed up the cipher in the cover clearly had a lot of fun with it.

The MIT hackers strike again. Too bad they couldn’t get a full-size Red Line car up there though.

Trenchant as always: “So Bobby Jindal makes fun of “volcano monitoring”, and soon afterwards Mt. Redoubt erupts. Susan Collins makes sure that funds for pandemic protection are stripped from the stimulus bill, and the swine quickly attack.

What else did the right oppose recently? I just want enough information to take cover.”

“For the old country, the benefits would be obvious. A more intimately sized Congress would briskly enact sensible gun control, universal health insurance, and ample support for the arts, the humanities, and the sciences. Although Texas itself has been a net contributor to the Treasury—it gets back ninety-four cents for each dollar it sends to Washington—nearly all the other potential F.S. states, especially the ones whose politicians complain most loudly about the federal jackboot, are on the dole. (South Carolina, for example, receives $1.35 on the dollar, as compared with Illinois’s seventy-five cents.)” A couple other trenchant points in this meditation on the idiocy of secession.