Reinke Faces Life

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=
2007-04-20_D8OKDBT00&show_article=1&cat=breaking

http://tinyurl.com/255rdo

N.C. Clerk Wins $200,000 by Mistake
Apr 20 11:01 AM US/Eastern

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CONOVER, N.C. (AP) – A store clerk’s slip-up at the cash register has paid off big time.

Wadburn Allen on Tuesday accidentally rang up two duplicate Powerball tickets for a customer in this western North Carolina town. At the end of the day, after she was unable to sell the second ticket, Allen paid for it herself.

The next day, Allen returned to the store and found the ticket matched all five numbers—earning her a $200,000 jackpot.

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REMEMBER, remember, back in March when there was the big powerball jackpot. And, I wasted the two bucks buying the clerk’s “mistake”, Here it is! I’m telling you, if I hadn’t bought that mistake Mister Murphy (of Murphy’s Law fame) would have smacked me upside the head. As it was, he decided no lesson was required. Argh!

Here’s my post. http://tinyurl.com/24o7w7 Score one for blogging!

How do you think that customer felt sharing the jackpot with the “mistaken” clerk?

text

http://kentblumberg.typepad.com/kent_blumberg/
2007/04/inclusion_is_go.html

http://tinyurl.com/3cfccm

Inclusion is good for business

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Merrill now strives for diversity of thought, believing it will lead to innovation, growth and competitive advantage. Most of the writers about innovation also stress diversity of thought as a powerful source of innovation.

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Hey, I love Kent’s blog. And, he was kind enough to mix it up with me about my opinions on Merrill Lynch. It was sort of like watching the samurai carve up the turkey. Feathers every where.

Bottom line: It was interesting and educational.

http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2007/04/
dozens-massacred-in-gun-free-zone-again.html

http://tinyurl.com/yqp7gy

Monday, April 16, 2007
Dozens massacred in gun free zone. AGAIN!

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Once again disarming an entire population of people in one concentrated location has lead to a massacre. A gun free zone is a breeding ground for mass killings.

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Yup, a “gun free zone” equals a “target rich environment”.

She was clearly upset by the VT shootings, as we all are, and she did blurt out some “facts” about guns that were just wrong. But she did put the onus on the College Administration and Police for poor performance. I’ll see if I can find, and refute, her exact statements,

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0416/p01s04-usec.html

USA > Economy
from the April 16, 2007 edition
As US tax rates drop, government’s reach grows
Study: 1 in 2 Americans now receives income from government programs.
By Mark Trumbull | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

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Maybe the era of big government isn’t over, after all.

As Americans finish their annual tax-filing flurry to meet a Tuesday deadline, it is true that tax rates are lower than they were a few years ago. But according to a different yardstick, the federal government’s reach is expanding.

Slightly over half of all Americans – 52.6 percent – now receive significant income from government programs, according to an analysis by Gary Shilling, an economist in Springfield, N.J. That’s up from 49.4 percent in 2000 and far above the 28.3 percent of Americans in 1950. If the trend continues, the percentage could rise within ten years to pass 55 percent, where it stood in 1980 on the eve of President’s Reagan’s move to scale back the size of government.

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Certainly not me!

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over lousy fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average of the world’s great civilizations before they decline has been 200 years. These nations have progressed in this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage.”
Alexander Fraser Tyler, Cycle of Democracy (1770)

Have we reached the point where we are in bondage to the others on the dole?

Finished your income tax? Had your savings inflated away? Done what your betters tell you to do — put on that seat belt, pay the required fees, bow in subservience to the political class.

Argh!

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From: Frederick Roeber
Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2007 3:05 PM
Subject: Re: On “proving NON copyright infringement” (Re: Dellinger, RISKS-24.61)

Bell Labs used to have a system like this. I read about it a couple decades ago on usenet– (comp.dcom.telecom? sci.crypt?
alt.folklore.computers?) — but I’ve never since been able to dig up much reference to it.

Basically, you’d send it files (or perhaps cryptographic hashes, if you wanted to keep your document secure), and it’d keep a log, and build up a rolling hash. Every week, the resulting hash would be published in a classified ad in the New York Times. (There was an amusing bit about how they had to talk the NYT into accepting the ads; the paper was afraid they were doing something Bad with encrypted
communication.)

If a question ever came up, they’d be able to re-run that week’s hash and compare the results; this would certify the document in question to at least within that week, and if you believed the independence of the other users of the system you could bracket the time much more closely.

Frederick.

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Hmmm, never heard of that.

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From: Jeremy Epstein
Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2007 6:14 PM
To: RISKS List Owner
Cc: r @ reinke
Subject: notsp: Re: On “proving NON copyright infringement”

The concept of a digital notary as proposed by Ferdinand Reinke already exists commercially in a similar form: Surety <www.surety.com> will basically do what you’re asking for. You can either give them the document/web page to sign, or you can give them a hash and they’ll sign it. They publish a summary weekly in the New York Times, so it’s open for public inspection (at least so long as there are archives of the New York Times). [This is obviously a summary of what they do – I don’t want this to be an advertisement!]

I have nothing to do with Surety, other than thinking they’ve got an interesting solution to a difficult problem.

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One feedback with an existing solution.

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From: James P. Howard, II http://jameshoward.us
Sent: Monday, April 16, 2007 8:54 AM
Subject: digital notary mentioned on RISKS

I created something like this a while ago:

http://jameshoward.us/robot-dsa

James

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Oh well, guess I won’t need the empty checkbook. Sigh! Yeah, I know don’t quit you day job!

I MADE RISKS AGAIN. (Maybe Peter is getting soft in his old age. Or my humor is growing on him!)

http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt

Subject: Risks Digest 24.63
RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Sunday 15 April 2007 Volume 24 : Issue 63
ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks)
Peter G. Neumann, moderator, chmn ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy

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Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2007 09:50:17 -0400
From: “r @ reinke”
Subject: On “proving NON copyright infringement” (Re: Dellinger, RISKS-24.61)

This sounds like a case for “watermarking”, “stenography”, or a good old fashioned notary?

I am surprised that the concept of a “digital notary” has not taken off for just such situations. (Maybe there’s a web20 application for me make into the next google? I could be rich! And, get a life, instead of reading ezines, blogging, and commenting.) Maybe it has and I just haven’t heard of it!

While the Internet Archive is a good idea, one has to wonder if push came to shove (i.e., think RIAA as the model for a Pyrrhic victory) if that would be acceptable evidence in a legal proceeding.

I’d envision the digital notary as a website that:

CASE#1 — takes an url, “photographs” it, computes a digital signature, saves and encrypted copy, sends you a receipt, and publishes the checksums. The disadvantage is that you have exposed your content on the web.

CASE#2 — takes anything you send it and do the same. The disadvantage is you’ve shown it to a nosy notary like me.

CASE#3 — takes a file from you that you want to keep secret and “seals” it as well in a similar fashion.

[NOTE: I need two key pairs. Call them FERDINAND and REINKE. I’d envision that I’d take my secret treasure map (MAP) to the Lost Treasure of the Sierra Madre and encrypt it with my REINKE private key. WORK1=ENCRYPT(MAP,REINKEPRIVATE) Anyone who had that file could read the map
using REINKEPUBLIC. Then, I’d encrypt it with my FERDINAND private key. WORK2=(WORK1,FERDINANDPRIVATE) Anyone who had this file would know there was a file and it was mine by using FERDINANDPUBLIC. Then, WORK2 goes to the notary. The notary decrypts WORK2 with FERDINANDPUBLIC, and ENCRYPTS with NOTARYPRIVATE and returns it to me. Then, since I am getting old I promptly forget all my passwords, lose the keys, and the LOST TREASURE stays lost.]

The digital notary would seem to be a useful service for such disputes.

Now all I need is a PowerPoint deck and some VCs. And a spare checkbook to put all the money in.

Ferdinand J. Reinke, Kendall Park, NJ 08824

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http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0406/p11s03-algn.html

Booking your own private library
For a modest annual fee, book lovers can enjoy memberships at such venerable sanctums as the Boston Athenaeum.
By Teresa Méndez | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

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The Boston Athenaeum, dating back to 1807, is the country’s largest such institution, with 600,000 volumes (in addition to more than 500 pieces of art) and 5,000 members. Stepping through its red leather doors at 10-1/2 Beacon Street is a little like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole. Within the 12-story structure, now in the throes of its 200th birthday party, lies an elegant hodgepodge – part library, part museum, part gallery. There is little delineation between where one part leaves off and the next begins: Paintings hang in every room, busts are nestled between bookshelves, and the books themselves – colorful, leatherbound – are works of art.

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Amazing. I didn’t know this. A non gooferment library!