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Timothy Noah provides some tips on how the recent Sopranos coinage about “disrespecting the Bing” should be used in everyday conversation. I don’t know why I find this interesting, but I do. Rapper/rap producer Dr. Dre got a $15 million dollar settlement from Big (what is it, 4 now?) accounting firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers after they allowed his associates to fleece him out of millions of dollars. You’d think that a massive, well respected accounting firm could successfully manage the accounts of a rapper, but that’s obviously not the case. Kind of makes you wonder what kind of job they’re doing for their corporate clients. ...

I’ve been reading Damain Conway’s fantastic book Object Oriented Perl this week, and I’ve got some really cool new ideas for rewriting the software that powers this site. Once I finish plowing through the book, I’m going to work on designing and writing the new software. I’ve also been piddling around with Slashcode and Greymatter to see how they were built and what concepts I can apply to my code. Right now, I’m thinking I’d love to provide all the features of rc3.org in a system that doesn’t require a relational database (like Greymatter), but I’m not sure how to accomplish that yet. More to come … ...

Phil Greenspun has posed his own account of what’s going on with the lawsuit filed against him by arsDigita and its venture capitalist investors. It’s a wonderful cautionary tale for those who would get in bed with VCs. According to Steve Lipner, a security guy at Microsoft, security through obscurity is OK after all. Lipner argues that nobody reviews open source code anyway, so source may as well be closed to prevent malicious people from finding security holes. Not only does this fly in the face of conventional wisdom (not that conventional wisdom is worth anything), but also against recorded history. ...

Salon’s interview with Adam Isacson addresses a lot of my questions about the downing of a civilian flight transporting missionaries by Peruvian antidrug forces. The plane was shot down by a plane made in the US, paid for with US drug war funds, and given to the Peruvian air force for the purpose of shooting down drug trafficers (or whoever else flies by, I guess). The surveillance plane was also a US plane, operated by US mercenaries, provided by the CIA. ...

One of the contestants last night on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is the wife of former major league baseball player Jack Aker. Here are his career stats (courtesy of Baseball Reference, which is back up, at least temporarily). Also, someone got to the million dollar question last night and phoned a friend who tried to look up the answer on the Internet using a search engine. The friend didn’t find out the answer in time, and ended up leaving with $500,000. After the show, I tried to see if I could find the answer using a search engine within 30 seconds, but couldn’t. (The question was, “What was Carol Brady’s maiden name?”) ...

Remember when I mentioned the problems Baseball Reference ran into when their bandwidth usage exceeded the limits posed by their ISP? Salon has picked up the story. An Economist op-ed favors continued U.S. surveillance of China. Lore Fitzgerald Sj

Am I the only person who’s having trouble using Google lately? It seems like half the time I try to reach Google my request times out. Architecture astronauts, I love it. The House Republican leadership has assembled a group of 31 clergymen to assist them in writing “faith-based” legislation. Unfortunately, the advisory committee includes some well known bigots. I’m looking for a full list of the members of the advisory committee, but it seems to be missing in action. I was curious to see whether they invited Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton to participate on the committee along with their other picks. Perhaps Matt Hale would be more to their liking. ...

Wired News has an article with further evidence of what people who are hiring tell me, which is that the job market for techies is not evaporating. From what I’ve heard, it’s just about as hard to find good programmers and sysadmins now as it was back in the go-go days of dot com hegemony. On the other hand, I know some people who have been looking for jobs for a few months now. Most of those people aren’t programmers, they’re from sales, marketing, or have other non-technical skills. ...

I’ve long wondered how Aaron Sorkin was able to come up with a concept as far fetched as a liberal President for his show The West Wing. It all makes sense now that Sorkin was arrested for possession of hallucinagenic mushrooms at Burbank Airport. Apparently he was on his way to Las Vegas for some sort of Hunter S. Thompson-esque vacation – I wonder if he had ether in his bags as well. ...

Today, Salon runs Andrew Leonard’s interview with Barbara Garson, the author of Money Makes the World Go Round. Garson put part of her advance in a bank account and the rest in a mutual fund, and then traced the path of the money around the globe. The point is to expose the huge set of interdependencies on which globalization is based in terms that a layman can easily understand. I’m a major sucker for systems theory, the more complex the system the better, so this book looks very fascinating to me. I’ve also been puzzled for quite some time about the inner workings of globalization, and also about why most hardcore leftists are against it. Is it a kneejerk reaction against capitalism and foreign investment, or is there a legitimate beef. I’m looking forward to reading the book in hopes that it will shed some light on the subject. I imagine the answer lies somewhere in the middle. ...