Recently US senators and members of Congress have been demanding punishment for anyone responsible for the recent media accounts of US involvement in Stuxnet and Flame. Can we assume that there's going to be a thorough investigation of what is in effect confirmation of those media stories? Starting with the HR departments of those giant defense (or offense) contractors and going as far as the evidence leads? Are we holding our breath?

The NYT engineers had been working nonstop for months without success trying to get their iPhone app to stop freezing. Eventually they decided it would be smart to work on something different and less strenuous for a while and then return to their important project with fresh minds.

The name is Human Samani.

Not to start a browser religious war, but right now in Chrome (7.0.517.44), selective blocking of cookies doesn't work. I just did the following:

- removed all Facebook cookies;

- set Chrome to block facebook.com cookies selectively;

- visited Facebook.

The cookies from Facebook were back. Maybe I should add that, in the words of leftists from 60 years ago, "I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member" of Facebook.

I've got nothing against the Aeron chair per se, but ergonomically it's mostly theater. You stay more alert, and your back feels better, if you more or less perch on the edge of your chair - pretty much any chair - with your feet on the floor. That is to say, it doesn't matter what the back of the chair is made of. And w.r.t. desks, the lessons they used to teach in typing class are still true when it comes to keyboard height. None of this is exactly rocket science, but for those who want to know more about the ergonomics and history of furniture there's a terrific book called The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design by Galen Cranz.

Underlying almost all the talk on /. about this project there seems to be the assumption that one reasonably competent performance of a classical piece is equivalent to any other adequate performance. Sorry, but most lovers of classical music would violently disagree with that idea. I for one love some performances of a given piece and detest others.

Note that I'm talking about performances, not the sonic fidelity of recordings, which is a much easier thing to get right. In fact, one way of looking at this is that there is no one right way to perform a classical piece.

So when I think of this project, I can't help thinking there's not a high probability that their recording of, say, a Beethoven symphony will turn out to be one that I want to live with. Sorry if that sounds snobbish - that's really the way it is with classical music.

In fact there's a whole newsgroup devoted to rating various performances and recordings of classical works and proving that other posters are idiots. Sound like Slashdot? See nntp://rec.music.classical.recordings.

... and his face is dark until and unless I touch it.

Whatever the merits of the documentary, the name of the organization Aizhixing is extremely sly. It literally means Love, Knowledge, Action; it rhymes with Aizibing, which means AIDS. This reminds me of the wordplay in the Grass Mud Horse episode.

Good thing Flash is so secure!

... to power his home by the lake?

Not that I'd discourage anyone from keeping their Apache up-to-date, but I decided to see what would happen if I prevented the Windows Apache on my machine from loading mod_isapi. The answer? Nothing, apparently. The only thing I really feared was that it might interfere with the Zend debugger, but no, it's fine.

It's been easily half a dozen years since, afflicted with an Emacs-induced sore left wrist, I switched to a Kinesis keyboard that uses thumbs, not pinkies, for chording. It has no SysRq key. I'd forgotten all about that long-lost, alluring key, and now you go and remind me!

Mandarin (which is the official nation-wide dialect) is much more phonetically impoverished than Cantonese: fewer tones, fewer consonants. So if there's a more lucrative language for punsters anywhere in the world than Mandarin, I'd be surprised.