TRUMAN DEFEATS DEWEY...

...and, moving on to more timely news, you won't be enjoying free government-provided wireless Internet access over airwaves near you anytime soon-despite this Washington Post story by Cecilia Kang which seems to raise the possibility that you will.

Anyway, thanks to Forbes contributor Anthony WIng Kosner and especially Jon Brodkin over at Ars Technica for setting the record straight.  (And Jon, I loved your use of the famous photo I alluded to in this post's title.)

Oh, for the days when journalists were good enough writers to simply make stories up out of whole cloth and try to get away with that rather than fumble facts and then stumble over half-hearted non-corrections.  Does the name Janet Cooke ring a bell?

"I saw her again last night, and you know that I shouldn't..."

Okay, okay, so what if I am old enough to remember the Mamas and the Papas?  That particular lyric suggested itself yesterday evening at the Plaza Library, when I was again asked by a woman I didn't know from Eve-and who, judging from the college textbooks she had with her ought to have known better-to look after her laptop while she took a bathroom break. 

I've simply decided as a matter of policy to politely but firmly decline all such requests-and you should too, especially if the person asking is a total stranger.  Obviously if your significant other or one of your awsomely bright offspring is doing the asking, that's a totally different situation.  So is being asked by a truly trusted friend or coworker.  If I know where you lay your head at night, or where you trudge off in the morning to earn your daily bread, I've got at least some recourse should I return from the pause that refreshes-sorry, but I'm just in a nostalgic mood all of a sudden-and discover you've disguised yourself and that rather expensive apparatus I left with you as thin air.  At least I know where to start looking. 

I suppose I should have been flattered to have impressed the woman I encountered last night as the trustworthy sort, but I'm still convinced that begging off is the best thing to do.  After all, what if something had happened while she was gone?  I'm not the police.  Not only would I therefore not have been inclined to be able to intervene had someone just brazenly grabbed the laptop,  I'd have been at a disadvantage against a con man or woman pretending to be with the owner.  How could I have prevented that person from leaving with the machine before proving who he or she was? 

And I don't want to even think about the potential legal consequences.  Even if no one ended up going to jail, any civil litigation arising from such a situation could get very nasty very quick.

No, thanks.  I'll stick with what I do when nature calls-shut down the laptop, shove it into the bag and tote it along.  And I'll continue to suggest everyone else do the same.  You might get away with leaving it nine times out of ten-but is that tenth time really worth it?

Not to me, it isn't.

That big guy in the red suit?

Yes, he does exist, and Mary Sanchez of the Kansas City Star has found proof.  In fact, it looks like the Man with the Bag (love that song, by the way!) has already lightened his pack a bit over in Rosedale. 

Bravo, Connecting for Good, bravo!  Now let's hope a Certain Broadband Provider Which Shall Remain Unnamed and which came to town making similar promises will be moved by your example to more closely walk their talk.

And just in case this is my last post of the year, best wishes for the holiday season to everyone-and a prayer for special blessings of comfort and strength, of course, to all so horribly and wrongfully bereaved on Friday.

Horrors!

Breaking news-there's this big huge thing called the Internet out there-and there's-wait for it-dirty stuff on it!  And if we don't prevent access to that dirty stuff, it will sweep over us like a tsunami, and...

Well, you get the idea.  And perhaps the humorous tone I've taken above really isn't appropriate for this first story from Florida, given that the scumbag involved is accused of pulling down child porn.  Nonetheless I feel I do need to take some issue with the detective quoted in the story when it comes to his veiled threat to those running free and open Wi-Fi networks.  Remember, Sherlock-you caught this guy because he was sitting out in the open while accessing such a network-because that was all he had available.

And then we go across the pond to merrie old England, where it's apparently just dawned on some folks there that free and open Wi-Fi means free and open for bad stuff too-and that Wi-Fi networks don't care how old their users are.  A gentle suggestion to our British friends with such concerns:  Instead of running to the goverment demanding action, why not perhaps look a bit closer to home?  Since parents generally do a better job of raising kids than governments can manage, it stands to reason that parental controls on privately owned Internet-connected devices ought to work better than government controls on businesses serving the public at large. 

One would think that if the party currently in power over there was conservative in more than just name only, it wouldn't take a disaffected American to point this out.

Australians finally remember who they are

Well it took them long enough, but common sense has to a certain extent prevailed Down Under  That harebrained scheme I first commented on here and here nearly four years ago to impose Chinese-style filtering on a national level has, according to the Associated Press, bitten the Outback dust.

Good news.  And good riddance to an idea that I'm sure actually embarrassed many Australians.  To be sure, protecting kids from exploitation by child pornographers must remain a priority not only in Australia but everywhere else.  However, even back when this proposal first emerged, most of the garbage it was targeted against wasn't distributed via the World Wide Web anyway-and it still isn't. 

Like terrorists, child predators are nothing if not resourceful.  Law enforcement must, therefore, respond in kind.  Undercover busts of the sort at which U. S. authorities have become so adept, coupled with mercilessly tough sentences that will strike the fear of God into these perverts and prove we're serious about this, have done and will continue to do much more than resorting to tactics better expected of besieged despots and tenuous totalitarian regimes-tactics that in the end, it should be remembered, neither quelled the Arab Spring nor dissuaded the naming of a dissident as a Nobel laureate.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you...

...that I finally saw someone with a tablet-to wit, an iPad-here at the library tonight, but he wasn't using it.  Apparently he had it plugged into a USB port on his MacBook just to charge it.

Biennial off-topic rant, MMXII

So here we are again, twelve years after the Supreme Court had to pick a president because it couldn't be determined using the best technology in use at the time whom voters in Florida had chosen, four years after I first complained here about the lack of progress on the voting technology front since then, and two years after further lamenting the same. 

You'd think things had gotten better by now, wouldn't you?  Well, think again.

I just came from my local polling place-displaced from its usual neighborhood library branch location by road construction-and hasten to report that not only do the powers that be still consider only a single electronic touch-screen voting machine per location to be adequate, but that one machine wasn't even working when I signed in.  At least that's what I overheard a poll worker telling another voter.  Now, I wasn't really trying to start anything, mind you-after all, this is only the closest presidential election since Kennedy-Nixon, and we all know no one would even think of anything like...

Well anyway, no sooner had the seeds of suspicion been planted than another poll worker announced to one and all that the e-machine had suddenly and miraculously regained its good health and was once again available to cut down on the growing line of voters waiting for an available seat to open up so they could sit down and begin filling out their paper ballots.

And while I'm going to have to admit, sadly, that the residents of this particular precinct perhaps may lean towards the old-fashioned-I'm sure many if not most of those taking paper ballots would have opted for them if they'd been asked-that's no excuse for not continuing efforts to improve the overall process-and that means modernization.  The local election board ought to engage in more education-public demonstrations of touchscreen voting with hands-on time for participants, for example-and do a better sales job on how much faster and more convenient voters can do their patriotic duty that way than they can using the older one. 

And as for my suggestion two years ago that we ought to seriously consider moving to some form of online-from-home voting, I wish I'd known it would take one of the worst hurricanes ever to hit the Northeast for someone to take the idea seriously.  I might not have bothered.