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Senator Obama gave another one of those speeches that makes you realize what’s missing in politics in our sound-bite world, this time at the commencement at Knox College: “What will be your place in history?” In other eras, across distant lands, this question could be answered with relative ease and certainty. As a servant in Rome, you knew you’d spend your life forced to build somebody else’s Empire. As a peasant in 11th Century China, you knew that no matter how hard you worked, the local warlord might come and take everything you had—and you also knew that famine might come knocking at the door. As a subject of King George, you knew that your freedom of worship and your freedom to speak and to build your own life would be ultimately limited by the throne. ...

A House Appropriations subcommittee has voted to cut funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting by 25% next year, totally eliminating the budget in two years. They also voted to get rid of another program that supports children’s educational television. While I think it would be a good thing for public broadcasting to be able to shift from federal funds to other sources, simply so they could get out from under government criticism, this amounts to a direct assault on public television. The excuse made by the subcommittee chair, Rep. Ralph Regula (R-Ohio), was that they needed to cut funding somewhere, and they would rather keep college grants and special education funds than the CPB. ...

Yeah, those words don’t seem like they should all go together, but in this case, it’s appropriate. Check the image on the first page of The AMA Compensation Survey of Marketing Professionals. It takes a bit for it to start, so it may look like a normal picture, but it isn’t. It probably says something about my expectations on the Web when I jump when a picture takes several seconds to start moving. :) ...

Yep, Coingate… Read more about it here. Update: Hey, it made the home page of Yahoo!

One fan’s imagining of Jimmy Olsen’s memoirs: “Did I turn into a giant turtle monster? I sure did. Did I drink the elastic serum? You bet. Did I marry a gorilla? And how. Do I regret any of it? NOT ON YOUR LIFE, PAL.” You know, if Jimmy Olsen was really Robert Evans, that would make a great comic book. :)

Somehow I figured the first side I read that brought Nazis — or, in this case, Holocaust denial — into the Intelligent Design debate would be the ID proponents, not the opponents. Guess I was naive. Oh well, Godwin’s law wouldn’t exist if Nazi analogies weren’t useful across the political spectrum. And, by the way, darn those “techniques of rhetoric and debate”. If we just didn’t have those, we’d be in a much better…Oh wait, he doesn’t say what those are, does he? ;) ...

Not really news, usually, but this time the package contained financial information and Social Security numbers on 3.9 million Citibank customers. Apparently Citibank was sending unencrypted backup tapes by UPS, and a set disappeared a few weeks ago. After what must have been a agonized few weeks of searching, Citibank is now planning on notifying affected customers. It’s nice that identity thieves have that waiting period before they can use information that fell off the truck, thereby giving Citibank plenty of time to wait, right? ;) ...

Apparently the Justice Department has decided not to enforce the criminal penalties behind HIPAA, which protects the privacy of medical records. Basically, they ruled that criminal prosecution can be brought against medical practices, hospitals, insurance companies, and the like, but not against the employees of those entities. That’s kind of interesting, since the employees who did the stealing would have been the targets of any criminal prosecution anyway. I’m not sure what Justice was thinking on this one, although I don’t entirely buy the theory that it’s a backhanded way of getting rid of HIPAA. To the extent that I do buy it, I think it is likely a result of a larger ongoing Justice Department attempt to downsize its influence over corporate practices. If it was a real attempt to overthrow HIPAA, I would expect it to be even more ham-handed. (Although the person I linked to would have a better idea than I, I would think, having worked to put HIPAA together.) ...

Man, step away from the Internet for a few days, and by the time you get back, hell freezes over. Okay, so hell didn’t freeze, it just caught a draft, but still: Apple is planning on using Intel chips? And they aren’t planning to do anything to keep those computers from running Windows as well? Admittedly, Apple can easily fix it so OS X only runs on its hardware, no matter what processor. However, the illogic of being able to run it on this Pentium IV while not being able to run it on that Pentium IV is going to be one more push down the path to widespread Mac clones. Maybe Apple’s counting on the idea that it’s the Microsoft in this picture, instead of the IBM. ...

It’s interesting what you miss when you’re moving. I’m spending my time trying not to forget things like bills and address changes, and I completely miss the one-year anniversary of The Phantom City. When I started this blog, I figured my biggest problem would be keeping it going. After 241 posts, that doesn’t seem like a problem. There’s a lot to write about out there, in a lot of different fields, a few of which I actually pay attention to. ...