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Thursday, October 16, 2008

Physical Security Maxims

Tongue in cheek list of pithy security catchphrases, that happen to be true 80-90% of the time from the Argonne Nuclear Engineering Division Vulnerability Assessment Team ... How's that for a mouthful?

The following maxims are somewhat cynical and tongue-in-cheek. Nevertheless they say important things about physical security, and are essentially correct 80-90% of the time (unfortunately).

As an example:

High-Tech Maxim: The amount of careful thinking that has gone into a given security device, system, or program is inversely proportional to the amount of high-technology it uses.

Friday, October 10, 2008

Meat feeds more climate change than food miles

With all the fuss over fuel miles affecting New Zealand's meat exports to Europe I was intrigued when I found this interesting report in New Scientist magazine's environment section.
"That locally-produced, free-range, organic hamburger might not be as green as you think.

"An analysis of the environmental toll of food production concludes that transportation is a mere drop in the carbon bucket. Foods such as beef and dairy make a far deeper impression on a consumer's carbon footprint.

"If you have a certain type of diet that’s indicative of the American average, you're not going to do that much for climate while eating locally,"
Of course as we're exporting meat, this doesn't directly help New Zealand's case, but when you couple this with the way we grow beef and lamb: free-range in paddocks eating grass and not grain, our cattle are a lot closer to carbon neutral than the factory farmed beasts in the northern hemisphere.

Let's hope someone can get the message out to the world and remember "Red meat isn't bad for you, green fuzzy meat is bad for you".

Gmail Goggles - Stops drunken emailing

Well, not quite. It's a timer based service and Google being Americans they primly describe your state on a Friday night as being "Tired", if Google understands irony it might be a reference to Private Eye's "Tired and emotional" euphemism.

Mail you send over the weekend late at night may be useful but you may regret it the next morning.

How it works is you install it through the "Labs" tab on your Gmail settings page, then before you can send an email at certain designated times you have to solve some basic arithmetic problems. Presumably you pre-set the times it's active to match your likely times for being tired and emotional.

The feature is also available for the email component of the Google Applications for Domains hosted office service.

I can see this as a great service for those who go out partying then put a hand over one eye so they can do a quick email check while they are waiting for the room to stop spinning, now I just wish the car manufacturers would install something like this to reduce the carnage on our roads by stopping people driving cars drunk.

 


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