A local area man was brought up on stabbing charges today, after alarmed neighbors called the police about "sounds of violence" in the adjacent building. Officers arrived on the scene too late to intervene, but found the man in a state of exhaustion, clutching a screwdriver through a glove.

The man did not deny the charges, but upon inquiry, alleged the victim had "evaporated". The police forensic outfit failed to turn up any traces of a struggle.

The case was presumed insoluble until an amateur videotape surfaced, showing the man repeatedly stabbing his refrigerator. The victim is now suspected to have been a large block of ice, alleged to have made "unwelcome advances" toward the man's groceries, according to testimony.

When asked why he didn't simply empty the refrigerator and de-ice, the man stated that course of action could have caused "a diplomatic incident" due to the vast amounts of food products distributed among many owners.

Popular outrage broke out when police officials declined to hold the man. In a press release, the commissioner responded citing "acts of violence committed against elementary particles and their fundamental compounds does not constitute a felony in the greater state of Metropolis". Animal rights groups were soon to renounce the decision, warning that this was setting "a dangerous precedent".

The man was released this afternoon after paying a fine for Indecent Culinary Conduct.

Here's my perspective on it. We all have ideas, some good and some bad. Now it's understandable that people who have invested themselves into a bad idea, especially if they thought it was good, are reluctant to walk away from it. It's painful to have to realize that. But the flip side is that we have to maintain the myth of Santa Claus because, well, so many kids believe in him that we can't let them down. Bad ideas deserve to die for the good of everyone.

The first thing a good idea must have is a real problem to solve. OpenID does very well here. The point of OpenID is to solve our common problem of the internet age: many websites, many accounts, many usernames and passwords. This is probably why OpenID still appears to some people as being a good idea.

Here's how they do it. Instead of keeping track of your accounts on all the sites you're a member of, just let one site keep all your account records (sound ominous yet? it did to me). Now, whenever you want to login to one of your sites, instead of using your username/password for that site, you use your OpenID login, which looks like this: http://username.myid.net. This url is effectively your OpenID provider, ie. the site you use to keep track of all your accounts. So now the site you're logging into sends you to your provider, where you login with a username/password belonging to the account on the provider site, and that logs you into the site you were visiting. So in other words, your account on the provider is the gatekeeper to all your accounts. Sounds simple, right?

I remember when I first heard about this idea years ago. The first concern I had was that in order for this to work, I need a provider to keep track of all my accounts. So I asked myself the question: whom do I trust do this for me? The answer came back: myself. I don't know about you, but the idea of some third party storing all my logins doesn't make me feel warmy and cuddly. As it happens, the open in OpenID means you can choose any provider you want, including yourself. You just set up some php scritps and voila, you can use http://mysite.com as your provider. So basically, instead of storing your accounts in some "account manager" program on your computer, you do the same thing on your server. This is where the concept of OpenID died for me. I don't want to have to depend on my own OpenID provider to work in order to use other sites. I don't want to add a dependency on my ability to login to some other site contingent on the assumption that my own site is available and working properly at all times (which it isn't, I have a little downtime like everyone else).

If you don't want the hassle of being your own provider, you can pick a provider from a list. This is not an attractive fallback option, because now your account on the provider is your key to all your other accounts. If I have an account on some site and I forget my credentials, big deal, I only lose that one account. But if I lose my credentials on the provider, I lose everything.

In theory, OpenID tries to improve your overall security. The hassle of keeping track of accounts is known to us all, and we get around the problem by reusing the same (or similar) credentials on a lot of sites. This is obviously bad for security, because if someone gets your password to one site, they can access all your other accounts that use this password. So security people will always recommend that you use distinct credentials for every account. Suppose you do this, and you use OpenID to alleviate record keeping. Now, OpenID actually works against you. Your account on the OpenID provider is the key to everything. With a different password on every site, you're that much less likely to remember what it was, therefore your account on the provider is proportionally more valuable.

There is a strange irony at play here. Supposedly, the more accounts you manage with OpenID the more useful it is. But on the other hand, the more accounts you manage with it, the more you depend on it, and the more you make it the one gateway to all your online identities for a potential attacker or for abuse by a dishonest or incompetent provider.

Most importantly, however, OpenID's solution to the login problem isn't a very clever solution at all. Typing http://username.myid.net is not a big improvement over a username/password form. My browser already gives me the option to login without typing anything.

Those are my reasons why OpenID is a bad idea and should have died years ago. If you want more, Stefan Brands has an exhaustive laundry list of problems with OpenID.

Something is very wrong here. Right after starting a KDE session everything looks normal.

But after running for a day we have a different story. I'm assuming this isn't the expected behavior (if so I didn't expect it).

This time I specifically took a screenshot to prove it, but I've seen it eat up as much as 1.3gb of my memory, which is rather unnerving.

kwin-kde4        4:4.0.4-0ubuntu1

Bug report.

This list of 100 books to read showed up on reddit today. I leafed through it and thought I'd do the general public a service by giving some annotations ;)

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald :)

1984 by George Orwell :star:

The Republic by Plato :)

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley :thumbup:

The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer :) :nervous:

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller :yawn: :nervous:

Lord of the Flies by William Golding :lala: :cap:

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka :)

Ulysses by James Joyce :/

Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky :star:

The Art of Warfare by Sun Tzu :)

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra :thumbup:

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri :/

Animal Farm by George Orwell :star:

Hamlet by Shakespeare :neutral: :nervous:

A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway :yawn:

The Stranger by Albert Camus :neutral:

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson :thumbup: :cap:

Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco :yawn:
Absolutely not. Go read The name of the rose instead, it's a masterpiece.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas :/ :cap:
If you find the novel too slow paced, see the mini-series with Gerard Depardieu, it's fantastic!

:cap: A children's book.
:nervous: I saw the movie or the play, didn't read the text itself.

:star: Stellar, unforgettable, a must read.
:thumbup: Highly recommended.
:) Well worth a look, but doesn't leave a lasting impression.
:neutral: Mediocre.
:yawn: Interminable.
:/ Gave up, the author could not convince me it was worth reading in a reasonable amount of time.

By some people's logic, this how the economy is supposed to work:

1. New companies emerge all the time.
2. No companies ever close.
3. Consumers always buy the cheaper and better products.
4. No products ever become obsoleted and force the company to go out of business.

Sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn't it?

When a new company opens in a town and provides a thousand new jobs, there's noone protesting that this is unfair, we didn't do anything to deserve this, that you can't just suddenly create new jobs out of nothing, there aren't people complaining that it's not right, we didn't get jobs at the new company. No, people accept it with great fanfare. Great, the economy is growing, our town will prosper! People will have more money, there'll be less unemployment, we'll be able to afford a higher standard of living.

And yet when, after 40 years, the company goes out of business or moves their production to a cheaper location, people say this is outrageous, 1000 jobs will be lost! There's anger and pandemonium, how can they do this to us, we were loyal to the company for 40 years. People appeal to some sort of higher ethical body; you can't take our livelihood away, what are we going to do with ourselves? And the town itself, which never had much industry, and really just had that one company that employed everyone in town, starts to regress. People move out in search of jobs, young people leave and don't come back, noone moves in because there's no local economy.

It's a sensitive topic. Losing your livelihood is one of the more challenging life situations. But before you start screaming that it's those damn crooked politicians and those greedy executives that have stolen your life, take a moment to think about why you had that job in the first place. In fact, let's start with the basics: what does it mean to have a job?

It means that you are producing a product or offering a service that someone is willing to buy. It does not mean any of these things:

1. Someone is being nice to you.
2. You deserve this.
3. You're going to keep your job because you've been loyal to the company.

If you actually believed any of that then you were under a complete misapprehension. Sure, sentimental concerns do come into it sometimes, like the boss's son getting a summer job because he's family. But in the long run, the only thing that matters is the economic reality.

If you think that's a raw deal, think about this. Most artists aren't wealthy, in fact most artists are struggling to get enough work to live on. A painter may think that he deserves to live a decent life as a painter, but if noone is willing to buy his work, well he's not going to. Is that unfair? No, it isn't, because if he's not producing anything of value, why should anyone have to pay to keep him in business? So if a painter can't do the job he wants to, why should it be any different for you making shoes, or catching fish, or whatever it is you do?

There used to be people working in elevators who would press the buttons. We don't need them anymore. Shepherds aren't in great demand either. Neither are telegraph operators. These professions have all be superseded and they're not coming back. Many others still exist, but have been moved to where production is cheaper, like textiles.

It's always a turbulent transition, you can be sure of that. We don't have hunters anymore, we have domesticated animals now, no need to chase them in the woods. Think about how many hunters were out of work when this happened. But what should they have done, lynch the guy who came up with the idea of keeping animals on the property? Compared to the hunters' relatively narrow interests (although there were many of them), domestic animals were very beneficial to the village. For one thing, you didn't wonder where dinner was coming from, the animals were right there. So should the villagers have discarded this new idea just to make sure the hunters could keep their jobs?

I've got news for you. The very same thing you're protesting against, your job being taken away, you're doing the same thing to people everyday. That's right, you're not so innocent yourself. Have you ever bought a car from a different automaker, because it was cheaper? Did you ever buy peaches from Spain instead of domestic apples? Well, I'm sure it must have been a very gruelling decision for you, right? I mean to think that you could be putting car makers and farmers out of business because you're not buying their products, that's a tough one to swallow.

And what did you get out of it? You could afford to buy more things, because the new products were cheaper. And they didn't break as quick, so you could use them longer. And they had some functions that the old products didn't have, which made you happy. And just as this was happening, the old companies that couldn't stay competitive were going out of business one by one, people were losing their jobs. But hey, you got a pretty good deal out of it, didn't you?

Here's what it comes down to. You're not entitled to your job. You'll only have it for as long as people are willing to buy your product. And even if you've had it for 40 years, that doesn't mean the global market won't make it obsolete tomorrow. There was a demand for your product, now there isn't. You didn't do anything to deserve getting it, and you didn't do anything to deserve losing it.