Flashblock, Outsource Your Job, Privacy Laws

Flashblock is a great plugin for firefox to keep distracting animations from bothering you. If you want to see the flash object you just click on it and you can see it. Well awhile back Firefox started crashing fairly often on my machine.

Finally I decided to see what was going on. It seemed to be related to sites with Flash so I went to look at the Flashblock page and it seems a new version of Firefox has a bug that results in the old version of Flashblock crashing Firefox. I just upgraded Flashblock so hopefully I will now avoid all those crashes. You have to follow the uninstall instructions (default extention upgrade process won't work).

Outsource your job to earn more!
I think this is pretty amusing. I would guess others will get all worked up about it. I wouldn't be amazed if this quote is less than completely true:

Says a programmer on Slashdot.org who outsourced his job: "About a year ago I hired a developer in India to do my job. I pay him $12,000 out of the $67,000 I get. He's happy to have the work. I'm happy that I have to work only 90 minutes a day just supervising the code. My employer thinks I'm telecommuting. Now I'm considering getting a second job and doing the same thing."

I have thought about something similar, but I am too chicken to actually do it.

Lawmakers have proposed several bills that seek to better protect personal data

While I hope they pass some effective laws, I am skeptical. Lawmakers now use so much 1984 Orwellian speak you can't trust what they say (yes I realize some may say that was always true but I don't believe they could so boldly be Orwellian previously). The only effective way to know what the claims they make mean is to have trusted entities that will tell you what it really means (or become an expert yourself). Unfortunately the mainstream media has mainly given up any role they traditionally played and now mainly parrot whatever they are told (this is not something new in the last 2 years it has been growing more and more true for 20 years). So for privacy I would look at what the Electronic Privacy Information Center, EFF, Privacy Rights Clearninghouse and other say to know whether the lawmakers are using English the way the rest of us do in talking about these laws or whether they are Orwellian.