I just responded copiously to an Ask MetaFilter question about this topic.

In case something unfortunate happens to my reply, I’ll copy it in toto over here, but here’s the link to my answer too.

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Just a short update.

It turns out that even the venerable Peter Guttman (who proposed in 1996 or so that we use a 35-pass wipe according to a strict algorithm to protect our old/deleted data) thinks that with today’s storage and recovery technologies, only a few passes are now needed to protect us from snooping.

I used to advocate the 35-pass wipe algorithm but now I think you only need to do that if you don’t know what types of passes should be used for the type of modern drive you have.

A private Wiki article.

The Guttman article with the Epilogue about the actually required passes versus the 35-pass algorithm.

Found my way to this via kalmn.

They’re basic rules of social interactivity, by Jörm von Motörhead.

They’re very good. I strongly recommend a think you should read them only if inclined. Should you find them helpful, they may remind you how to behave in general, and I assure you that they hold pretty well in think if you consume them selectively, they may help you in not looking like an asshole in various *-isms type discussions too.

Update: Following discussion by a dear friend, I should point out that Jorm is a rude bastard who uses a very typical I-know-more-than-you or I-know-better-than-you geeky type of instruction which not only grates, but when it’s wrong it’s very wrong.
I strongly recommend either not going to look or going to look with shields up.
I also think that if you’ve already got a good system of rules for being polite, and you do go see what this guy has to say, that you should only steal the good ideas, the ones that make you think of new things that might help you personally, and ignore the bad ones.
If the list of rules don’t work for you, please feel no compulsion to use them to replace your own. I am not recommending any of these rules to supersede rules you already know work for you.

Last night, we had a wonderful protein rich dinner with silverbackbutch and biblespice, to celebrate various birthdays and victories!

It was a good time. They helped drink beer from our fridge that has been languishing and needs to be drunk before October.

They also brought cognac soaked peaches and fine chocolate. We got more than a little silly.

hlwiley asked me in a recent comment whether I thought were any useful analogies to be made in the -isms spaces. I responded that while I thought in general, analogies are really sticky and tricky and dangerous things, I would think about it and get back to it.

Here’s my attempt at starting the conversation.

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In which I shall attempt to explain how I think entitlement/privilege is related to docentry/tokenism, reverse racism and how I think you can use your entitlement/privilege for good.

Updated: To try to clarify a bit.

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After a particularly good talk with H, I have a lot to say. I want to break it down and talk about it in chunks both from the point of view of not knowing exactly how much energy I’ll have tonight to do it and also from the point of view of being able to manage any ensuing discussion.

First, let me talk about my posting, as a reminder for regular readers and for those who’ve missed previous discussion.

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Idea totally ripped off from Gary Dauphin’s Should I use blackface in my blog? flowchart. I find Visio a lot easier to work with, though it doesn’t allow any sort of easy image mapping in HTML that I can tell. More tinkering is clearly needed.

Meanwhile, I present for your enjoyment an examination of how fraught it is to compare one group’s sufferings or civil rights to another as a rhetorical ploy. Any well-intended feedback is appreciated.

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So I downloaded Fable II Pub Games a few days ago and have been steadily accumulating inventory items and unlocking higher stakes games. (I probably will buy and play Fable II, probably with the birthday mad money my Mom sent me - Thanks Mom!)

This evening, while unlocking higher stakes games in Keystone (which is a lot like craps but with 3 dice) I had either a run of very good luck or i found something…

Update: Looks like it was blind luck after all - though it seems like I’m hitting triples of various types a lot more often than the less than 3% indicated by strict probability. Though that may just be a local variation in probability for that night, who knows.

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A meme!

via sparkymonster.

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