After gimme-five went down for just under 24 consecutive hours since yesterday, I’ve decided that we’re going to switch webhosts.  Our current webhost is blazernetwork.com, who is terribly unreliable.  Our mySQL database goes down for hours at a time at least once every two weeks and sometimes the entire server goes down for extended periods of time.  I didn’t pay money to have a website that goes down all the time.
They guarantee 99.9% uptime or your money back, so I’d better get a refund… I’ll keep you all updated.

Suppose you buy a nice condo, and a terrorist magnet moves in next door? Even worse, the government places her next to you because you live in a secure, gated community. Do you have any recourse to this? Does the safety of your family or value of your property make you think about this, or do you accept the risk based on a strong, principled stand?

I found the immigration story of Ayaan Hirsi Ali compelling because even as a recepient of the generous immigration policy of the Netherlands, she supports limiting free immigration.

After becoming controversial in Holland, she had her citizenship revoked (maybe temporarily) and was offered a job with the American Enterprise Institute in DC. So I expect that we’ll be hearing more from her from the conservative forums of the US.

There were favorable stories in the WSJ and Salon demonstrating her wide appeal among both the liberals and conservatives, but fundamentally for the sake of discussion:

• She lied about her asylum application in matters related to age, name, and cause and cherry picked the country of asylum.
• She benefited from the Dutch immigration policies to the tune of citizeship, social entitlements and a graduate degree in political science.

I will be out of town from today until Sunday evening.  I am traveling up to New Jersey with my girlfriend to her relatives and my relatives along the way.  I will probably not have a chance to check gimme-five or my email, but you can send fan mail to george AT this domain dot com and I’ll maybe respond if I get around to it.  Peace out until then!

It’s disgusting when people throw cigarette butts on the ground. It happens all the time. Many people throw cigarette butts out the car window, toss them to the side when walking down the street, and treat them as if it’s perfectly ok to put them anywhere. One extreme example is when my girlfriend and I were sitting in a restaurant. While we were waiting for our food, a man who was smoking a cigarette finished smoking and threw it on the ground IN THE RESTAURANT, and walked away.

Obviously, that last example was pretty extreme, but the point still remains that there are a lot of smokers out there that feel they can throw their cigarettes wherever they choose. How is this different from littering? When someone crumples up a bag and throws it on the ground, the general consensus in society is that it’s pretty awful. But when someone throws a cigarette butt out the window of a car, it’s not a big deal to the average person.

Why?

A few days ago USA Today joined the ranks of the terrorists by outing that the government was keeping track of phone call records in a massive database at the NSA. I can imagine that this helped the bottom line at more than a few companies; the free markets work best when they’re infused by taxpayers money in black programs where there is virtually no oversight.

But that’s not the really interesting part. Having devined that Gimme-Five is full of future CEOs (except for george which appears destined to a CIO position based on his technical nerdiness), I was curious what the future leaders thought about the behavior of ATT, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest. In short, ATT, Verizon and BellSouth handed over records while Qwest did not, despite sizeable threats to their core business — such as witholding black contracts from the companies if they did not cooperate silently. This type of arm-twisting looks unseemly from the civil liberties perspective, but even more so from the standpoint of these companies being money printing machines.

A comment from Schneier’s blog: