My guess is there aren’t many Mensa members among principals.

From CNN, we get this nice little item in which we learn of principal Kenny Lee of El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, Calif., who ordered satirical posters of President Bush taken down (they were advertising a school play) because… they promoted smoking and “endorsing one ideology over another.”

Blink. Blink.

Forget how blatently stupid the idea that a poster of a Groucho Marxish Bush would promote smoking. (Lee’s logic: Showing someone smoking “promotes” it; he obviously doesn’t think much of his students’ intelligence.)

What’s amazing is Lee’s real reason for ordering them removed. They endorsed an ideology.

In other words, according to Kenny Lee, students are not allowed to express a point of view.

Per CNN: “That’s our take on the student speech and conduct,” Lee said.

Get this: Frances Ball, the principal of Clarke County High School in Virginia, cancelled the free delivery of the local paper (the Clarke Times-Courier) to students because — horrors! — the paper reported that the school board held an illegal meeting.

Ball, well-worn jackboots in place, wasn’t making an educational decision; she was making a political one.

What’s next? If a paper endorses a candidate the principal doesn’t like, she’ll stop students from reading it? If the paper gives a bad review to her favorite restaurant, ban it?

The papers are given free to students as part of the nationwide Newspapers in Education program. (The Times-Courier is offering free delivery to students through the end of the year.)

I’ve written a few times about thermal depolymerization (TDP) — a process that converts just about anything into oil. (In fact, “Anything Into Oil” was the title of a Discover magazine article on the subject.)

Changing World Technology, the Long Island, N.Y., company behind the process, opened a plant in Carthage, Mo., as a prototype/testbed for it. And I haven’t heard much since, other than a brief follow-up in Discover in July 2004.

But there is more. The Carthage facility produces about 400 barrels of oil a day, but has had economic problems because of the higher-than-expected cost of turkey parts, and the inability to qualify for a federal program that would have helped drfray costs.

Heck, read it yourself: The Kansas City Star had a story talks about some problems the plant is having (including an odor that turned out not to be coming from the plant). Registration is free, but you can also try username: bobross@pbs.org; password: happy3.

There’s also a piece in Fortune magazine you might want to check out.

Finally (for the moment) some other links for ya:
My USA Today column on TDP
My follow-up on this site
My page of TDP links
Wikipedia article

So a guy threw a rock through the window of Temple Emmanuel here.

The temple’s security cameras taped him. He didn’t just throw a rock. He stopped his car across the street, put on his hazard blinkers, got out and got something from the back of the car, crossed the street, and repeatedly threw it against the window of the temple library until it broke. Then he collected whatever it was, got back into his car, and drove away.

Parked his car. Put on his flashers. Threw the rock repeatedly.

Incredible.

Police are investigating. And yet, that doesn’t make me feel much better.

I just have to point this out, because it’s buried in the CNN story.

The House of Representatives passed a bill, HR 810, that would reduce the current ban on stem-cell research.

The CNN story wrote in the lede that the new bill “would expand public funding for embryonic stem cell research.” Yes, this is true. But what’s buried is this very important part of the bill: It would only allow reserach on stem calls in which

[T]he embryos would never be implanted in a woman and would otherwise be discarded (Emphasis mine.)

In other words, these embryos are going to be destroyed. Gone. So the question is, should we allow them to be used to do research that might save lives, or should we simply discard them? ‘Cause that’s the choice here — there’s no third option. Destroy them or try to save lives with them.

What choice would “err on the side of life” here? Seems pretty obvious to me.

Yay, CNN! The site not only reported that Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith had been leaked to a file-sharing network, but also gave the all-important detail of which one (Bittorrent).

Good thing they didn’t explain how to use it — that you would need to install a free Bittorrent client (such as ABC), then go to a site like TorrentSpy and search for it.

Then all you would need to do it click the file name and follow the instructions.

(Neat thing about Bittorrent: The more people downloading the movie, the faster it gets….)

I just received my 140+ photos back from Shutterfly, along with a (free) note card; a (free) 11×14 print is on its way.

For the record: great quality, great service, and damned fast.

Most of the photos were high-res images, but there were a few in which I only had a small JPEG to work with. (Shutterfly even gave me a warning that a 4×6 print wasn’t recommended.) Despite that, even the low-res prints came out great.

I had been printing photos myself on a nice, if a bit old, Epson photo printer. But worrying about ink levels, dealing with bad prints, and having to buy everything was a hassle. Figuring just the cost of media told me that each 5×7 cost about 50 cents; a 4×6 ran about 33 cents. And that’s not counting my time and gas running to Staples, fighting with clogged ink jets, etc.

Shutterfly charges 29 cents for a 4×6, less if you buy in bulk. Further, if someone wants a copy of one, we can point ‘em to the Web site. The choice was obvious.

From Edmunds comes this tidbit:

AUBURN HILLS, Mich. — Chrysler has decided to cancel its 7-year/70,000-mile standard powertrain warranty.

The company judged that this package did not sufficiently entice customers, so it plans to divert the money and resources it was using to fulfill the warranty obligations toward other consumer and dealer marketing efforts.

Wait, let’s translate.

It was costing Chrysler too much to fix its customers’ cars under the 70,000-mile warranty, so it’s cancelling the program.

And what does that tell you about Chrysler cars?

Actually, I already knew. I know a guy who works for Texas Instruments, and he used to work in the division that made chips for auto makers. Each car company has a certain number of defective parts it was willing to accept. (Obviously you pay more for a guarantee of 3 defects per 100,000 than you would for 100 defects per 100,000.)

He said he would never buy a Chrysler because it accepted the highest number of defective parts. If the company was willing to accept bad chips, it was probably willing to accept bad other things.

I finally decided to enable comments on the site, so you can tell me what an idiot I am in public, instead of just by e-mail. Click on the “Comment!” link after any blog entry to go to a page where you can speak your mind.

Comments had been enabled on the USA Today follow-ups, but a quirk with my anti-comment-spam software had that broken. It should be fixed now.

Here’s a novel twist on spam: Send a newsletter, and instead of a simple “Click here to stop receiving these,” require that the user send a detailed e-mail. And then refuse to accept the message.

That’s what the American Chemical Society does. I am getting its Chemistry.org newsletter. I do not want this newsletter. The instructions for unsubscribing are to write to webmaster@acs.org, ask to be unsubscribed, give your full name, and give your chemistry.org login name.

Uh-huh. (Having worked at the ACS, I can tell you firsthand that it’s far, far from the technology cutting edge.)

So I do this. I send the following note to webmaster@acs.org:

Please cancel my subscription to the chemistry.org newsletter. My e-mail
address is [I put my address here] and my full name is Andrew Kantor. I don’t have
a login name.
Thanks.

The message bounced back with the following error:

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

webmaster@acs.org
SMTP error from remote mailer after end of data:
host boron.acs.org [216.143.112.9]: 550 5.7.1 Blocked by SpamAssassin

SpamAssassin, huh? Neat trick — use SpamAssassin as an excuse to continue sending unwanted mail. I gotta try that. (I sent the e-mail again from a different address. Same bounce.)

The ACS makes millions of dollars every year in a great scam: It sells universities scientific journals that contain papers written by their own professors. (Most are federally funded, so the ACS gets millions of your tax dollars for itself by selling people their own work. Amazing!) And yet, it can’t afford the staff to get its mail servers to work properly?

Follow-up: I got another unwanted spam from the ACS. This time I pasted “webmaster@acs.org” into the BCC field a few dozen times and sent it back. That finally got their attention and they unsubscribed me.

I’ve been sitting in a discussion with Ken Sands, online publisher of the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash. Lots of good things to learn about the future of journalism and the things newspapers, reporters, bloggers, et al. have to look forward to.

Anyway, we were talking about craigslist, the free online classifieds service that is “in” hundreds of cities worldwide and is killing the classifieds business of newspapers in every city it covers.

If you go to craigslist, you’ll notice how plain the site is — entirely text. No photos, no video, nothing. Clean to the point of sparseness.

And yet it’s the biggest classified advertising place on the planet.

Google. You’ve heard of it? Another monster site, and another absolutely clean interface. The Drudge Report — same thing. (Granted, there are lots of more-popular news sites that are image heavy.)

Lesson I took home: If you have the information people want, image(s) mean nothing. Clean/plain/Spartan/boring — it’s all OK. Toss out your Web design books that focus on style; substance will kill it every time.

I have a ton of photos of my son, almost all of them in electronic form. Further, I tend to save photos as TIFFs, not JPEGs (or at least in addition to JPEGS) because JPEGs use lossy compression, meaning that saving it that way loses some information. Usually it’s too subtle for human beings to notice, but if you re-save a JPEG too many times, eventually you will see the file degrade.

So TIFF it is. But TIFF files are much larger than JPEGs. And because I’m a Smart Guy and back up my photos regularly, I figured that I would use WinZip to compress those TIFFs without losing data, and thus fit more photos on each CD. Zip files being the standard compression format in the world, I figured I would always be able to re-open them.

So I created zip files, one zip for each month of photos — 2004-04, for example. And then I backed up those files to multiple places.

And then I needed those photos. And then I found that a bunch of those zip files were corrupt. Somehow, WinZip screwed up, and I couldn’t open them.

And all my backups were copies of those bad zip files. Oh-oh.

I got lucky. I found a backup CD that contained the originals, unzipped. And I quickly made copies of those files.

I don’t know, yet, if I shouldn’t trust zip files in general, or if this was a WinZip problem. But I won’t be zipping any of my files for backup anymore until I know the culprit. (Or I’ll at least test my backups immediately.)

From the Institute of Oriental Study in Brazil:

(Via BoingBoing.)

More: When told it was a logo for the Institute of Oriental Study, colleague Lindsey Nair quipped, “What is that, ‘up the yin-yang’?”

Still more: I guess the site’s unexpected popularity has finally taken its toll. It’s down for repairs.

Money quotes from the U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit, in its ruling on the broadcast flag case:

The result that we reach in this case finds support in the All
Channel Receiver Act of 1962 and the Communications
Amendments Act of 1982. These two statutory enactments
confirm that Congress never conferred authority on the FCC to
regulate consumers’ use of television receiver apparatus after
the completion of broadcast transmissions.

There is no statutory foundation for the
broadcast flag rules, and consequently the rules are ancillary to
nothing. Therefore, we hold that the Commission acted outside
the scope of its delegated authority when it adopted the disputed
broadcast flag regulations.

And from Circuit Judge Edwards, writing for the majority:

The principal question
presented by this case is whether Congress delegated authority
to the Federal Communications Commission in the Communications Act of 1934, to regulate
apparatus that can receive television broadcasts when those
apparatus are not engaged in the process of receiving a broadcast
transmission. In the seven decades of its existence, the FCC has
never before asserted such sweeping authority. Indeed, in the
past, the FCC has informed Congress that it lacked any such
authority. In our view, nothing has changed to give the FCC the
authority that it now claims.

…always an asshole.