Seen Dr. Horrible yet? Worth it just for Felicia Day. (Don’t she just wanna make you become a stalker? In a good way, of course.)

Some folks say that these high prices are here to stay, and they’re going to keep going up for a while. Others think it’s a bubble based on oil speculators that will eventually burst, bringing prices down.

If you’re among the former, how sure are you? I ask because of MyGallons.com. The idea is simple: Buy X gallons of gasoline through the company at today’s prices — it’s put on a debit card that has gallons instead of dollars — then use the card at BP/Amoco, Chevron, Citgo, 76, Shell, Texaco, or lots of other stations to buy gas at whatever the current price is. The company says it’s accepted at 95 percent of stations across the country.

The site/service isn’t doesn’t appear to be a joke. Jokes usually don’t make liberal use of trademarked logos — there’s too much legal trouble to be had, and jokes never actually let you pay by credit card.

Anyway, so you fill your debit card with, say, 50 gallons at $4.00 each, then when the price jumps to $4.25 you just made, er, $12.50. Or saved $12.50 — however you want to look at it. Oh, but you have to pay $1.95 to fill/refill the card. So you made $10.55 (right?).

If you drive a lot, and prices continue to go up

Other things I noticed. From the privacy policy:

We may offer contests and sweepstakes to our account holders form time to time.

and

MYGALLONS does not currently sell, trade, or otherwise transfer outside the company personally identifiable information that account holders voluntarily provide (emphasis mine)

That, plus the $1.95 charge to fill the card, seem to be the only catches. Well, and the fact that gas prices could drop if this is indeed a bubble.

But if you think the worst is yet to come, maybe you want to hedge your bets.

I went with my son, Sam, to his first baseball game today: the Richmond Braves vs. the Durham Bulls. We figured to root for the Braves, they being the local team and all, but we really didn’t care all that much. (The Braves are leaving after this year anyway.)

But in the course of 10 minutes we went from being Braves fans to being Bulls fans.

We were sitting about five rows behind the Bulls’ dugout. At one point, one of the Bulls’ staff (pictured) was tossing a ball around. So I grabbed Sam and walked over.

“Any chance we could get that ball?” I asked.

No and yes. For some reason he wouldn’t give us that one, but he called to one of his teammates and asked for a ball, which he tossed to us.

A few minutes later, Karen went to get a cup of ice — it was 96 degrees and we wanted to cool Sam off. The cost: $3.50.

And with that, we are now Durham Bulls fans.

Amusing note: The guy who tossed us the ball was Belichicking the Braves through a lot of the game, shooting video when the Bulls were at bat and they could catch the Braves’ signals.

I’d be grateful if you’d tell me how you usually read this site.

Basically, I want to know if you go directly to an entry (via RSS feed) or whether you go to the home page and read from there.

(If this is your first time here, I’m guessing you went to a specific entry’s page, not the home page.)

Just use the comments. And thanks.

Holy moly — I haven’t looked in a while.

The current IRS standard mileage rate — which, among other things, is what any reasonable business reimburses employees who drive on company business — is now 50.5 cents per mile.

(Last I looked it was 38 or 39 cents.)

I was getting the latest U.S. unemployment figures for a project, and rather than use news reports I went straight to the source: The Bureau of Labor Statistics. The first quick scan seemed to indicate an unemployment rate of 5.0 percent.

But then I actually read the report.

That 5.0-percent figure, which is what most newspapers will, incorrectly, cite, is based on there being 7.63 million unemployed people.

But you have to read past the top of the report. Because that figure doesn’t include some very important people: so-called “marginally attached workers.”

Who are they? They are, the BLS says, “persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and  are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past.”

They include people who have run out of unemployment benefits (”discouraged workers”) and those who “want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.”

So that 5.0 percent figure only counts people who are getting unemployment benefits. When your benefits run out, you’re not considered unemployed.

Thankfully, the Bureau of Labor Statistics also gives the actual unemployment numbers (albeit in an easy-to-miss addendum to the monthly labor report called “Alternative measures of labor underutilization“). 

The actual unemployment rate in the United States in April 2008 was 9.2 percent.

Something worth thinking about.

I don’t think Dave Barry, Tom Shroder, and Gene Weingarten set out to create a wonderful demonstration of the difference between knowledge and intelligence, but they sure did — at least for me.

This Sunday I drove up to Washington, D.C., for the first (annual?) Post Hunt — a giant, public, puzzle game held all over downtown D.C.

“Puzzle game.” Let me explain for those who aren’t familiar with the Miami Tropic Hunt, which this is based on. (Or, for you grammarians, “upon which this is oh go screw yourselves.”)

Thousands of people play. You go to the starting point, as explained in that week’s Post Magazine. You are given five locations on a map of the downtown. At each of those five locations is a puzzle waiting for you — a large, public puzzle. The answer to each puzzle is a number, and the number leads you to a phrase in the magazine.

The magazine lists lots of numbers and phrases, but only five will mean anything. The rest are red herrings.

So you might solve a puzzle, get an answer of “12,” and then know that phrase #12 is important.

When you get all five phrases, you go back to the starting point at 3:00 where you are given a final clue that you use in conjunction with those five phrases to unravel another location with another puzzle. Solve that first and win the prize. (Actually, there are prizes for first, second, and third.)

The puzzles are neat. They were smart but not too smart — good enough to weed out the posers, but not so tough that only dedicated puzzle people would win.

That was important to me, because I was with a group of members of the National Puzzlers’ League, having been invited by my friend (and NPL member) Eric. I felt like I was playing a game of touch football with the NY Giants.

When it comes to puzzles, these guys are the best. Several were featured in the movie Wordplay, for example, including at least one of the three others on my team. (There were 15 NPLers in the group, divided into four teams.)

So I hoped against hope to make some kind of contribution to my team.

I won’t go into details of all the puzzles — Eric does that on his blog — but I’ll share one example.

We went to a museum. In front were three signs (the photo below shows other hunters staring at them):

13 ?

14 ?

15 ?

Hmm. We remember that this same building was the subject of a puzzle in the Post magazine — one of those “find the differences” things. You had to find 12 differences.

“So,” said Eric, “There must really be 15 differences. We just have to find the other three.”

Problem 1: If you found 15 differences, how would you know which three were the ‘additional’ ones?

Problem 2: If you found three differences, how would that make a number?

We stared at the puzzle in the magazine, finding the 12 differences. Some involved numbers, most didn’t.

Then I said, “Hey, in the magazine the U’s are U’s, but on the museum they’re V’s.” That is, in person it’s a MVSEVM, but in the magazine photos it’s a MUSEUM.

Eric immediately jumps. “That’s it!”

Huh? I thought it might be important, but didn’t get how. Apparently Eric did. He realized immediately that there where three V’s that had become U’s. Therefore differences number 13, 14, and 15 were V, V, V — or 555. Which was the answer.

Knowledge vs. intelligence. I had one, but not the other. In fact, it took me a minute to get it; I even stopped Eric and said, “Wait, what? Explain it.” Then it was obvious, although Eric thought it was funny “to have to explain the answer to the guy who found it.”

Which was the point — I found the data that others had missed, but data are useless without someone with the intelligence to use it.

A similar thing happened at the end game — the final puzzle, where I finally got to contribute again. The clue my teammates finally figured out (and don’t ask me to explain) was FORMER NAME CAPS HOME.

To me, that was obvious: What was the former name of the home of the Washington Capitols hockey team? (Now they play at the Verizon Center.) I convinced Eric to bug his wife at home. She Googled it — it was the MCI center.

Then I screwed up. “No, no, before all the corporate naming stuff.” But that was a dead end and we were stuck.

Then, off-hand, I said, “MCI is also a Roman numeral. What is it, 1,101?”

And Eric says, “That’s it! That’s it!” He remembered that a building on the cartoon Hunt map was number 1101. We raced there, but too late.

And again, it was a case of knowledge vs. intelligence. I had the data — I knew “CAPS” meant the Capitols — but I simply wasn’t smart enough to realize I had the answer in “MCI.”

I felt like the little kid in the movie who says off-hand to the hero, “Yeah, my  dog barks at night a lot” to which the hero shouts, “Of course! He must hear the screech of bats! The criminals are in the belfry!”

So I felt helpful, but boy I wish I could have made that extra leap to know what those data meant.

There’s a lesson in team-building there, though. You need a mix of people — those who know a lot, those who are smart enough to run with the data, and some who are good enough to bring them together.

(Right: Four presidents and a “buck” prepare to race. The answer to this puzzle turned out to be ‘A buck, plus a quarter (Washington), plus a penny (Lincoln)’ — $1.26 or simply 126. I didn’t get it.)

Eric poses at the main gathering place for the Hunt, about 15 minutes before it began.

Rain, schmain — at the endgame there were still thousands of people waiting for the final clue.

Kudos, props, etc., to the staff of the Washington Post for winning the 2008 Pulitzer Prize “for its exceptional, multi-faceted coverage of the deadly shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, telling the developing story in print and online.”

The Post also won the Virginia Press Association’s awards for its coverage of the shooting for both “Spot news writing” and “General news writing,” and scored a “Best in show” for is coverage as well: “Clearly the best writing over the entire event. A model of breadth, depth, clarity and sensitivity. This story was a local one for The Post and every other newspaper in Virginia. It was beautifully done.”

But extra kudos go to the Christiansburg-Blacksburg News-Messenger. The tiny, local paper took both first and second place in the VPA’s “Special sections or special editions” category for its extended coverage of the Tech tragedy. (Let’s get some names in here: Tonya Hall Bowyer, Amanda Bolen, and Lawson Koeppel.)

And finally, Alan Kim of the Roanoke Times — whom I’ve worked with and I know to be an absolutely terrific guy — took the VPA’s Best in Show award for this shot (at least I think it’s this shot) in the aftermath of the shooting.

I have to say, though, that I’m disappointed that the single best source of breaking news during the shooting — I was in the Roanoke Times newsroom at the time — was omitted. that was Planet Blacksburg, a student-run news site. It was where we turned to find out what was happening because it had all the information first.

The site got new media — it understood that it’s not about having photos and video and multimedia fluff, but it’s being willing to report rumor and unverified information as such. In a situation like that, waiting for confirmation on every piece of data would have been the wrong move — the old media move.

As long as readers knew the information was unconfirmed and may be revised, during chaos like that it’s best to get everything out there. Detailed, confirmed reporting could wait for the next day’s papers or for the evening news. But the Web can’t work like that, and the folks at Planet Blacksburg knew it. Bravo to them.

Could be.

OK, you’ve probably heard various musicians and other artists shouting “Free Tibet!” and have at least a vague awareness that the Chinese have occupied it against the wishes of its people.

My understanding, though, was limited to that. But here’s a useful link to a short piece in the Sunday Times, “Long-suffering pawn at mercy of the great powers,” that explains the history. FWIW.

And, of course, there’s the Wikipedia entry, “Tibetan sovereignty debate” that goes into more detail.

(I note that this is the reason other encyclopediae are all but worthless. While Britannica has an entry on Tibet (”Tibet autonomous region, China”) I doubt it has a separate piece devoted to the sovereignty issue. Further, trying to read the piece about Tibet that Britannica does have is impossible — popups demanding that you pay for the privilege won’t let you.)

Ziff-Davis, which owns PC Magazine and other once-big-name computer magazine, has filed for bankruptcy. (PC Mag was the first tech magazine I ever worked for.)

The money quote:

"We feel like we’re in a position poised for wonderful growth," Ziff Davis Chief Executive Jason Young said Wednesday. "We just needed to solve this issue."

I was thinking about the way we punish people from crime in this country, and it struck me how poorly considered it is.

I’m not talking about the whole "retribution vs. rehabilitation" issue — at least not directly. I’m talking about the general thought process we use in dealing with criminals.

Except for a few oddball cases, we deal with them in one of three ways: We incarcerate them, we make them pay money, or we execute them. And that’s it. We’re so used to it that we rarely consider how limited those options are.

Steal a car? Go to prison. Try to kill someone? Go to prison. Take a baseball bat to someone’s house? Go to prison. Bilk investors? Go to prison.

Doesn’t it seem that we ought to have more options? No, I’m not advocating cutting off a thief’s hands; we rightly have a knee-jerk reaction that doing so is barbaric. (Killing someone, though, is not, of course.)

But consider the thinking behind that kind of punishment. It deals with a particular crime in a particular and logical way, much like the people who advocate castrating rapists do.

We talk about "let the punishment fit the crime," but all we mean is "longer prison sentences for greater crimes."

Well, not all the time. For example, I see today that

Actress Rebecca Broussard was sentenced to jail time and morgue duty Monday after pleading no contest to a drinking and driving felony charge.

She was sentenced to do highway cleanup and to "participate in a hospital and morgue ‘Scared Straight’ program." I like the morgue duty; forcing a drunk driver to see these bodies makes sense, if that’s what will happen. Or a sentence of "visiting the families of people killed by drunk drivers" would also work.

This isn’t to say I have the answers, but I’m hoping it’ll be one of those cases where now that I’ve pointed it out, you’ll begin to notice it around you.

Well well well. Turns out that L. Ron Hubbard, the failed sci-fi writer who started the Scientology cult actually stole the whole thing, name and all.

Via Boing Boing, we learn that a German book from 1934 called Scientologie was the basis for much of Hubbard’s work.

Boing Boing got it from a post at Enturbulation, and you can read the full details at http://www.scientologie.org/english.htm.

Besides claiming that it’s a religion (and not a wacko cult), Scientology also claims to have copyright on all its ’sacred texts.’ They didn’t want everyone to know that they believe people were brought to Earth by the galactic tyrant Xenu… oh, never mind.

Anyway, the fact that Hubbard plagiarized much of those ’sacred texts’ calls into question the whole copyright issue, doesn’t it? Or maybe that’s just my thetans talking.

This greeted me the other day when I hovered my mouse to check my mail:

To sign up for an online account with National City, check out the security questions you have to answer (click to enlarge):

"High school mascot" I can handle. But favorite past-time? Huh? And they think I’ll remember that in a few months when I come back? Is it reading? Writing? Sex? TV? Football? What constitutes a past-time?

And favorite actor? I don’t have one.

Arrrrrrrrggggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

On the topic of private companies taking the law into their own hands — or at least their perception of the law — we find that Yahoo has removed The Pirate Bay from its search results.

Based in Sweden, The Pirate Bay is one of the largest sites listing files available via Bittorrent, legal and otherwise. It’s an index; it doesn’t store files, and (despite numerous attempts to show otherwise) what it does is legal.

Apparently, though, Yahoo decided to mess with its search results. If you search on the phrase "the pirate bay" on Yahoo and on Google, you’ll see that Google’s top link, naturally, is the site itself:

Yahoo, on the other hand, links first to the Wikipedia entry about TPB, then to a site for the Pirates Bay condos in Florida, then to a Vanity Fair article.

Try the search on other engines. Ask.com? The Pirate Bay site is the first entry. Live Search? Ditto. Only Yahoo doesn’t include it in the first page of results.

That means one of two things. Either Yahoo’s search engine is incredibly bad, or Yahoo is tweaking its results to please someone other than its customers. Which begs the question: What other sites does Yahoo block or degrade, and at whose behest?

Oh, and if Yahoo is going to make the argument about the legal issues, note this. You can search the site for "how to make a pipe bomb" and come up with some detailed advice:

Which do you think is more dangerous?

Follow-up: Since writing this, The Pirate Bay now appears at the top of a Yahoo search on the phrase, but the other links on the page don’t link to the site. My gut feeling is that Yahoo inserted the single link to TPB at the top because of criticism, but hasn’t changed the underlying changes to its search, whatever they are.

The United States has blocked Americans’ access to an entire Web site.

Really.

Wikileaks is a site where whistleblowers can anonymously post information and documents showing their companies or governments are engaged in illegal activities.

In one case, Rudolf Elmer, former COO of the Swiss banking group Julius Baer’s Cayman Islands operation, posted such documents purporting to show that the bank was involved in money laundering and tax evasion. The bank’s lawyers convinced Judge Jeffery White of California (still trying to find out which court specifically) to order that the site’s domain registrar, Dynadot, remove the site’s hosting records.

In plain English, that means that if you try to go to wikileaks.org, your computer won’t know where that is. Try it. The Wikileaks people weren’t even given enough notice to appear at the hearing.

Wow.

And, according to the BBC,

As well as removing all records of the site form its servers, the hosting and domain name firm was ordered to produce "all prior or previous administrative and account records and data for the wikileaks.org domain name and account".

The order also demanded that details of the site’s registrant, contacts, payment records and "IP addresses and associated data used by any person…who accessed the account for the domain name" to be handed over.

But you can still access the site easily — you just have to go to one of the alternative Wikileaks sites, such as

http://wikileaks.cx 

or

http://wikileaks.be

or go to the IP address directly.

http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks

Read more at Daily Kos.

Read the text of the injunction. (PDF)

Read the documents that are the cause of the hubbub.

I wrote already that I was happy to be Comcast-free in large part because I don’t think Comcast should be telling me what I’m allowed to use the Internet for (any more than my phone company has the right to tell me what I can say to the people I call).

Comcast, for those who missed it, has a policy of restricting Bittorrent traffic. Bittorrent is a terrific way for sharing large files, because it spreads the pain of delivering those files among lots of people. If you want to download demos of new games, or a version of Linux, Bittorrent is the way to go.

But it’s also used for music and movie piracy, so Comcast decided to limit all Bittorrent traffic by essentially flooding Bittorrent users’ connections with bogus data.

When accused of this, first the company denied it. (I.e., it flat-out lied.) Then the Associated Press, the EFF, and some others proved it was being done. The the FCC started an investigation. Now Comcast is defending the practice it said it wasn’t engaged in.

Ergo, screw them.

To paraphrase John Gilmore, the Internet interprets this kind of bullshit as damage and routes around it. In this case, per TorrentFreak:

Several BitTorrent developers have joined forces to propose a new protocol extension with the ability to bypass the BitTorrent interfering techniques used by Comcast and other ISPs.

It amazes me on a regular basis that companies and organizations think they really can stop a large number of users from doing what they want to. There comes a point where companies have to realize where the river is going and then realize they have to work with that flow.

At times, Bittorrent accounts for something like 25 to 30 percent of all Internet traffic. Think about that. Comcast really thought it could throttle that kind of usage? Clearly users want Bittorrent, and interfering with it would only mean those users would come up with a way around Comcast’s roadblocks.

The future, to any reasonable person, was obvious; Comcast wouldn’t stop it for long, and it would generate a lot of bad press in the meantime.

Every now and again you read a story about, say, a teacher who suspends a student for leaving class to talk to his father in Iraq. We all know how that will end up — outcry, apology, embarrassment — and I wonder why the teacher couldn’t see the obvious. Ditto for Comcast. Did it really think it would get away with this for long?

Probably. The music industry still hasn’t learned its lesson. It continues to sue its customers while not providing them what they obviously want: unprotected music they can play wherever they want to. And then it’s shocked — shocked — that vastly more music is acquired by piracy than legally.

A few quotes from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching are appropriate:

If you overvalue possessions,
people begin to steal.

and

If you don’t trust the people,
you make them untrustworthy.

and finally

Throw away morality and justice,
and people will do the right thing.
Throw away industry and profit,
and there won’t be any thieves.
If these three aren’t enough,
just stay at the center of the circle
and let all things take their course.

On February 17, 2009, the US will convert to digital television. A lot of misinformation has been spread about this, most notably the lie that existing analog TVs will no longer work.

Unscrupulous sales people are using the confusion to try to trick people into buying a more expensive TV than they need.

Here are the facts:

If you get your TV signal from a cable or satellite company (e.g., Comcast, Cox, DirecTV), you can continue to use any television you want to. That old 1965 Zenith set from grandma? Yes, it’ll work just fine. Cable and satellite companies have been moving to digital for years, and most have phased out their analog offerings.

Don’t believe me? Quoth the feds:

If I have an older analog television, will I have to throw it away after February 17, 2009?

No. A digital-to-analog converter box will allow you to continue using your existing analog TV to watch over-the-air digital broadcasts. You do not need to get rid of your existing analog TV. In addition, analog sets should continue to work as before if connected to a subscription service such as cable or satellite TV. Also, analog sets should continue to work with gaming consoles, VCRs, DVD players, and similar products that you use now. (Emphasis mine.)

If you already subscribe to a digital cable package or if you use DirecTV or Dish network, you are completely unaffected by the changeover. Period. It doesn’t matter what kind of television you have, you are not affected.

(If you’re one of the few folks who still get basic, analog cable, you’re going to have to upgrade to your cable company’s digital service like most of us already did. And yes, you can still use your ancient TV.)

So who is affected? People who get their TV over the air via a rabbit ears or rooftop antenna. If they don’t have a newer TV, they’re going to need a converter box. That’s it.

Once more: The only people who have to worry about what kind of TV they have are those who get their signal over the air. Period.

If someone tells you otherwise — say a salesman from Best Buy — he’s lying. Period.

File this under "Huh." Apparently, Roald Dahl had written another child into the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by the name of Miranda Piker. But the section with her in it survived.

Miranda Piker now pushed forward and stood in front of Mr Wonka. She was a nasty-looking girl with a smug face and a smirk on her mouth, and whenever she spoke it was always with a voice that seemed to be saying: “Everybody is a fool except me.”

“OK,” Miranda Piker said, smirking at Mr Wonka. “So what’s the big news? What’s this stuff meant to do when you eat it?” “Ah-ha,” said Mr Wonka, his eyes sparkling with glee. “You’d never guess that, not in a million years.

I think that’s kind of cool. Most folks who’ve seen either Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (or read the book) know the five kids and their fates — Charlie, Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde, and Mike Teavee. Who knew there were originally six?