Okay, so I just had a panic moment, I booted my machine back up (long story why it was down, I may write that up after), and had no sound. I’m at a total loss here, it was working fine before rebooting. Note, this is the first reboot since having converted from Ubuntu to Debian. I look at the modules, everything seems fine, but I’m getting a snd_ctrl_open error which I have no clue what is, but looks like a kernel module error to me. So I poke around loading extra modules, no luck. I start googling, and one guy asks about the output of alsamixer. Now, I have an alsamixergui, but no alsamixer; what’s up with that? Its very weird, that’s what it is, Linux always comes with a command line client before a graphical one. So just for kicks, I install alsa-utils, and guess what? it’s pulling alsa-base and several other packages I’d have sworn I’d had. Apparently in the conversion from Ubuntu to Debian, they were uninstalled. So a second reboot later (that being the easiest way to make sure the modules and alsabase and everything are all in sync that I know of, though I’m sure the reboot wasn’t necessary), I again have sound. :-)

The double standards in society are absolutely amazing. Michelle Malkin gets on the main stream media’s case for their discussion of Condoleezza Rice’s attire here. David Limbaugh does also, but I think Malkin’s post is better.

According to “When paying with plastic, why swipe? Just wave,” the credit card companies are looking at switching from magnetic strips to RFID tags. I imagine these will be similar to those that the State Department wants placed in passports now, which has significant privacy and security implications. In “Schneier on Security” security expert Bruce Schneier addresses some of the concerns with the RFID tags in passports. Apparently, despite government assertions to the contrary, with the right equipment, these tags will be readable from some some distance away. Schneier’s report is somewhat misleading from what I have gathered, he talks about the chips broadcasting continuously, where I have heard from Andrius that they only do so when they are powered by a certain radio frequency. The difference is slight, but significant to keep in mind when reading the more official reports on these tags. Even assuming they need to be powered by a radio frequency, a directional transmitter/receiver would be able to read an unshielded passport from sufficient distance that you would not necessarily know it had been read. The implications for credit cards are clear. In an age where credit cards increasingly do not need a signature (think amazon.com or other online vendors), someone having your credit card number is equivalent to that person being able to buy things in your name. “Potential ID Theft Victims Eye Information” is simply the most recent article I have seen about identity theft, there have been many many others in the past year. This also goes right back to the concerns I discussed on Wednesday, 16th of February 2005.

You can sense how much some of the Church’s hierarchy are hoping for a different pope in some of the anonymous comments in “Pope Breathing on Own Again; No Infection.” It is not as overt as some articles are, thankfully, but it is still really sad to hear about people hoping to capitalize on our Pope’s death. The BBC has a slightly different article on this, “Pope ‘is breathing for himself’,” which thinks there are “ethical problems as to whether and to what extent his life should be preserved by artificial means.”