Some Quotes About Me!

I've been reading some court records from my trial last year - the best quotes are in confidential documents, but here are some in the public record:

"It is my hope that your State Legislature will some day pass the necessary legislation to further deter criminal conduct such as yours." - The Honorable Dennis M. Kehoe, Wayne County Court, addressing me at sentencing

"Every consumer owes a debt of gratitude to Adam Durand and other activists who are doing the government's work for them by exposing the cruelties of modern factory farms. They are also doing the work of Gandhi and King, educating the nation to injustice, oppression and, in this case, the cruelties of modern farms, cruelties that all kind people oppose." - Bruce Friedrich, Vice President of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

". . . [Adam Durand] envisions himself on a personal jihad wherein his beliefs supersede the rule of law." - Christopher D. Thomas, Nixon Peabody LLP, Counsel for Wegmans

Yahoo! Sign-in Seal - what exactly does this accomplish?

I'm no security expert here, but I like to think things through. Yahoo! has a feature which is, it seems, a few months old. But it's new to me. It allows you to create a custom image - here I've made one that says "yahoo sucks!" - and every time you access a Yahoo! login screen, you see the image and know it's legit.

It took me, as a semi-regular Yahoo! user, a few months to even notice the little plug for this feature on the Yahoo! login page. I don't often look around at the various graphics on login pages, since they're usually cluttered with ads and help for users without accounts. Now that I've set a witty statement as my sign-in seal, I may notice it more. But if it didn't show up, or an error displayed where the sign-in seal used to be saying "sign-in seal temporarily unavailable", would I suspect a phishing scam? Would most users?

Yahoo! uses some interesting methods to store the reference to the image. I was at first concerned that simply deleting cookies or the browser cache would result in a broken seal, but Yahoo! took precautions.

But Yahoo! doesn't seem certain about the reliability of their security feature:

What if I don't see my sign-in seal?

You could be on a fraudulent site, but there might be other reasons why you can't see it. For example, someone else using your computer may have deleted or changed your seal, your cookies or files on your computer may have been deleted, or you're using a partner or international Yahoo! site (like BT Yahoo! or Yahoo! India). To be safe, look for these other clues to make sure you're on a genuine Yahoo! sign-in screen.

Yahoo! is too quick to list other explanations to the missing sign-in seal. If a user has taken the time to look up Yahoo!'s help information about their missing seal, the company could at least provide them with a link to some more information on phishing and how to avoid being scammed. This brief explanation contains no links, nothing to do other than "look for these other clues" and then log in and hope for the best.

How much phishing has this sign-in seal prevented? Probably not much, if any at all. Quite telling is the little pop-up message (shown above) asking if that's your sign-in seal. Phishing sites won't bother to put that little pop-up message in, and that's the only time when users will need to see that message.

Canandaigua, NY paper covers Wegmans protest

Great article in the Messenger Post:

Katie Barber shivered in the stiff wind, but her sign, which read “Wegmans, Please Go Cage-Free,” didn’t tremble. The CA junior and about five of her fellow students protested conditions at Wegmans’ Wolcott egg farm.

“Their egg farm is very cruel,” the 17-year-old said. “Their chickens aren’t being cared for properly.”

Barber said Wegmans’ chickens live out their lives in cages with floors no larger than a common office file folder. Once they’re no longer capable of giving eggs, they’re slaughtered and sold.

Learn What American Accent You Have

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Northeast
The Midland
Philadelphia
The South
North Central
The West
Boston
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

I'm usually not one to take online quizzes, but regional accents interest me. It's amazing how accurate this quiz is in my case.

Malkin: A Student Baits the Taser?

Is Michelle Malkin serious? She has entered into the realm of satire. If an individual refuses to show identification, does she really think shooting them repeatedly with a taser is the appropriate response? At least we can agree that tasering them after they've been handcuffed is excessive, right? Please?

From what I've read, even the police agree that this man made no threats of violence and was nonviolently resisting after they tasered him. What sort of scary world would Michelle Malkin prefer to live in? Doesn't tasering people who refuse to show ID make the world less safe?

Then a police officer named Joel writes to Michelle, and it only gets more bizarre. He claims that the problem here was California-style political correctness. I guess that in liberal P.C. society, we're now politely tasering people who resist showing ID, who knew? According to Joel, it's better to "hit a person with your nightclub one time as hard as you can in the leg" instead of resorting to the gentle taser approach.

Tasers are not always non-lethal, and become much more dangerous when they're used repeatedly on someone. Tasering a person for a few seconds may be defensible in situations where they appear to pose a threat - tasering a nonviolent protester multiple times while they are physically restrained is indefensible.

The Woman of Super Mario World

Via ffwd, Serious Games Source has an article by Gonzalo Frasca about Super Princess Peach
and the gender stereotypes that Nintendo reinforces in the game. It's less of a manifesto and more of an attempt to take the game more seriously, which appears to be mission of the site.

The most interesting part of the article is the part where Frasca compares the Japanese version of the game's advertisement to the American version. The contrasts between our two cultures are quite stark.

But this was strange to read:

In Mario’s universe, Princess Peach - formerly known as Princess Toadstool in Western countries until 1996 - has always played the damsel in distress role. Until now, all she did was wait until Mario showed up and rescued her.

My favorite playable character in Super Mario Brothers 2 was always Princess Toadstool. When she jumped, she seemed to defy gravity. I preferred her everywhere but the ice world. Of course, who knows if she was really capable of all that - we find out at the end of the game that it was all in Mario's head.

So I don't know how Frasca could have forgotten about Super Mario 2. Back then, the Princess was a much less emotional character, probably due more to 8-bit sprite limitations than anything else.

Taking video games seriously is a good idea, I'm sure, because video games play a major role in society. But I think you'd want to discuss the effects games actually have on attitudes and habits, rather than limiting the discussion to subject matter. And incidentally, any truly serious discussion about gender in Mario World would include Birdo. I remember learning, as a child, about Transgenderism through the Super Mario 2 manual.

Thoughts on the Wegmans Boycott

Many friends of mine quite naturally boycott Wegmans out of personal reasons. They can't stomach regularly handing hundreds of dollars of cash to a company "whose influence," as one corrections officer put it, "is the reason you went to jail."

A boycott of all Wegmans products is more of a symbolic move that an action intended to bring the company to its knees. I can completely understand why people - after seeing what Wegmans does to animals when they think nobody's watching - would want to withdraw their economic support from the operation.

Compassionate Consumers isn't calling for a boycott, but we support people who do. Whether individuals or families decide to buy cage-free eggs, boycott all animal products, or refuse to shop at Wegmans, they're making an ethical choice that should be admired.

Wegmans has a "Nature's Marketplace" because they make more money off of those products than they do conventional products, not out of their love for vegetarians. If cage-free eggs are considered "Nature's Marketplace" products, then the Wegmans Cruelty campaign has increased the number of natural shoppers more than it could ever take away.

That's one of the biggest problems with the campaign - cage free eggs only cost 5 to 10 cents more per carton to produce. Companies that sell exclusively cage-free eggs often charge little or nothing more for those eggs than companies that sell battery cage eggs. If Wegmans simply did the right thing and stopped selling battery cage eggs, they would lose out on their market for "upscale" cage-free eggs. The Wegmans Cruelty campaign currently serves as free advertising for these pricey eggs.

Anyone who's been to the egg section of their Wegmans will probably be amazed at the number of cage-free eggs available. This represents chickens living much better lives than they would at Wegmans Egg Farm. But this also probably represents more money for Wegmans and less incentive to change.

It's hard to know what's right, so we encourage any positive step that people take.