Scylla and Charybdis: Corruption, health care reform and climate change.

A combination of flawed institutional practices, the nihilistic devastation of the Party of Beck and Limbaugh, and the political, economic and social importance of health care reform have made corrupt Democratic party senators immensely powerful.

Since these people care about nothing but their own power and privilege, and because they hold millions of Americans hostage, they can extort a heavy price from far more honorable people. They make the Beckians seem almost respectable.

It’s a tooth grinding time for compassionate rationalists. We know the historic price of failure. We know the GOP is ever more the party of unreason. We know too, the deep cost of social and institutional corruption.

Knowing all this, for the sake of health care “reform” we’ve eroded our enamel. Do we go to dentures for the sake of senate action on climate change?

I don’t think we can afford it, and I don’t think it will work. American support for climate policy is as fickle as the weather – by comparison support for health care action is relatively strong. Even if we continue to feed the leeches we still won’t get meaningful senatorial action.

We’re going to have to find ways to act on climate change through a combination of Presidential powers, EPA regulatory authority, and state policy (California still matters – just as in the days of Silent Spring). Perhaps international CO2-based trade tariffs will cause enough American corporate pressure to bring pet Senators into line.

No, it’s time to stop feeding the leeches. We’ve given up a lot, and the price continues to rise.

This is the time to change course. The midterm elections are ahead, and the party of relative reason is almost certain to lose its Senatorial supermajority. Even if nothing else happens, Robert Byrd will expire.

Losing the supermajority means we can now open yet another front against political corruption in America. No, not against Lieberman – that corrupt sod is safe until 2012 and will be well rewarded thereafter. Forget mere justice, this is about survival.

We need to resurrect old ideas about campaign finance reform and start the long, hard fight against a culture of corruption that has grown up in so many aspects of American life – in politics, professional societies, physicians, the judiciary, corporate governance, the media, and in finance and regulatory authorities.

Personally, I’ll be writing more on this topic in the months to come under a new tag of “corruption”. To start with I’ve asked the Center for Public Integrity to make it easier to find the feed for their latest from the center page. I’ve also become a Facebook fan of the CPI (yeah, there’s irony in using FB to fight corruption).

I’ll be pointing to similar organizations and making some donations*. I’ll even be consorting with the enemy; although the GOP is merely seeking to advance their own immense corruption their attacks on corrupt Dems do provide valuable intelligence we can use.

We’ve given a lot of ground for the millions of Americans held hostage to health care reform. We’re at the cliff’s edge now, we’ve got no more ground to give. We need to push back.

Take your anger against Lieberman, Nelson, and the like – and use it. Not against them – forget ‘em. They’re history. Use your anger against their kin everywhere.

Fight.

* If you donate to any of these groups, you will be spammed mercilessly. Yeah, that’s kind of corrupt too. It ain’t a sweet world out there. Don’t give them a phone number, do give them your spam-only Yahoo email account.

Google vs. Apple - Stross on the phone wars

Charlie Stross is a literate geek who makes a living inventing plausible worlds. That's why he can write one of the best tech posts of 2009 ...

Charlie's Diary: Gadget Patrol: 21st century phone

... I think Google is pursuing a grand strategic vision of destroying the cellco's entire business model — of positioning themselves as value-added gatekeepers providing metered access to content — and their second-string model of locking users in by selling them premium handsets (such as the iPhone) on a rolling contract.

They intend to turn 3G data service (and subsequently, LTE) into a commodity, like wifi hotspot service only more widespread and cheaper to get at. They want to get consumers to buy unlocked SIM-free handsets and pick cheap data SIMs. They'd love to move everyone to cheap data SIMs rather than the hideously convoluted legacy voice stacks maintained by the telcos; then they could piggyback Google Voice on it, and ultimately do the Google thing to all your voice messages as well as your email and web access...

Please go now and read the entire essay ...

... Fun, isn't it? Charlie can write.

Charlie compares Apple to high end and luxury auto companies. It's an old metaphor, but it works. Extending that metaphor, what Google wants to do is deliver the Model T platform -- a super-cheap internet-connected phone and netbook for use in Detroit, Seoul, Kabul and Kampala.

2010 will be a very interesting tech year.

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Copenhagen - Better than I'd expected

If the UN's 2009 Climate Change Conference (Copenhagen) had reaffirmed the Kyoto Accord, or committed the world to saving Tuvalu, or promised to limit temperature rises to 1-2 degrees C, it would have been a disaster for humanity.

Instead we saw desperate back stabbing, dodging and weaving. That's a good thing.

No, I haven't turned into a Republican. The rise of China made the Kyoto accord absurd; affirming it would have a been a form of mockery. Similarly saving Tuvalu would require Americans to make radical lifestyle changes this month, and China to shut down its development. Not going to happen, so that kind of commitment would be a promise to do nothing.

We can't save Tuvalu.

A trillion dollars to offset the harm global warming causes developing nations? From the country that reelected George Bush? Puh-lease.

We've gotten about as much as humanity can produce. Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist writing for The Guardian, put it well (emphases mine) ...

Copenhagen summit: This marked a turning point in human nature | Colin Blakemore | The Observer

.... Copenhagen may mark a turning point in human nature, when the global village acquired a global mind.

What we have just witnessed is delegates from 192 countries talking about making sacrifices, slowing their development, constraining their industry, taxing their citizens, in a collective bid to stifle climate change. Those nations included virtually every race, every religion, every style of government – from monarchy to dictatorship, from constitutional democracy to communism.

For the past 5,000 years, agreements between nations have been determined by military or economic power, by political ideology or religious dogma. What Copenhagen has established, even if the final agreement fudges and procrastinates, is that a new force is at work in international diplomacy. A force that does not speak in terms of faith and conviction, that is not even absolutely certain about what it has to say. That force is science....

... In his first major speech after winning the presidential election, Barack Obama said of the value of science: "It's about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it's inconvenient – especially when it's inconvenient." And in his inaugural address, he promised "to restore science to its rightful place". Even with its flaws, what Copenhagen suggests is that the rightful place of science is at the heart of policy for a threatened world. The oceans are already rising. Either we sink, separately, or swim, together.

The leaders at Copenhagen, by and large, took the science of climate change seriously -- even though it's saying things they don't want to hear, and that their citizens often disbelieve.

That won't be enough to save Tuvalu, but it's more than I expected. The game is far from done.

Update 12/20/o9: Similar perspective, from the NYT

Update 12/22/09: A relatively neutral observer tells us that China's goal was to sabotage the meeting and that Obama did yeoman's work: "I saw Obama fighting desperately to salvage a deal, and the Chinese delegate saying "no", over and over again..."

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Prague as seen by superman

In addition to his well known x-ray vision, Superman could use his super-vision to zoom into small details. Details such as this teeny-tiny spot on a monstrous 360 degree panorama of Prague ...



The Panoramic photo site (w/ blog) describes the photo ...

... This is a super high resolution photo. Use your mouse to zoom in and see a startling level of detail. This image is currently (as of 12/2009) the largest spherical panoramic photo in the world. ... When it’s printed, it will be 16 meters (53 feet) long at regular photographic quality (300dpi). It was shot in early October 2009 from the top of the Zizkov TV Tower in Prague, Czech Republic. A digital SLR camera [jf: Canon 5D] and a 200mm lens were used. Hundreds of shots were shot over a few hours; these shots were then stitched together on a computer over the following few weeks...

It seems inevitable that one day, when we look something up on our phone, we'll be able to pan these photos as quickly as my relatively modern (new) machine does today. It's mind-boggling to zoom around Prague on a 27" monitor.'

The image creation used surprisingly average technology ...

...Canon 5d mark 2 and a 70-200mm lens, set to 200mm. The camera was mounted on a robotic device which turned the camera in tiny, precise increments, in every direction....a four year-old windows PC with two single-core 3ghz xeon processors and 8GB of RAM... .... The final image exists as a 120 gigabyte photoshop large (PSB) file. It cannot exist as a TIFF or JPEG file because of their size constraints. The panorama online exists as a few hundred thousand small tiles (in JPEG format), and they take up about 1 gigabyte of disk space.....

The tiled JPGs sum to only 1GB. That would fit on an iPhone.

I'm going to be following the site blog from now on.

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Why mad cow? Against cannibalism.

It's not yet freely available online, but the Scientific American Origins issue has a nice short summary of the origins of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, aka "Mad Cow disease".

Turns out Mad Cow is now thought to be related to President Jimmy Carter's sweater. The first (prodromic) energy crisis led President Carter to wear a sweater in the chillier White House, and changed animal rendering from boiling to centrifugal separation. The centrifuges were kind to prions, so millions of cattle, uncounted small animals, and about 200 humans died a miserable death.

The true root cause, however, was cannibalism. Rendered cows were largely fed to non-rendered cows.

Eating one's own species turns out to be quite unhealthy - despite the compatible food stock. Prions are therefore a de facto form of species-specific poison, and they would contribute to natural selection against conspecific cannibalism.

Prions are presumably a relatively small contributor to the contra-cannibalism trend, but this is an odd upside to the otherwise blameworthy prion.

Update: The 200 dead number will grow. Sadly.

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The ChromeBook rumors grow

We've been expecting this, though we thought it would be earlier ...

Get Ready For The Google Branded Chrome OS Netbook

... Google has, according to multiple sources, been talking to at least one hardware manufacturer about building a netbook for Google directly. As in Google gave the company a RFP with quite detailed technical specifications and has begun discussions on building it.

They’re not in any particular hurry and seem to be aiming for the 2010 holiday season, a full year from now. Our understanding is that Google intends to have the devices built, branded with Google, and then sell them directly to consumers. The only firm tech spec we’ve heard is that they’ll be mobile enabled, and likely tied to one or more carriers with a subsidy.

... I’d even go out on a limb and suggest that they may very well be targeting Nvidia’s Tegra line. Those chips are outperforming Atom in every way, say some of the hardware guys we know. HD Flash video no problem (something the Atom can’t do), and at a fraction of the power usage.

What does that mean? It means next Christmas you may be getting a high performance Google branded netbook running Chrome OS for next to nothing. And if it’s running ARM, Intel is going to be freaking the hell out about it...

I speculated last February that Google would eventually have to split the company if this takes off. I think it will be huge.
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Google's IQ boost is only beginning

AltaVista was really pretty useful (it's still around - owned by Yahoo! now), but the first time I used Google, in early 1999, I knew AltaVista was history.

It's been almost 11 years since that day, and my brain's been following the usual middle aged fail. On the other hand, Google keeps getting smarter. So my brain + Google isn't doing as badly as my brain alone.

Take yesterday, for example. I asked Google for help with an esoteric Excel problem, and it told me how to use matrix operations to sum a range of inverted numbers. I didn't even know Excel had matrix operators.

It took minutes to answer that problem, and to acquire a new set of skills. There's no way I could have answered the problem 10 years ago.

Even though Google has its weaknesses (see also), it's only begun to get smart. Imagine what search will be like in 10 years.

Vinge's Rainbow's End classroom is feeling familiar, even as more of my brain is outsourced to the House of Google.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Strange loops: Google custom and customized search - and a memory blog
• Gordon's Notes: Full text search and digital prostheses: new email, new mind
• Gordon's Notes: memory management

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Lieberman explained: He's a lot like Bush

This explains a lot.

Gail Collins - Sorry, Senator Kerry - NYTimes.com

... my favorite explanation comes from Jonathan Chait of The New Republic, who theorized that Lieberman was able to go from Guy Who Wants to Expand Medicare to Guy Who Would Rather Kill Health Care Than Expand Medicare because he “isn’t actually all that smart.”

It’s certainly easier to leap from one position to its total opposite if you never understood your original stance in the first place, and I am thinking Chait’s theory could get some traction. “When I sat next to him in the State Senate, he always surprised me by how little he’d learned about the bill at the time of the vote,” said Bill Curry, a former Connecticut comptroller and Democratic gubernatorial nominee."...

Lieberman is a dull man who's not that interested in understanding the world. He's dull enough to be profoundly corrupted by his insurance company donors, yet still imagine that he's an honest man.

A lot like George Bush Jr.

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Post-HIV America

A celebrity is found to have been cheating on his wife. That's unsurprising.

He's believed to have been cheating with a large number of women of professional and easy virtue. That's minimally interesting.

Nobody mentions HIV. That's truly noteworthy. My medical school career began with what we later called HIV, and now it's all but forgotten.

We're in post-HIV America.

PS. Nobody mentions the libidinous effects of large doses of androgens either.

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Update 12/19/09: NYT article on remembering a lost era - and lost people. HIV really has been forgotten.

Responding to Facebook’s lions: Stop friends using the apps

Facebook has made changes to their privacy settings that have two major consequences. The first is that the default settings now share much more information. The second is that users can no longer protect their social network from Facebook’s “Applications”.

Most of the media attention has been on how information is exposed to search engines such as Bing and Google. This is important, but there are complex workarounds. It’s not the most interesting or important consequence anyway.

The more important consequence is that Facebook’s shady App vendors (see: Scamville Furor, Facebook and the eBay disease) can no longer be blocked from accessing a player’s social network. So every App vendor has access to all player “friends” and all of the information they in turn make available in their public profiles. Remember that most of those public profiles now contain a great deal of personal data.

The Facebook Apps are “free”, but these vendors are not charities. They earn money by selling game goods, marketing extra-game services and products (some fraudulent), and by selling information. They will sell the social network information they harvest. They will also use that social network to find new “players” (aka “victims”).

To understand this it helps to think of Facebook as the African plains. In this metaphor Facebook users are rhinos and zebras and Facebook App vendors are lions.

Both rhinos and zebras graze on Facebook grass (photo sharing, social stories, contact information). They get along. So how are they different?

The rhinos don’t do Apps and they restrict access to their personal information. They’re tough and nasty; they don’t directly feed lions. The zebras, however, do Apps, and they travel in herds. They’re sleek, soft and vulnerable. Find one, you can find more. Lions eat zebras.

It’s messy for the zebras, but that’s how the market works. The Facebook ecosystem is a rich feeding ground, and lions have to eat.

Of course the Facebook ecosystem is more complex. Facebook rhinos and zebras are often friends and family. Even though lions don’t eat rhinos, FB lions find rhinos through their zebra friends. They then sell Rhino locations (information) to big game hunters (banks?) who sell Rhino horns for fertility potions (risk profiles).

The market world is different because rhinos and zebras can fight back. Not every vendor scores a 10 on Gordon’s scale of corporate evil; Google’s a mere 3 at the moment. There’s more than one way to make money – though the alternatives may mean a smaller IPO. On the other hand, Facebook’s current strategy runs the risk that IPO buyers will remember eBay.

It’s not clear that there’s anything to be done about Facebook. The corporate culture there is probably too much like 1990s Microsoft or 2010 Goldman Sachs for them to find another road. I’ve stopped encouraging my friends to join up with Facebook.

If you want to continue grazing Facebook’s grasslands however, and you don’t want to be lion fodder, there’s now only one possible response.

Convert your zebra friends to rhinos. Get them to stop using Apps. If they persist in using Apps, unfriend them. They’re leading the lions to you.

As of today, Facebook apps are the enemy.

Update: Great comment from Nettie. She refers us to Brad Stone's announcement of the EFF's complaint to the FTC - cosigned by ten other privacy organizations ...

... Ten other privacy organizations signed the complaint, including the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the American Library Association and the Consumer Federation of America. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner in Canada has also been looking into Facebook’s privacy guidelines...

I think it's fair to say that the fan has been hit. Like Nettie, I've noticed people drifting away from FB ...

Another world - this one watery

Another week, another world. This one is wet (emphases mine) ...

.... The alien world known as GJ 1214b orbits a red dwarf star one-fifth the size of our own sun, 40 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, the astronomers reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

Super-Earths - planets that are roughly two to 10 times Earth's mass - represent the hottest frontier in the years-long search for worlds beyond our solar system...

... Those planets orbit stars like our own sun, but the brightness of GJ 1214b's parent star is hundreds of times dimmer. The planet is also much closer to the star than any of our own solar system's planets, orbiting at a distance of only 1.3 million miles (2 million kilometers). That combination suggests that the planet's surface temperature would be about 400 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius), Charbonneau's research team reported.

... GJ 1214b was detected thanks to an innovative telescope system, a cleverly focused observation campaign - and perhaps a little bit of luck. The eight-telescope array, dubbed the MEarth Project, was set up at the Whipple Observatory on Mount Hopkins in Arizona. The telescopes were programmed to gaze at 2,000 low-mass stars and check for slight, regular dips in light that could be caused by a dark planet's transit across the star's disk.

Relatively dim, relatively close stars were favored because the planet's dimming effect would be more noticeable than it would be with brighter, bigger, farther-out stars.

Just a few months after the MEarth Project began, graduate student Zachory Berta spotted the signature of GJ 1214b's 38-hour orbit. Based on the pattern of the dimming, the team figured out that the planet was 2.7 times as wide as Earth.

The astronomers then turned to another instrument, the HARPS spectrometer on the European Southern Observatory's La Silla telescope in Chile, to figure out the planet's mass. Such mass calculations depend on another technique that checks for the slight wobble in a star's motion caused by a planet's gravitational pull. The HARPS observations indicated that the planet was 6.55 times as massive as Earth.

Putting those measurements together, the team was able to model the planet's density and composition. The best fit for the data was a mixture consisting of about three-quarters water and other ices, one-quarter rock and a gaseous atmosphere.

... Although the surface temperature on GJ 1214b would be well above water's boiling point on Earth's surface, Charbonneau said the planet could nonetheless possess an exotic form of liquid water due to extreme atmospheric pressure at the surface. In today's news release, Berta said the pressure may turn at least some of the water into a rare crystalline form known as ice-seven.

"Despite its hot temperature, this appears to be a water world," Berta said.

On Earth, organisms have been found living near deep-sea hydrothermal vents, where superheated water is held under high pressure. But Charbonneau said he wouldn't want to bet that life could endure under GJ 1214b's crushing conditions.

In fact, it's too early to bet heavily on any detailed description of GJ 1214b. Fortunately, Charbonneau said, the star is close enough that the Hubble Space Telescope could someday analyze the composition of the planet's atmosphere. "That will make it the first super-Earth with a confirmed atmosphere - even though that atmosphere probably won't be hospitable to life as we know it," he said...

... The larger implication of the Nature study is that other super-Earths may be waiting out there with just the right conditions for life. "We found this planet in the first six months," Charbonneau noted. "We had only looked at a small fraction of the stars that we planned to look at through the entire project. That means that either we got really lucky - which is possible - or these planets are common."

Red dwarf planets are tidally locked, so one side would be very hot and another side very cold. In between?

The next two years are expected to bring news of hundreds of planets - maybe thousands. We're filling in terms in the Drake equation, and making the "great quiet" ever more unsettling.

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Alzheimer's and obesity: it's not the fat, it's the leptin?

It's puzzled me that obesity was associated with earlier onset of Alzheimer's. It makes sense that both the obesity and the dementia might arise from a common cause ...

BBC News - Alzheimer's risk linked to level of appetite hormone

High levels of a hormone that controls appetite appear to be linked to a reduced risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, US research suggests.

The 12-year-study of 200 volunteers found those with the lowest levels of leptin were more likely to develop the disease than those with the highest.

The JAMA study builds on work that links low leptin levels to the brain plaques found in Alzheimer's patients....

... Research on mice - conducted to establish why obese patients with diabetes often have long-term memory problems - found those who received doses of leptin were far more adept at negotiating their way through a maze.

The latest research, carried out at Boston University Medical Center, involved regular brain scans on 198 older volunteers over a 12-year period.

A quarter of those with the lowest levels of leptin went on to develop Alzheimer's disease, compared with 6% of those with the highest levels.

"If our findings our confirmed by others, leptin levels in older adults may serve as one of several possible biomarkers for healthy brain ageing and, more importantly, may open new pathways for possible preventive and therapeutic intervention."...

That's a huge relative risk - a 4 times higher incidence of dementia. Note that the mouse did better when given leptin (though mice seem to do better with just about anything). There's some interest in using leptin to prevent and treat Alzheimer's.

Note that elevated insulin levels have previously been associated with increased Alzheimer's risk.

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15 cigarettes yields 1 mutation - the new world of cancer genetics

I remember when "oncogenes" were on the cover of TIME. They were the key to understanding malignancy, and would change the ballgame. That was about 30 years ago.

Now that handful of oncogenes have become tens of thousands of mutations ...

BBC News - Scientists crack 'entire genetic code' of cancer

... scientists found the DNA code for a skin cancer called melanoma contained more than 30,000 errors almost entirely caused by too much sun exposure.

The lung cancer DNA code had more than 23,000 errors largely triggered by cigarette smoke exposure.

From this, the experts estimate a typical smoker acquires one new mutation for every 15 cigarettes they smoke.

Although many of these mutations will be harmless, some will trigger cancer...

We used to think a cancer involved a few mutations. Maybe two or three. Not 23,000.

It takes an astounding number of mutations to knock off the systems that prevent cancer -- while managing not to kill the cell.

Among other things we now have a good explanation of why cancer risk falls after someone stops smoking. It appears that the mutated cells are replaced by healthy cells. If they're lucky the bad ones die off before one goes rogue.

So it's never too late to stop - or to get out of the sun.

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The most marvelous world of the virus

A superb essay on the virus ...

A Gazillion Tiny Avatars - Olivia Judson - NYTimes.com

.... whether you count viruses as living or not, there’s an awfully large number of them: a single drop of seawater may contain more than 10 million viral particles. That’s more than 10 billion in a liter (two-and-a-bit pints) of ocean. Some people have estimated that, in the oceans, there’s more carbon stashed away in viruses than there would be in 75 million blue whales.

Moreover, viruses are extremely diverse; there are zillions of different kinds. Some, such as MS2, a virus that attacks bacteria like Escherichia coli, have as few as four genes. Others, such as the gargantuan Mimivirus, have more than 900. (Mimivirus mostly attacks amoebae, although it is also suspected of occasionally causing pneumonia in humans.) And each time we look in a new place, we find more and more viruses that are different from those we have known before.

Fortunately for us, most viruses don’t attack humans; they attack bacteria and other microbes, which they kill on a colossal scale. In the oceans alone, viruses are reckoned to kill about 100 million metric-tons’-worth of microbes every minute.

.... viruses play a fundamental role in regulating the food chain. This is because death-by-virus is different from death-by-predator. When a predator kills a microbe, it consumes it: the microbe’s cell is incorporated into the predator’s body. In contrast, when a virus kills a microbe, the microbe’s cell bursts open, or “lyses,” releasing new viruses and a lot of cellular debris back into the environment. This debris can then be consumed by other microbes. In other words, by lysing their victims, viruses are constantly making food available to other life forms...

So do bacteria have a fundamentally different relationship to viruses than multicellular organisms? Why are they so much more lethal to bacteria than to us? Did the way our DNA propagates facilitate a "truce" with viruses?
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Never a good feeling – an attack on my Google account

Someone just made 3 attempts to reset my Google Password. The reset notice I received includes this statement …

… If you've received this mail in error, it's likely that another user entered
your email address by mistake while trying to reset a password. If you didn't
initiate the request, you don't need to take any further action and can safely
disregard this email….

A mistake. Suurre it’s a mistake.

I have a robust Google password, but the risk here is that someone has access to a secondary account that receives my Google password reset requests. Those have robust passwords too, but there are always weaknesses.

Just to be on the safe side I’ve reviewed my Google accounts password recovery options and they look good.

Brrr. I hate passwords. I’d have bet good money in 1996 that we’d have robust biometric authentication by now. I’d have lost every penny. A good lesson about predicting the future.

Update 11/18/09: Amit Agarwal was hacked around the same time I was attacked. It's not clear how they hacked in.