Penny Hero (dot) Net

Paul, of CANADA, sent me flowers yesterday for Christmas!

No one has EVER sent me flowers before. He apparently tried to get them delivered to me at work, but our Eugene office moved in July and the interweb hasn’t updated itself or overwritten itself enough to make that clear. So… he IMed me at work to get my mailing address and they were waiting for me at my house when I got home.

Crazy crazy awesome stuff.

Anyway, Paul’s awesome. I <3 him. :)

Thanks to Marineam, “full text” in wordpress rss feeds now work for me.

So, my roommate and I recently switched to Comcast, and he was issued an email address @comcast consisting of the first letter of his first name and his entire last name.

He logged in today and discovered the inbox already contains email (and spam) from the previous owner (whose name was Carol. His name is Chris). Some of this email is from places she apparently shopped at, and if Chris was a Bad Person, it wouldn’t take much effort to go to those shopping websites, claim that “she” lost “her” password, and BINGO! He can go on a shopping spree on her dime. (Fortunately for her, he’s not a Bad Person, and would never do this.)

Does this seem wrong to you?

Someone needs to inform Comcast, and/or people who use Comcast, of the potential security holes inherent in re-issuing their customers’ email addresses.

So…

Dear Comcast:

Please stop re-issuing your customers’ usernames. It results in irresponsible mis-use of personal information. You are effectively giving someone’s old email address (and all correspondences going to it) to someone else, which could result in the misuse of their credit cards or other personal information.

Next:

Dear Comcast subscribers:

Don’t ever use your Comcast-issued email address. Ever. It is not secure, and any correspondences to or from this email address can be read by whoever Comcast decides to give that email address to next.

Luckily, I’ve never used my Comcast email address back when I subscribed.

So, come on kids. Who’s at fault here? and what steps do you think should be made to protect people from fraud in this kind of situation?

My thoughts:

It’s very easy to blame the subscriber for being ignorant of email’s insecurity. However, I don’t think this is fair because the average internet and computer user has great Big Misconceptions about How Stuff Works (it’s a series of tubes?), and there simply isn’t an effective way to educate them all.

So until everyone magically learns how to be more responsible, I think big, well-funded corporations like Comcast should take it upon themselves to make sure their customers are informed of the risks associated with using their services.

(Dude, someone digg this or something. Jeebus. People need to know about this.)

Part I

Did you know that the Federal Govt. spends about $91,687,500.00 (that’s nearly $92 million, for those of us who don’t often see numbers bigger than 4 or 5 digits) a year on the salaries of 551 people?

Did you know that our president makes $400,000 a year? (sources: 1, 2) The average US salary in 2002 was $36,764 (ask.yahoo).

Let’s compare that to the Presidents and Prime Ministers of other nations (in US dollars):

• Mexico: was $245,000 (new President’s salary not announced yet). Mexican minimum wage salary (couldn’t find annual average salaries): about $8/day, or $3,000 a year.
• Canada: PM was $123,500 (USD) in 2004. Avg. Canadian salary: $40,000 (USD) (source).
• I’m trying to get Japan’s numbers too.

Anyway, my numbers are not going to be exact because I’m taking info from places that seem reputable after really quick google searches. I’m not trying to be totally scientifically accurate. I just want to show the trends.

This means that our President officially makes 11 times what the average American makes. The Mexican president made much more: 81 times more than their minimum wage earners during a good year, granted my data is probably pretty off. The Canadian Prime Minister makes only 3 times that of the average Canadian.

The moral of this story? I don’t know. Maybe “I’m glad we’re not Mexico and I wish we were more like Canada” ?

Part II

Did you know that US Govt. salaries increase every year (in 2001, it increased by about $4,000) unless they vote to block it?

I didn’t either (2001 about.com article explaining how it happens).

Now, on the one hand, I understand that US congresspersons must maintain homes in more than one location, and they have all kinds of work-related and personal stresses that come with a job that literally doesn’t end at 5pm each day like our jobs do. However, i can’t help but wonder if it would be cheaper if the government paid for Washington-area homes for our representatives and gave a lower salary.

Lastly, did you know that Hillary Clinton proposed a bill to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to tie the national minimum wage increase to the percentage increase that congress receives every year? It’s called the Standing with Minimum Wage Earners Act of 2006 and I kind of like it. While it doesn’t address the fact that congress makes a ton of money each year, it would guarantee that next time congress fails to stop itself from getting a pay increase this year, we’ll get a minimum wage increase by the same percentage.

The pessimistic side of me wouldn’t be surprised if congress finally starts voting to stop their (and our) wage increase if this bill passes.

Anyway, this is just stuff I ran across and started to investigate for kicks. Really. I enjoy this kind of stuff.

So… I used to live with Cody Sheehy, who runs Autonomy Productions and makes amazing documentaries and other creative video things (on top of being in grad school studying rangeland sciences! heh.)

He made a documentary about my/our other roomie Marci a while back and her nuclear reactor design that could take people to Mars. (linky to the teaser page)

Anyway, he recently got contracted to do some video clips to be shown at the 2006 2nd Space Exploration Conference and he just finished them.

Watch them here.

They’re only a few minutes long each and they’re really powerful and insightful. It’s a dude (named Chad) in a space suit interviewing real people on campus and in Portland (I assume) about their knowledge, interests, and perspective on NASA, space exploration, and where we’re at.

So, I’m a little sensitive of course, so duh I started crying a bit at the end, but really the tone and style of the project is very light-hearted and fun, but the impact of the whole film is amazingly powerful, especially if you were ever inspired by the idea of exploring space as a kid (or now).

WATCH THEM. I have to admit that I only knew a few of the questions they asked people, so it made me realize a lot about my own knowledge of where we are and what my priorities are too.