short takes

[cellio]

I hope the owner of Penzoil is making good money from the venture. For a cost of $30 and 15 minutes of my time (10 for them, 5 to drive there), I can have other people change my oil, replenish all other fluids under the hood, check and adjust the tire pressure, vacuum the carpets, wash the windows, and take a quick look for incipient problems with belts and stuff. I could do all of that myself, but certainly not in 15 minutes. And the oil itself is, what, $10 of that $30? So for about $3.50 a month, I can have someone else take care of most of the nit-picky aspects of owning a car. What's not to like?

If I understand correctly, credit-card companies instituted that extra 3-digit number on your card to cut down on fraud from stolen card numbers. But more and more online transactions now require that I enter that number. Have we just moved from a semi-secure 16-digit number to a semi-secure 19-digit one? How does this help?

A few links:

Does the first amendment ban public schools? (David Friedman). While intelligent design is a religious teaching that is rightly barred from public schools, he argues, so is evolution -- or history.

Everyone needs Panexa. Ask your doctor for it. Well, maybe you should read the ad first. (Thanks to jducoeur.)

cvirtue asks: how many partridges in pear trees by the end of the song?. I seem to be in a pedantic minority.

American Yule, by siderea is a cogent essay on what this season is and what it could become.

Put the Saturn back in Saturnalia, from goldsquare.

Comments

[sethg]

I suspect that the credit-card companies will only let you use the last three digits for validation if you swear an oath signed in blood that you will throw away the numbers as soon as the validation is complete.

I know a guy who works at ITA (the company that wrote the software behind Orbitz), and now that they're looking into handling airline reservations, they have to learn to deal with credit-card validation. MasterCard and Visa have a whole bunch of requirements for how to handle their card numbers, and they audit to make sure you're fulfilling their requirements (although, as we all know, that doesn't always help.) I suggested that they could improve their card security by hashing the numbers and never storing them as plaintext on disk, like they do for /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow in Unix. Nope, he said, can't do it that way, because then it can't be audited.

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

If I understand correctly, credit-card companies instituted that extra 3-digit number on your card to cut down on fraud from stolen card numbers. But more and more online transactions now require that I enter that number. Have we just moved from a semi-secure 16-digit number to a semi-secure 19-digit one? How does this help?

Because the extra three digits don't print on a receipt, a credit card imprint, or the actual bill. So if someone gets ahold of that information, they can't use the card. Better. Not perfect.

[cellio]

Ah, ok -- so internet snooping works the same as always, but trash diving is less useful now. I suspect there's more of the latter than the former, still, so that makes sense.

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

But let's look at the type of internet snooping. Most of the sites use secured protocols, so unless you are dealing with a "man in the middle" attack, the transmission should be safe. There could be a keystroke logger on the end user's machine, but unless you go to hardware tokens (which even then could be captured), you wouldn't be able to bypass it. So, your real risk is on the vendor's end. They are likely only storing the main CC number; the additional 3 digits are used for the immediate verification check (just like your billing zip code) but not stored. This would help protect the database if stolen.

There is risk everywhere; the trick is balancing it.

[cellio]

Ah, ok. I was assuming database storage.

There is risk everywhere; the trick is balancing it.

Yes. I'm not particularly worried about either kind of theft. I follow reasonable practices to protect the information, but I also mitigate against possible damage (examining bills closely, storing info needed for cancelling all in one place, etc). I've never had a card stolen/misused. Dani did once, and it was clearly a physical security issue: he'd never used the card online and a month after visiting a Japanese restaurant he had thousands of dollars of charges in Japan. Apparently some employee who thought he wasn't making enough had sent some card numbers home to his family, or something. The credit-card company was very good about it.

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

See, and there was something where those three digits might have helped, combined with the zip code check. The employee (at a restaurant, which doesn't use those numbers) would have just sent the normal 12 numbers back. He wouldn't have those 3 numbers, nor your billing zip. Thus, internet orders wouldn't work, and the CC company heuristics might catch normal paper transactions sudently showing up from non-normal places (yes, they have heuristics for everything, which is why you get the occasional phone call of "Did you charge this?"

[cellio]

Yeah, we've gotten those phone calls occasionally. They usually say "sorry to bother you", to which I always respond "I want you to check if my buying habits drastically and suddenly change".

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

thanks for the Panexa link. That was the one bright spot in my day.

[cellio]

Glad to help. Sorry it was the high point, though. :-(

[ellipticcurve.livejournal.com]

Panexa is a quack drug peddled by snake-oil salesmen to an America so desperate for panaceas and quick fixes that it will cheerfully ingest expensive--possibly dangerous--amalgams of dubious provenance (and merit). Progenitorivox, by contrast, is a critically-acclaimed medication that you should probably be taking. Ask your doctor about it today!

[siderea]

You know, I'm generally the first to get in line when someone is dishing on the legality/ethicality/morality of state-run schools, but, man, even I thought the logic of that first amendment essay was weak.

[jducoeur]

Yeah, that was my reaction as well. David's one of the smartest people I know, but he does carry his arguments to extremes sometimes...

[siderea]

Oh, extremity is not the problem, I don't think. Having state-sponsored schools implies, per force, state-sponsored versions of the truth and that creeps me out for exactly the same reason state-run newspapers creep out most rational, civil-liberties-loving people. Saying the issue is that the state might contradict someone's religion misses the mark. The state is welcome to contradict people's religions incidentally. It's religions' job to keep out of the way of the state, not the other way around, because the alternative requires allowing the state to interpret your religion for you and that's not a path towards free worship.

No, this whole ID kerfluffle it seems to me to demonstrate a very different weakness of the system: schools are a medium, just like tv and radio and movies and newspapers and the internet and standing up on a soap box in the town square. Having a de facto state monopoly of a medium is a threat to intellectual freedom. Not just in the sense that it deprives the population of some esoteric, feel-good right to think what they please, but rather it give the state a bully pulpit from which to propagandize the nation with whatever the Powers That Be feel serves them best.

Historically, that pulpit has been used to:

1) Attempt to eradicate the scourge of Catholicism.

2) Attempt to extinguish native cultures and languages.

3) Promulgate racism.

4) Propagandize the nation, at various times, against the scourges of socialism, communism, anarchism, and atheism. And no doubt other isms.

5) Promulgate a revisionist history of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Right now, we rely on the state to teach the citizenry how to be citizens. That strikes me as such an incredibly bad idea, such an obvious conflict of interest, that I have trouble understanding how anyone could not see it thusly. Especially if you grant that the phenomenon of aristocracy is perennial, and power blocs will attempt to colonize any organ of influence they can manage, democracy or no, for the benefit of them and their dynasties.

Indeed, I am of the opinion that that's how we got into this mess in the first place, by mandatory state-run schools.

I love the idea of a free education for everyone. I love the liberal idea of education as a universal route to self-improvement. But I don't think requiring the citizenry to attend upon the state's tutelage for 13 years is a great way to preserve the liberties of an ostensibly free people.

Partridges

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Travelin' along there's a song that we're singing, c'mon get happy!

Ahem.

The whole issue is pedantic, so while you're in the minority, you're still with the rest of us pedants. ;)

[cafemusique.livejournal.com]

Obviously that poll needs to see more pedants with an understanding of grammar.

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

Friedman made one major (though probably typographic) error, referring to the Fifteenth rather than the Fourteenth Amendment in discussing the incorporation doctrine. Of course, what I'd really like is separation of school and state. Were all schools private, as they should be, we wouldn't have any of these silly problems about what is and is not acceptable in the curriculum.

I'm in the minority, too, about the partridges. I remember a math problem in my tender youth that asked for the total number of presents given in that song. :-)

[cellio]

Separation of school and state would solve a lot of problems, yes.

[kmanista.livejournal.com]

One explanation, apparently false, has the partridge standing for Christ, etc - http://www.appleseeds.org/12_days-christmas.htm, but http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/12days.asp for the debunking. So that would mean only one partridge, or else we'd have twelve Jesuses, and that's a lot of Jesus.

[cellio]

I hadn't heard that explanation before; thanks for pointing it out (and its debunking).

and that's a lot of Jesus

This is going to sound flip, but it's not meant to be. Isn't there an infinite supply of Jesus? If there's not, the sacrament of communion won't work forever (for Catholics, who believe it's actually Jesus and not just a representation), and that seems bad. We know that Jesus is available to everyone spiritually, but it appears he is also available to everyone physically. If that's the case, then it wouldn't really matter if there were "a whole lot of Jesus" in the song; in fact, that might be an argument in favor of my interpretation, as it keeps Jesus/partridge as the focus -- every day you get new stuff too, but it's always delivered along with that core value.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

That particular mystery is definitely mysterious, but I don't think that even the most mystical/studied RCs think that the bread is *physically* Jesus. I think they believe that it's *spiritually* Jesus, and physically bread. And the Protestants think that it's a spiritual act or representational as you say, but doesn't transmit Jesus-spirit as, er, one of the ingredients.

Whether or not the song is historically about Jesus, I think it's OK for a modern Christian to find meaning in it, as long as they're aware it's not provable/historic. People find such reassurances in any number of non-related-to-religion phenomena all the time.

[jducoeur]

I don't think that even the most mystical/studied RCs think that the bread is *physically* Jesus.

Are you sure about that? I'm no expert on the subject, but my impression had been that, at least in period, it was an important element of dogma that it was literally his body and blood. I'd always gethered that it was heretical to say otherwise...

[kmanista.livejournal.com]

Yes, I also thought that for Catholics, transubstantiation means just that - the bread and wine are literally converted into the body and blood.

The article I linked below says : "This is my body", the bread became, through the utterance of these words, the Body of Christ; consequently, on the completion of the sentence the substance of bread was no longer present, but the Body of Christ under the outward appearance of bread."

And I remember a priest once explaining it to me as "Christ said this IS my body - not this represents my body. The bread becomes the body of Christ."

[dmnsqrl.livejournal.com]

Yep. Physically. Actually. There's a bit in the teachings about how God lets it seem like bread and wine still not to gross us out but that it's still become Christ's actual Body and Blood.

In fact, although I went to church with my Protestant mum for years in addition to Masses with dad, I didn't catch on that non-Catholics don't believe the same thing until someone in high school pointed it out (in backwards fashion... mentioning to someone else in my hearing what 'Catholics' believe and I said 'Christians' and was corrected) and I asked her to confirm when I got home. (I'd been in parochial school until 5th grade and then CCD for years after that so I was pretty clear on the Catholic perspective)

Realizing that there was such a difference in perspective did clarify a few things for me about policies regarding non-Catholics participating in Eucharist and Catholics participating in communion at non-Catholic services.

[kmanista.livejournal.com]

Well, I was definitely being flip, and I don't think you sounded flip at all.

The Catechism seems to indicate that Christ in TOTALITY is present in each bit of bread and wine after the moment of consecration. So it would be not so much an infinite supply of Christ as an infinite supply of Christs, plural. For some very detailed and technical explanation, there is always the Catholic Encyclopedia : http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05573a.htm

I had also meant to say, about the schools issue, that when I was teaching world history I always had to preface the day we talked about the beginnings of Christianity with a little speech about how "there are things we can believe as people, and there are things we can know as historians, and those aren't always going to be the same." Otherwise (and sometimes anyway) I had some Southern Baptist students whose heads just about exploded at the idea that the Gospels weren't eyewitness sources.

[sue-n-julia.livejournal.com]

Please ask Pennzoil (or anyone else who checks your fluids) to double check that they replaced all caps. Juliana and I lost our brakes on I-79 going into Washington, PA, because someone forgot. As a result, we lost all our brake fluid. The service tech found the cap next to the master brake cylinder.

The miracle: Juliana had driven to TN and back without the cap on!

S