I've turned the CAPTCHA feature back on. (This is the twisty "word" you have to type in to post a comment.)
It appears that some spam bot found me -- fourteen "comments" were posted between yesterday and today. Deleting these is a laborious one-at-a-time process, and it's just too much of a pain to keep doing it.
I'll turn the CAPTCHA feature back off in a few days. Meantime, sorry for the inconvenience.
From yet another story about yet another group of private contractors feeding at the trough blindly filled by yet another branch of the Bush Administration:
The State Department said it had improved monitoring of DynCorp, but in a letter to auditors department officials said that it would still take "three to five years" to reconcile fully the payments made to the company during the first two years of the training contract, beginning in February 2004.
Not to worry. We're only talking about a billion dollars that no one can account for. So nice when the grown-ups are in charge, isn't it?
In an article on profiling in today's NYT, the following assertion is made:
Passengers with frequent-flier memberships are more often suspected of having malicious travel plans than those who don't participate, according to Professor Schauer.
There is no explanation given as to why this might be.
Not that I'm willing to reveal my secret identity as a master crimestopper or anything, but this is opposite to what I'd think. Absent any other information, I'd be more suspicious of someone who didn't want the frequent flier miles, because I'd think such a person (a) didn't have plans for a life long enough to use them and (b) wanted to stay out of a database.
Your speculations?
(Updated below)
The second poll is up (over there in the sidebar).
Results from the last one: The majority thinks this blog's font is readable. No one voted for a change to sans-serif, so I guess all those young hot shot web designers don't know all demographics. I guess I'll stop fretting about this.
Coming in second was "Never mind the font. When's the content getting an upgrade?" I'll take it under advisement.
Thanks for voting!
Update
2007-10-22 13:55
Clare noted that multiple-choice answers are sometimes too limited, so please feel free to expand on the thoughts underlying your vote in the Comments here. (You should see a new link to this post in the sidebar under the poll that points you here, as well.)
Via Tom Tomorrow, we hear of yet another Gross Old Pedophile. The Green Bay Press-Gazette seems to be the primary source:
The chairman of the Republican Party in Brown County faces criminal charges for allegedly fondling a 16-year-old Ethan House runaway and providing the boy with beer and marijuana late last year.
Donald Fleischman, 37, of Allouez, was charged last month with two counts of child enticement, two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a child and a single charge of exposing himself to a child.
The story reports that the Wisconsin Republican Party's communications director says Fleischman has resigned, but that they couldn't confirm this with Fleischman's own people.
Granted, Fleischman has yet to be convicted. But I'm adding to the buzz on this story because I'm a shameless partisan hack who mainlines schadenfreude because there's a stench of cover-up about this whole thing.
From Mark Trodden, via Julianne, the best motivational statement I've heard in years:
Once you have tenure, it's all edible panties, firearms, and blow.
I was going to title this post "So You Think Your Prof's a Stiff?," but …
Phil Plait notes an update to the Sen. David Vitter story that I mentioned last month. Vitter had snuck an earmark into a Federal appropriations bill that would have given $100,000 to a Louisiana group that wants public schools to teach creationism as science. Now, thanks to reaction from the reality-based community, it ain't gonna happen.
Plait gives partial credit, and rightly so, I think, to the blogosphere for bringing Vitter's tactics to light. Whether or not my tiny contribution helped, I'm proud to have been part of the protest.
Phil's source for the news is this piece in the Times-Picayune, which is worth a look if you want to see some clumsy backpedaling by Vitter.
On a related note, in an earlier post, Phil links to a great editorial in the Calgary Herald, titled "Schools should put faith in science." Evidently, Canada is starting to suffer wingnut infestation as well.
From a NYT story about a Rudy Giuliani speech:
Mr. Giuliani spoke with a tone of humility …
Let's see how the sentence continues.
… saying at one point: "I come to you today as I would if I were your president …"
Yup.
Last year, Hollywood producer Joseph Medawar was convicted of conning investors out of $5.5 million for a bogus TV show on the Department of Homeland Security called D.H.S.: The Series. Medawar spent the money but never produced anything, which makes it the most realistic portrayal of DHS yet.
- -- Bruce Reed
It's been a while since I've indulged in fisking David Brooks. Lately, he's been showing signs of coming to his senses, at least on some issues. He occasionally borders on sounding sane these days, both in his column and on his point-counterpoint gig on PBS's News Hour. Sure, he still coughs up one of his patented sociology-as-seen-from-suburbia navel gazers from time to time, but I can forgive overlook these. Coming up with a column twice a week isn't as easy as blogging when the mood strikes.
But then there's this, from out of nowhere, a love letter to Mike Huckabee.
Let's pick it up in the middle of the lede.
But it’s quickly clear that Huckabee is as good a campaigner as anybody running for president this year.
And by "anybody," I mean "anybody in the GOP." And by "quickly," I mean "it only took me a year to come up with this."
I get that a not-completely-unhinged guy like Brooks has to be appalled at the front runners in the Republican Party. Giuliani wants to start World War Whatever. Hard as is to conceive of the possibility, Romney is both creepier and less trustworthy. And Thompson? (Long pause for laughter, or a collective under-the-breath "OMFG," depending on the audience.)
But really. The standard for bars has never been lower.
And before too long it becomes easy to come up with reasons why he might have a realistic shot at winning the Republican nomination:
First, Republican voters here and in Iowa are restless. That means that there will be sharp movements during the last 30 days toward whoever seems fresh and hot.
Shorter version: I have no idea how any of this is going to play out.
... Huckabee is the most normal person running for president ...
Bars, low, very. (op. cit.)
... he is part of the new generation of evangelical leaders.
Did he raise his hand when asked, "Who here doesn't believe in evolution?"
Yes he did. So, define "new."
... though you wouldn’t know it from the past few years, the white working class is the backbone of the G.O.P. Huckabee is most in tune with these voters.
Redacted: I don't actually have any statistics to back this up, but the assertions sound good, don't they? (And wait'll you hear 'em said live on TV!)
He tells audiences that the only soap his family could afford was the rough Lava soap, and that he was in college before he realized showering didn’t have to hurt.
Yup. And Alberto Gonzales sold crap from the trunk of his car. Or his father did. No matter. The key is, a heart-warming personal story guarantees exemplary public service.
He condemns "immoral" C.E.O. salaries ...
Which won't ever happen again if he moves out of the second tier and starts having to ask for real money.
... and on global trade he sounds like a Democrat: "There’s no free trade without fair trade."
He's the bold candidate for all people! He dares to makes vague statements when he's in single digits in the polls!
... he’s a former governor. He talks about issues in a down-to-earth way that other candidates can’t match. For example, he’s got a riff on childhood obesity that rivets the attention of his audiences.
One point to Mr. Brooks for not saying that I/you/he/we would like to have a beer with him. But other than that, the NYT Sunday magazine already puffed him on this suitable-for-Oprah-fans weight loss story. What else you got?
... he’s a collaborative conservative.
What brand does that make me think of ... ? Wait! I've got it! It's two, two, two brands in one! "Compassionate conservative" PLUS "Uniter, not a divider!" And both of those worked out really, really well!
He also criticizes the Bush administration for its arrogance.
He is so far ahead of the curve on this one, isn't he? After all, 24% of the country has yet to achieve this insight.
He is a solid conservative who is both temperamentally and substantively different from the conservatives who have led the country over the past few years.
He's got the old values, but he's all new? Maybe Brooks will clarify?
Too late! Word limit looming! Final graf just ahead!
He’s rising in the polls, especially in Iowa. His popularity with the press corps suggests he could catch a free media wave that would put him in the top tier.
And by "press corps," I mean "me." And by "free," I mean "I work cheap, don't I?" And by "suggests," I mean, "Don't hold me to any of this. Please."
Andrew notes that WingNutDaily has fired the first salvo in this year's culture war.
I respond thus:
From John Cole, via Andrew Sullivan, two questions we'd like asked of all Republicans running for president:
• Would you have sex with a man to stop a terrorist attack?
• If you had a time machine, would you travel back in time and abort Bin Laden?
On a related note, I saw this comment from The Exterminator over at John's place:
Wouldn't it be great if they discovered that the alleged gayness-gene and the so-called god-gene were mutually dependent …?
I have no idea where that title came from. There is precisely one Google result returned for this exact phrase. Maybe reincarnation is true?
I'm posting this mostly as a reminder to self, now that roundball is returning. And because I like the picture, of course.
I look at AGENT ZERO: THE BLOG FILE every now and again. It's a bit heavy on the self-promotion (News flash: pro atheletes have big egos! And endorsement contracts!) but a lot of it feels tongue-in-cheek. There's gossip, trash talking, and laughs to be had, and occasionally, some real diary moments (e.g., "The Gary Payton Story").
If you're into inside baseball basketball, check it out. Although it's hosted on the official NBA site, it's not excessively sanitized.
(Updated: title typo)
Via John, the Evolutionary Middleman, I came across a video of Daniel Dennet giving a talk titled "Darwin's Dangerous Idea."
Since I swiped John's link, I'll swipe part of his pitch, too:
Even those who are steeped in evolutionary theory will be enlightened by some of his unique insights. Fair warning -- it is over an hour long and by the end you will wish it was two!
I completely agree. It started out seeming a little basic to me, but I know Dennet -- he's a philosopher by profession, so he likes to lay a firm foundation for his ideas. He's a fine speaker, with a gentle voice and a good sense of humor, so I wasn't suffering, and, within a few minutes, I was hooked.
This isn't just a straight lecture on natural selection. Part of Dennet's purpose is to analyze why some people find Darwin's ideas so hard to accept, and to rebut their arguments against evolution. Then he takes another step, going beyond purely anatomical characteristics, and examines how the growth of human ideas, beliefs, and languages can be explained by the same evolutionary mechanisms.
Highly recommended. Watch it here.
As you might recall, I had a monitor die on me recently. It wasn't a catastrophe; I had an almost identical one that I had bought used via Craigslist last year (a bargain, of many sorts), so it was only a matter of getting another carton out of storage. Unfortunately, starting a couple of days ago, I'm seeing flakiness in this one, too. I'd be paranoid about an electrical problem if it weren't for the fact that the computer itself, along with several peripherals, draws from the same outlet, and they've all been fine. My new hypothesis: The Gateway EV-700 engineers had designed obsolescence nailed more precisely than I had previously thought possible.
Then, I get two emails from regular correspondents, one day apart. In the spirit of sharing the pain, let's hear next from TC.
I've been down with the computer for a day. The off/on button on my monitor bit the dust and froze in the off position, so I couldn't get on to do anything. I called around this morning to try and get it repaired and nobody wants to work on monitors especially a small job like putting in a new switch where they won't make 300 dollars. Strictly PC in Morro Bay told me that it's $ 75 to check it out and then there would be the charge on top of that for the repair and really he didn't want to fool with it and suggested that I buy a new one. Star computer in Morro Bay told me that the parts are impossible to get and recommended that I buy a new one. Too bad Midstate Electronics isn't around to do small repairs.
So I went to Best Buy and bought a new floor sample with a $ 30 discount. The sales guy said I'll get you some cords for it because the floor samples use some that are wired into the wall. He went in back and came back with the cords. When I got home I tried to set it up and the monitor cable won't work because the plug is on the reverse way for the monitor so you can't plug it into the monitor. The cord comes out of the side of the plug instead of the back and the cord runs into the monitor so you can't plug it in. So I have to drive 60 miles to SLO again tomorrow to try and get the correct cord. 120 miles round trip each time today and tomorrow, so it's going to cost me 6 gallons of gas to get it going. 6 gallons times $ 3.17, and I break even on the savings if you don't count the hassle and time for anything. My jinx with computers continues. God doesn't want me to have one or at least to enjoy it. Sheesh.
I love the "explanations" we all reach for when we're beset by electronic gremlins. TC is as much of an atheist as I am.
KK isn't, but here, his mind goes to an earlier god, who, evidently, is a food nazi.
This morning when I got up I blew out the USB ports (with pressurized air) in the front of the PC - transferred the keyboard from the laptop (see below) to the PC there. It worked. I did the same in the back -didn't work. Back to the front -didn't work …
Then I remembered your "leave it in." Five or ten minutes later, it worked. Into the back - didn't work. Five or ten minutes later (I should have timed it) it worked.
Thank goodness, 'cause I've just returned from Mike the Computer Guy's shop. My lap top began to act funny when I was at the condo with Dan and Carol a few weeks ago. Freezing, restarting by itself -wouldn't shut off sometimes, etc. Finally I took out the battery and put it back in. It coughed a few times and then seemed to work just fine for the two or three days left.
But after seeming fine for the first few days with Jill and Keith, it started the same old thing. Battery out and in then work for a few hours, then have to force off. On AC or battery - usually I got it rolling, but brought it home to have it checked out. It worked last night, and some this morning, but I guess it was mad at my lunch selection and refused to do more than hum when I "started" it.
So, electronically: My Nikon is back with Nikon for the third time.
I have three watches. One, my old Seiko, at random times loses five or six minutes. I bought (On Overstock.com) a Pulsar. It now does the same thing. Dan gave me a watch last month, one of those four buttons, each of which, when pressed in exactly the right order, sets the time and alarms, date changes, etc. Tunes the TV. Too complicated to use except as watch. It too began to lose five minute chunks. None of them do so when they are not on my wrist.
My PC keyboard has cowed me.
My laptop is in the shop.
I'm afraid to buy an electric toothbrush.
The unwashed teeming masses that infest teh Internets scored another victory last week. No, no, I'm not talking about the poll results. I'm just loving the fit of pique they provoked in another clueless suit.
Tim Grieve has the details.
Have you caught wind of the outrage being expressed in certain quarters, about Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize?
I'll admit that there might be a little something to the claim that the Nobel Committee is motivated by politics. My sense is that they tend to recognize people who have done something about a problem that they think merits more attention. But the level of vitriol being expressed everywhere from the WSJ opinion pages to the dank cellars of the rightosphere is truly astounding. Why should this be?
Paul Krugman has as good a list of explanations as any.
One thing PK doesn't mention which has crossed my mind: the right fears Al Gore stepping into the race for president. I no longer think that Gore is going to do this, absent a meltdown by the leading Democratic contenders. But it would be pretty funny if the Republicans' efforts to smear Hillary over the past year were suddenly for naught.
Tangential note: As I look at PK's column at this moment, the first, second, third, and fifth-most emailed articles from the NYT come from people who used to be locked behind the TimesSelect wall. I hope that's working out for the company; you know the columnists themselves have to love it.
Blogger/Blogspot offered me a new widget and I accepted. If you look over on the sidebar, you should see a poll. Vote early and often!
The mechanics of this new gee-whiz-imo seem a little clunky -- it appears to slow page loading a tiny bit, and I've noticed some minor weirdnesses in how it behaves after playing around with it for a short while. But, it could be fun. More importantly, it could be a small step up the Coolness Chart, something that I climb in the forlorn hopes of someday catching Mr. Sandwich.
Please let me know if you experience any problems.
If you like the Daily Show, you might also like this: "TPMtv: John McCain vs. The Video Tape."
It's not as immediately funny as the work of Jon Stewart et al, but it's as devastating as anything they've ever produced. It never fails to amaze me how often Republicans will just flat out lie contradict themselves, when you'd think they'd be aware that yesterday's assertions were also recorded.
Don't worry about the monkey at the start of the video. It's just part of the set-up.
Your moment of Romney, ably shredded by Steve Benen and friends.
(Willard?)
Couple other good ones from today's TPM: a LOL @ Condi and some cackling at the MSM.
Bob Herbert knocked one out of the park with today's op-ed. He's thinking about Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize and the connection to the presidency, starting with the upcoming election.
The first thing media types wanted to know was whether this would prompt Mr. Gore to elbow his way into the presidential campaign. That's like asking someone who's recovered from a heart attack if he plans to resume smoking.
Then a look back:
Mr. Bush came to mind because, for all of the obvious vulnerabilities he exhibited in 2000, it was not him but Mr. Gore who was mocked unmercifully by the national media. And the mockery had nothing to do with the former vice president’s positions on important policy issues. He was mocked because of his personality.
In the race for the highest office in the land, we showed the collective maturity of 3-year-olds.
… and back to the present, after quoting a nuanced thought from Gore:
That's just the kind of thoughtful comment that can’t get a real hearing in our sound-bite politics. The result is that reality, untidy and complex, is almost always trumped by well-crafted phoniness.
Which brings us to Mr. Giuliani.
Inside baseball (metaphor continued): Ten points to the first person who can pick up the subtle dig that Herbert delivers to Maureen Dowd (hint: not listed in any of the above excerpts).
And if you're really into inside baseball, Gail Collins has a great quiz for you, right on the same page. (Thanks for vanishing, TimesSelect!)
More Gore Lore, from Jon Chait (h/t: TPM).
There's an interesting article in the NYT that reports on a debate between mid-level officers over who is more at fault for Iraq: Rumsfeld or the generals?
I've been thinking about this one since the war started. Leaving aside the obvious bone of contention that the war should never have started in the first place (and hence, the blame goes to Bush and Cheney), and just stipulating that the war "had to" be fought, the question is, should the uniformed officers have spoken up more forcefully against the SecDef's war plan?
My immediate response was to say, "Of course!" But almost as quickly, you have to ask, how is it a good thing for soldiers to disobey the civilian oversight that is the hallmark of our society? One need only look at Turkey for an example of what happens when the military feels permitted to overrule the will of the people.
No resolutions, either in the article or from me. Just something interesting to contemplate and debate.
On the heels of the NYT's state lottery story that I commented on recently comes another. According to today's paper, several states are now considering "leasing" their lotteries to private companies.
There are some immediate concerns that leap to mind. The first thing that comes to mind, for me: What about the chunk of the state's take on the lottery that is earmarked for education spending? As I noted in the earlier post, it's a small percentage of education spending, but still, it is billions of dollars. If the lottery income gets replaced by a one-step-removed stream of payments from some Wall Street firm who bought the rights to run the lottery, will it be easier for the funds to be redirected, away from education?
There's also the obvious worry that comes about when the government hands over control of something where big money is involved. What happens when, say, the business running the lottery says "We're not making as much money as we were, so we want to cut our yearly payments to the state." What happens when accusations are raised that the business is running a crooked table; e.g., paying out less to winners than might be merited by sales? So, obviously, you're going to need a regulatory agency of some sort. This means another layer of bureaucracy, not to mention a few key government employees susceptible to kid-glove treatment by lobbyists.
It's worth considering, as well, how much more aggressively a private company would market the lottery. As I noted in my earlier post, I'm on the fence about the government protecting adults from their own vices, but it does seem likely that poor people are going to be exposed to more commercials pushing the lottery. Who will be responsible for the truth in that advertising?
A final thought: if a private company can run the lottery, then why wouldn't any other gambling operation also be legal? I'm sure that the argument in response here will be that the private company doesn't own the lottery, but is merely running it, but this seems to be only a semantic difference. After all, it's not like the private company is being paid to perform a service. It's paying for control of the game and for the right to maximize its own profits. Sort of like leasing federal lands for the right to extract oil.
Yeah. Nothing to worry about here.
Rudy Giuliani has just announced a new raft of foreign policy advisors. And I guess the premise of the campaign is now that the Bush administration wasn't sufficiently riddled by neoconservative whackjobs.
(Updated: just wordsmithing)
There's a long piece in last month's Rolling Stone on the U.S. missile defense program. It's written by Jack Hitt, and I highly recommended it.
If you are on the fence about this program, the piece should prove instructive. If you're against it, you might like the details. If you're for it, I challenge you to read the entire article, and then say that again.
Pardon the long post. I just couldn't resist any of these excerpts.
Perhaps you'd like some background music to get you into the appropriately surreal mood while reading:
Let's start with a taste of the boondogglery:
Then, after Osama bin Laden blew a hole in the Pentagon in 2001, Donald Rumsfeld plowed even more money into missile defense -- even though the system was designed to counter large, trackable strikes by an enemy nation rather than small, asymmetrical threats from isolated terrorists. Indeed, the shield's hasty progress from drawing board to hardware resembles nothing so much as the Iraq War: engineered by neoconservatives, founded on blurry threat assessments, approved over the complaints of enfeebled Democrats, its mission periodically adjusted to accommodate the prevailing political winds.
Today, thanks to Rumsfeld's devotion to the shield, missile defense is the single most-expensive weapons system in the American arsenal. The Bush administration has nearly tripled Clinton's average missile defense budget, to $11-billion a year -- a sum almost four times larger than the U.S. government's total spending on energy research. By 2013, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, missile defense will be costing us nearly $19-billion a year -- roughly half the current budget for the entire Department of Homeland Security.
Missile defense exists in a world of its own. It has a special budget process that exempts it from most congressional oversight, and it is pioneering a new acquisitions process that redefines the very nature of what constitutes a "threat." The system has a separate definition to denote what it means for a weapon to "work" and even what it means to "know" something to be true. The shield operates beyond the world of empirical testing, and outside the four service branches of the U.S. military.
Oh, and by the way? All this money, and even a brochure put out by the program itself admits there's no chance it would work against an all-out missile attack launched, say, by Russia or China. Currently, it's being pitched as defense against North Korea and Iran. Take it away, Jack.
But the State Department recently reached a diplomatic agreement with North Korea that would eliminate its nuclear weapons program, and Iran is years away from developing nuclear capabilities. So whose warheads will the shield protect us from? In August, during a lecture at a missile defense convention, one proponent of the system suggested the possibility of a new ballistic threat from a country that currently possesses no missiles: Venezuela.
Venezuela?
Does it get more inane? You bet. See page 6 for how the program might be expanded to defend against aliens from outer space. See page 7 for the new style of evaluating whether this will ever work: faith-based testing. I am not making this up.
Okay, so "faith-based" is Hitt's term. Rumsfeld's term of art was "capability-based." But they both would agree, unlike the testing done for every other piece of procured military hardware, it's specifically not "knowledge-based." Who knew Rummy hated "Old Pentagon" as much as "Old Europe?"
More numbers: Hitt quotes Joseph Cirincione, a national security expert at the Center for American Progress:
The Manhattan Project cost about $22-billion in today's dollars -- and we got a bomb. So far, missile defense has cost more than $100-billion …
And there's this:
In 2003, the American Physical Society convened a study group of top scientists from MIT, Cornell, Stanford, Sandia Labs and Los Alamos … Their conclusion: "With the technology we judge could become available within the next fifteen years, defending against a single ICBM would require a thousand or more interceptors." Currently, we have twenty-two.
How about a little more faith-based thinking? Glad you asked. One key component of the system is called the SBX. This is a radar unit that is supposed to detect the incoming missile (note singular). It's mounted on a ship, about which an SBX engineer says:
It is built to commercial standards, for better or worse, and those are just different from what the Navy does. They intend their hulls to get shot at, and we are really hoping that doesn't happen to us.
My bad. It's not faith-based. It's hope-based.
As to how this program got so out of control, tell me if any of this sounds familiar:
To understand what happened, it is necessary to dial back the clock to 1994, when Newt Gingrich and the new Republican majority took over Congress. To make the case that America faced new threats in the post-Cold War world -- and thus needed to maintain a big defense budget -- Congress ordered America's intelligence agencies to assess the new dangers. The resulting National Intelligence Estimate was issued in 1995.
The problem began when the NIE arrived. The report concluded that there weren't any immediate threats: "The Intelligence Community judges that in the next fifteen years, no country other than the major declared nuclear powers will develop a ballistic missile that could threaten the contiguous forty-eight states or Canada."
Republicans immediately attacked this report. "Extraordinarily sloppy work," declared Sen. John Kyl of Arizona. Missile boosters mandated that a congressional commission be assembled to study this obviously flawed assessment. To ensure they got the answer they wanted, they stacked the commission with Republicans and put Robert Gates, a former CIA director, in charge. Yet Gates and his team concluded that not only was the NIE correct but that things were even less dire than stated.
Enraged, Congress mandated yet another commission. This time, the chairman was none other than Donald Rumsfeld. Working alongside Paul Wolfowitz, the future secretary of defense finally came up with the result that Republicans were looking for. The Rumsfeld Commission established a new standard of threat, asserting that any country with Scud technology would be able to easily convert to ICBM capability. Most important, they determined that the earlier intelligence efforts were flawed because they looked only at "likely" threats instead of "possible" threats -- such as North Korea and Iran and Venezuela.
(h/t: Lawyers, Guns and Money)
(Updated below)
Congratulations to Al Gore and the IPCC for winning the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
The Rude Pundit has a nice essay reflecting on Gore's achievements since 2000, especially as contrasted with George Bush's.
Update
2007-10-13 00:21
D'oh!
You know, with Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize for his environmental activism, it really makes the Nader voters look prescient, doesn't it?
(Updated: just wordsmithing)
Windows
Probably you have Automatic Updates turned on for Windows. If not, stop what you're doing and go visit http://update.microsoft.com/. There are some nasty holes to be patched, particularly in IE.
Java
Sun announced a security upgrade for the Java Runtime Environment, which will take you to Version 6 Update 3. You probably have some version of the JRE installed -- this is what enables you and your browser to run Java apps on web sites that use them. I didn't get a notification about installing the upgrade, as has happened in the past, so you might not, either. Fortunately, we have Brian Krebs.
To check your version of Java, visit http://java.com/en/ and click on the "Do I have Java?" link. This link will examine your version and offer any needed upgrades. I had Version 6 Update 2 installed. The upgrade was about 7 MB and took about three minutes. It works through the browser, so you'll have to restart your browser after the installation is complete for the upgrade to take effect.
QuickTime
Krebs also recently noted another QuickTime security update. (I imagine this applies to Mac users as well, but I don't have my Mac hooked up right now to verify this.) On the Windows platform, the update is only available for Windows XP and Vista, so I can't say anything about it -- Apple insists my Win2K machine's version is up to date, even though the version number for QuickTime is well behind what's current.
NB: If you think you don't have QuickTime installed, but you do have iTunes installed, then you probably have QuickTime lurking on your machine. This applies to both Macs and PCs.
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