In a move to try and make myself an additional buck or two, I’ve signed up with Google Adsense and integrated ads into various sections of my site. Hopefully their not too obtrusive. But if you find they are, leave a comment on a recent post and I’ll see what I can do.

Today, renowned search engine Google turns 7 years old! Happy Birthday !

Google opened its doors in September 1998, and we’ve been pursuing one mission ever since: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. For our seventh birthday, we are giving you a newly expanded web search index that is 1,000 times the size of our original index.

According to an article on the Washington Post, federal angencies are pushing to obtain our DNA for storage in a central database. The bill has already passed through the Senate, but still needs to be passed on the floor, and also has approval from the White House.

Luckily for most, the government will only sample one’s DNA when they’re convicted of a crime.

Privacy advocates across the political spectrum say the proposal is another step in expanding government intrusion.

“DNA is not like fingerprinting,” said Jesselyn McCurdy, a legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “It contains genetic information and information about diseases.” She added that the ACLU questions whether it is constitutional to put data from those who have not been convicted into a database of convicted criminals.

Privacy advocates are especially concerned about possible abuses such as profiling based on genetic characteristics.

Originally, the federal DNA database was limited to convicted sex offenders, who often repeat their crimes. Then it was expanded to include violent felons. Several states, including Virginia, also collect DNA from those arrested for violent crimes.

“It’s a classic mission-creep situation,” said Jim Harper, a privacy specialist with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “These guys are playing a great law and order game . . . and in the process creating a database that could be converted into something quite dangerous.”

Scary as it is, this will most likely pass through into law, as most other recent privacy intrusion bills.
I also see a large possibility for misuse here, in every corner of the government.

Thanks for a nice little writeup on the Ubuntu Blog over at Wordpress.com.

So you want to know what the temparature of your hard disk drive is?

Simple:
Install the package hddtemp from the Universe repository by doing a:
$sudo apt-get install hddtemp

Later, whenever you want to check the temperature of the hard drive, do a:
$sudo hddtemp /dev/hda

where /dev/hda is the hardrive designator - which you can change if neccessary.