Today’s word of the day: mananero.

I realllllly want this Simpsons chess set. (I found it while helping a friend find a nice Alice in Wonderland chess set; this is the one that we liked the most.)

Yesterday, I’m watching my TV, and a commercial comes on that looks like a public service announcement about domestic violence. Its essential points:

• domestic violence causes a great deal of physical harm each year;
• domestic violence kills people;
• exposing your kids to domestic violence hurts them in many ways;
• children in homes of people who engage in domestic violence are more domestic violence-prone themselves when they grow up.

Then, the commercial turns out to be for Philip Morris, trying to trumpet everything they’ve done to help victims of domestic violence. The problem? Replace “domestic violence” with “smoking” in all of the above points, and they all remain true, and are just as tragic. I really hope people aren’t this gullible… no matter what other good things they do, this is still a corporation which has, as one of its core businesses, the production and marketing of cancer.

A few days ago, someone posted on the NTBugTraq list about a problem they had found with Windows 2000’s new RunAs feature (which lets one user run apps as a different user, complete with the second user’s profile and environment), but I didn’t really understand it. Yesterday, Russ Cooper (the list admin) posted a good explanation of the problem, which looks to be troubling, not because it could be used for exploits (it wouldn’t be easy), but because of what it says about the possible underlying architecture of the new feature. There’s an additional explanation that hasn’t hit the archives of the list yet; I’ll point to it once it does.