Teachable Moments

The President has condescendingly talked about Teachable Moments in the past. In other contexts, he has promoted and promised Openness in Government. His Administration has been far from transparent, and has relied on Washington-insider deals to do and mostly not do anything. While modest gains have been made particularly in terms of transparency of government contracts, precious little of the vast amount classified data has been revealed to the public.

Meanwhile, in the name of safety and security, Federal Government drones, undeserving of basic customer service roles, have been deputised to examine naked photographs of all travellers and to grope their genitalia as a matter of standard procedure. When I was travelling last week, I sustained an uppercut to the groin because the TSA agent was nervous, untrained, and utterly incompetent. At this time, I am still considering legal action.

Recently, citizens have taken matters into their own hands and have shared classified documents with the public through WikiLeaks. This action has been condemned by the same administration which has promised openness. Upholding the law is the appropriate role of the Executive. However, an administration that has promised openness and has been elected on such reasonable assurances ought to use this Teachable Moment to open the records and procedures of the government, as was promised.

Root

Recently we upgraded our Verizon Motorola Droid to the Android 2.2 Froyo OS (upgrade available). Froyo is almost entirely a win. It runs everything much faster, and includes plenty of upgrades all around although some apps are not yet fully debugged for the new OS. However, in their infinite inanity, Verizon locked down the Droid's tethering ability with the new OS, and any attempts lead one to a page for a new plan upgrade they can purchase to enable previously free tethering. This is a brilliant way to alienate loyal customers. Fortunately, there is an app for that. EasyRoot safely roots the Droid phones for $1. Rooting, is giving the user and with user permission other applications, superuser complete control over their Linux phone. Once rooted, many other free applications allow users to take full advantage of their phone's potential including effective use of the terminal, phone-wide ad-blocking, and fixing USB tethering, and turning the phone into a wifi hotspot. EasyRoot has been blocked from the Android Market owing to Verizon's cozy relationship with Google, however it is still available for manual install. EasyRoot even has unroot capability in case you have to take your phone in for service.

*Update* - We also managed to root the Droid 2 using the following procedures: link.