Social Engineering: high tech crimes require low tech legwork.

This is a true story. It happened in one of America’s most technically literate cities. A municipal employee was on the street, tinkering with a “smart” parking meter. This meter accepts credit and debit cards, and recognizes pre-paid parking cards.  A young man approached the technician and gushed about the gadget. He said he’s fascinated [...]

If you like the bloggers you have, you get to keep them.

Choice and competition, by God, energize every field of endeavor. Here’s hoping you’ll welcome this humble offering of choice and competition. Of course, if you like the bloggers you already have, you get to keep them.
After a somewhat miscalculated career change, the Reasonable Reporter returns, with high hopes and apparently decent prospects of rejoining what [...]

Pulling the plug on radio

Today, the Reasonable Reporter will pull the plug on her radio career, in favor of a challenging new pursuit that starts in mid-September. The new gig is outside the media. It’s an exciting and long-overdue change. There is nonetheless an emotional tug-of-war in process, as the professional comfort zone is left behind.
The broadcaster’s life [...]

McCain leaves everything on the table in Sparks.

In an odd exchange following John McCain’s town hall meeting in Sparks this week, the candidate deflected a question from the Reasonable Reporter by suggesting that she might be a conservative. There would be no justification for telling the story, and it would remain untold, except that Anjeanette Damon alluded to the moment both in [...]

Presidential candidates should be protecting the personal information of reporters.

The Reasonable Reporter is good and steamed.  She has lost track of the times since Nevada became a swing state in 2004 that she’s been asked to send personal identifying information via unsecured means to the Secret Service for a background check. To protect elected officials, the federal government asks reporters to compromise their own [...]

Nevada voters do not have the luxury of being dumb.

Are the voters in Nevada a bunch of dummies?
The question was posed before the Supreme Court this week by Las Vegas attorney Dominic Gentile. He argued that the term limits question was not complex, and the voters understood quite well the initiative’s potential effect, regardless of technicalities now raised by the legislature, which [...]

Rush Limbaugh, big money, and Marconi’s old medium

Traditional media, recently declared dead, or at least critically ill in the face of new media’s rising commercial viability, has a pulse after all. Rush Limbaugh’s new contract is a 400 million dollar expression of confidence in traditional media, and such expressions of confidence have been rare in recent years.
But news of Rush Limbaugh’s record-breaking [...]

No pantyhose for Michelle: Mrs. Obama gets girly on The View

Hillary Clinton has voiced some concerns about sexism in the media, and for a number of reasons, the Reasonable Reporter has been quick to brush them aside. That’s mostly because three semester units of women’s studies backfired badly – crushing the capacity to give special consideration to female suffering in any circumstance except actual childbirth.
In [...]

What do Jim Gibbons and Eliot Spitzer have in common?

What do Jim Gibbons and Eliot Sptizer Have in Common? Not a great deal, except that they, like the rest of us, have had their daily movements electronically tracked and recorded, and because they did, acts they considered to be private became public.
Spitzer, the former Governor of New York, was caught purchasing sex because the [...]

Tired people say stupid things.

Last summer, when the presidential candidates were still wedged into their respective debate venues like too many SUVs in too few spaces meant for Honda Civics, and Nevada was still a campaign destination, the Reasonable Reporter was granted a sit-down interview with one of them. The time allotted was ten minutes.
The candidate arrived at the [...]