Eideard

Armenia, one of the world players in chess, has made it mandatory in school for ages seven to nine.

Chess is a national obsession in the country of three million.

The passion was fostered in modern times by the exploits of chess champion Tigran Petrosian, who won the world championship in 1963 and then successfully defended his title three years later…

Armenian authorities say teaching chess in school is about building character, not breeding chess champs.

The education minister says taking the pastime into classrooms will help nurture a sense of responsibility and organization among schoolchildren, as well as serving as an example to the rest of the world.

“We hope that the Armenian teaching model might become among the best in the world,” Armen Ashotyan told The Associated Press.

Half a million dollars were allocated to the national chess academy to draw up a course, create textbooks, train instructors and buy equipment. Another $1 million went toward buying furniture for chess classrooms.

Two characteristics educators hope to encourage are quoted in the article – by the father of an 8-year-old whiz at chess. He hopes that continued involvement with and study of chess will encourage logical thinking and the ability to improvise.

Not bad attributes for your life’s culture.

You have to understand that this would have been a perfectly acceptable solution among most politicians in New Mexico. Some of our True Locals still operate within a system of logic that tends towards regal commands rather than statute law.

Rio Arriba County officials made a mistake when they included a beer and wine licensing measure on the county general election ballot in November.

An opinion filed by the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office this month says, in part, that “an election for restaurant licenses may not be held in conjunction with a primary, general, municipal or school election.”

As part of the November election, Rio Arriba voters were asked whether to allow a “local option district” in unincorporated Rio Arriba County — nearly all of the 5,000-plus-square-mile county outside the city of Española and the village of Chama.

A local option district is required for restaurants outside those two areas to get liquor licenses. In Rio Arriba’s case, the ballot question would have allowed beer and wine licenses.

But the Attorney General’s opinion says state law forbids a local option election “within (42) days of any primary, general, municipal or school district election.”

The beer and wine question was included on the November ballot anyway because county officials thought that even though the law said the local option question wasn’t allowed 42 days before or after other elections, “it doesn’t say you can’t have it that day,” County Manager Tomas Campos explained in November.

“That may be dumb logic,” he said then. “But that’s the one we used.”

No kidding.

Thanks, Cinaedh

A logic bomb allegedly planted by a former engineer at mortgage finance company Fannie Mae last fall would have decimated all 4,000 servers at the company, causing millions of dollars in damage and shutting down Fannie Mae for a least a week, prosecutors say.

Unix engineer Rajendrasinh Babubha Makwana, 35, was indicted in federal court in Maryland on a single count of computer sabotage for allegedly writing and planting the malicious code on Oct. 24, the day he was fired from his job. The malware had been set to detonate at 9:00 a.m. on Jan. 31, but was instead discovered by another engineer five days after it was planted, according to court records.

Makwana, an Indian national, was an employee of technology consulting firm OmniTech, but he worked full time on-site at Fannie Mae’s massive data center in Urbana, Maryland, for three years.

On the afternoon of Oct. 24, he was told he was being fired because of a scripting error he’d made earlier in the month, but he was allowed to work through the end of the day, according to an FBI affidavit in the case. “Despite Makwana’s termination, Makwana’s computer access was not immediately terminated,” wrote FBI agent Jessica Nye.

Five days later, another Unix engineer at the data center discovered the malicious code hidden inside a legitimate script that ran automatically every morning at 9:00 a.m. Had it not been found, the FBI says the code would have executed a series of other scripts designed to block the company’s monitoring system, disable access to the server on which it was running, then systematically wipe out all 4,000 Fannie Mae servers, overwriting all their data with zeroes.

Wow!

I understand why IT departments consider it sound management to cut off someone’s privileges just before you fire them.