Category Archives: Uncategorized

The US savings rate has plummeted again, but basically we need to spend our money anyway before it depreciates further.

Google gives us Street View of Museums.

Their government decided there was no problem with the company that owns both CTV and the last mile wiring to houses implementing a drastic reduction of the bandwidth cap and large overage charges. Netflix is unamused. Steam, XBOX Live users should be upset too, if they have that sort of thing up there.

Remember how Comcast just bought NBC?

Egypt’s whole thing lately has had one positive effect; it makes clear the danger of giving the United States government the ability to shut off the internet in times of “national emergencies”.  Suddenly, people that were all “whatever” realize that it could be a really bad thing.

Yes, the lack of autocomplete will keep me from finding torrents. Because it’s just too much work to type the whole thing out and hit enter so I rely on autocomplete to finish it for me.

/It does have a rather forboding aspect.

Himalayan glaciers are doing fine despite dire predictions. This will no doubt be further proof of Global Warming Global Climate Change.

The ammo manufacturers just caught up with the demand from his election. If Obama says anything about any sort of gun control, even if it’s something reasonable like “criminally insane people shouldn’t be allowed to have guns” which it may or may not be, he’s going to set it all off again.

Chris Christie lays it out plainly again. This time to cops.

I was fine with the cop dude until that “my paycheck only went up $4, how am I supposed to live on that”.  The way the rest of us that haven’t had raises in years have managed to live on our frozen wages? The same way you lived on it last year? Moran.

This whole kerfuffle started with a call to Greek style protests which were riots that killed people and destroyed property over government benefits.

Why are Americans such wusses? Threaten the Greeks with job losses and benefit cuts and they tie up Athens, but take away Americans’ jobs, 401(k)s, even their homes, and they pretty much roll over. Tell British students that their tuition is about to go up and they take to the streets; American students just amp up their doses of Prozac.

For the most part, Americans don’t depend on their government to give them jobs and cushy unemployment and retirement packages, they just want the government to create an atmosphere that encourages job growth and curtail the excesses of the capitalist system, creating a fair playing field. And when the people felt the government didn’t do that, there were protests. You may remember the whole Tea Party thing.

Also, the United States government has never paid for American students tuition, they expect to have to pay it on their own. Unlike British students who were horrified their subsidized ride was going to triple to £9000 ($14,000) and went forth to destroy property, throw flares and billiard balls, and attacking the royals. Why would American students risk life and limb in riots over stuff that the government has never been responsible for?

When a congresswoman can be shot in a parking lot and a professor who falls short of Glenn Beck’s standards of political correctness can be, however anonymously, targeted for execution, we have moved well beyond democracy — to a tyranny of the heavily armed.

Nice juxtaposition. The certifiably insane wacko that actually shot a congresswoman and internet tough guys who shoot off their mouths, they’re all the same.

Did she not want the people to rise up and let their voices be heard, by violent means if necessary, just a couple paragraphs ago? Mixed messages there. Unless she’s saying that it matters whether people die from trampling and Molotov cocktails or gunshot wounds.

*I do not condone threatening people on the internet (or in person). People who do that are idiots and should be shot in the face.

**no really, don’t threaten people over the internet. It makes you look stupid.

The bad economy has started the Social Security deficit 5 years early. Don’t worry, it’s still on track to run out just about when I would have started taking money out. I’m so happy to have paid in so much and to continue to do so and then to get next to nothing out of it.

“It’s an IOU that is backed by Treasury bonds and the faith and credit of the United States government,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. “It is the same faith and credit that enables us to borrow from rich people and from China and from other countries. As you well know, in the history of this country, the United States has never defaulted on one penny owed to a creditor.”

And why does China let us borrow money? They have no choice. Why do I pay Social Security taxes? I have no choice.

The Feds are phasing out the Terror Alert status. Which makes sense since they don’t dare lower it and only raise it after a terrorist attack. One has to wonder why it takes them 3 months to phase out. Or, nine and a half years if you want to look at it that way.

I kinda miss my Sesame Street alerts I had in my sidebar for a long time.

What’s your state the worst at?

The story of Oregon Trail.

1. Pollyana-ish belief in unending wealth creation
2. ??????
3. Profit

It’s pretty dang hypocritical for the federal government to tell the states they won’t get bailouts, but I’m glad they won’t.

Dependence Day.

In our time, to be born a citizen of the United States is to win first prize in the lottery of life, and, as Britons did, too many Americans assume it will always be so. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favor of America because you were born in it? Great convulsions lie ahead, and at the end of it we may be in a post-Anglosphere world.

My new eyeballs are one step closer to reality.

A map that shows national GDPs and the US States they equal. I’m describing it poorly. It’s really cool, go look at it. Idaho=Sudan makes me sad. At least we’re not Mississippi = Bangladesh though.

This guy’s been retired longer than I’ve been alive!

If you’ll remember this article says that China has to keep the US economy afloat in order to keep its people under control. This guy says it might already be losing that battle. This is bad news…for Obama. And the rest of us, of course.

From the hacker’s Chaos Communication Congress, a look at how susceptible our infrastructure is to complete and utter destruction and thus the collapse of civilization as we know it.

A very readable, non-political analysis of the U.S. – China economic interaction.  And how it could go horribly wrong.

More than you ever wanted to know about the international honey laundering trade.

I came across this randomly and the more I look at it, the funnier it becomes.

The kid up front kills me.

Twitter powered coffee maker. My exact response to this was “Dude”.  If I didn’t have a major home improvement task going on right now I would try this this weekend.

Know why I don’t shop in bookstores anymore? Full price books. There’s no reason to have to pay cover price in our day and age.  Also, the selection is always so limited. Having it shipped to the door is just icing on the cake. Also, I have an ereader, so I don’t have to collect books any more.

I don’t know how I missed it this long, but here’s Dave Barry’s Year In Review.

Obama says no to upping the debt ceiling. In 2006, so it probably doesn’t count anymore.

He’s right, it is a failure of leadership. Stand up and say “no”. No you can’t have any more money, we don’t have any. We have less than any. We have been in negative any for quite some time now.

The progressives and the Left aren’t going to appreciate 3:05 onward as the woman explains that they’re just trying to implement communism from within as opposed to armed revolution.

Do these people not know about the horror unleashed on every. single. nation that has tried communism? How once their economies have collapsed and people have starved, every one turns to the evil capitalists to bail them out? Especially after big daddy USSR had to stop propping them up, having destroyed their own economy.

How do they explain why North Korea has to portion out the (incredibly poor) food rations according to the amount of work done despite being the most fervent of communist countries. And don’t be all blaming it on Kim Jong-il and Stalinism and the cult of personality. They were doing it from the very beginning, promising to get rid of it and they still haven’t 50 years later.

I prefer the Elephant Micah version to Big Star, though they both have annoying guitar solos (this video does not plumb the depths of the annoying solo), but good luck finding it *ahem*.

So I saw Tron: Legacy 3D last night. It was awesome and you should go see it. There was a nice War Games shout out and a lot of “homages” to Star Wars.

Great effects, 3D used wisely, most of the time. Only in a couple scenes was it distracting. Does 3D add anything to two heads having a conversation? No. Clu entered the uncanny valley a couple times (his top lip didn’t work right), but for the most part Clu and Tron looked natural.

My beef: the original Tron had a simple, awesome concept. The good and bad programs in my computer are battling it out on lightcycles and in disc games. Easy to understand and relate to. Tron: Legacy started with the battle between open and closed source operating systems which I was fine with, but then it went on to be confusing. Apparently, programs will spontaneously create a new life form that could solve all our problems, but programs don’t like them and we have to be careful that programs don’t escape the devices they’re in and take over the world? Something like that, I think. Between that and Kevin Flynn’s nihilistic “dude, whatever” spirituality I was annoyed by the plot, such as it was. Luckily, the plot wasn’t very important.

To sum up: awesome effects, worth the time and money to see on the big screen.

Like the average American, a lot of state governments don’t have any money and have run out of credit. The video is depressing and the article is depressing.

I have no doubt this will roll down to local governments soon and we’ll all see what our taxes can actually fund rather than what we want them to fund. And then we’ll be mad at them for not doing what we want them to do.

I have a hard time seeing why we need government regulation of the internet. It’s been doing okay for the last 20 years. This looks more like the cable and telecommunication companies getting their lobbying money’s worth.

awesome misheard lyrics there.

Republican congressmen are cutting back on the earmarks. Apparently they aren’t completely tone deaf. The Senate republicans have work to do, but then again they tend to be institutionalized and once inertia gets them in its grip they don’t listen well.

Baen has updated its site from 1997 to 2004.  You have to respect their commitment to classic looks. And hey, free short story!

The Body Browser (requires Chrome Beta or FF 4.0.1).

NY Times has an article on the Great Leap Forward. Which led to an interesting discussion about intentions at Instapundit.

It’s interesting that because the first academic knew Marxists as people, they weren’t evil. Since he/she didn’t know any Nazis, they are still mass murdering jerks. People are people and very, very few do evil things with no justification of a greater good.

bugmenot for the NYT.

I freely admit I don’t know what a lot of those movies are.

When everyone’s unhappy, I take that to be a sign that it’s a solid compromise.

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It is really weird to see math reduced to something as physical as gears. I tend to think of it as a mental / electrical thing.

I normally don’t bother posting pictures of cute animals, but these pandas are so dang cute they deserve your attention.

The 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time.

Life Magazine has a lot of awesome pictures from 2010 in the horrible, and small, slideshow format.

I would be far more excited about A Game of Thrones if the story had come to any sort of (hopefully satisfying) conclusion.  Having suffered through hundreds of pages of meandering through various stories with no end in sight, I’m having a hard time getting excited about this, though it looks awesome.

It’s my own fault that I kept on reading, thinking surely one storyline or another would have to come to a conclusion. I was wrong.

IBM has come up with a super fast, awesomely named Silicon Nanophotonics chip technology that will make your chips communicate amazingly fast, but won’t help as your RAM, hard drive or network drags everything back down to normal speeds.

A million dollar nest egg would allow me to retire into a slightly better lifestyle than I currently enjoy. Which, trust me, isn’t saying much. And let’s not talk about what inflation will do to that. La, la, la, I can’t hear you…

Between this and the Mythbusters dance bit, I’m warming to him.

I’ve seen blue dog democrats. I’ve voted for blue dog democrats. You, Mr. President, are no blue dog democrat.

The BBC’s iPlayer is coming to an iPad near you. With a subscription price. Which isn’t entirely unreasonable. But, since I don’t have an iPad this will not affect my BBC show viewing techniques.

The faces make you laugh and watch more and the sound makes you want to turn it off. I’m conflicted.

RIP, Leslie Neilsen

Shep Smith has a list of what you shouldn’t take through the thing this Thanksgiving.

Big Picture brings you some of the best pictures of the year from National Geographic. Truly stunning pictures that will make you throw your camera away in despair of ever capturing something half as good.

A security expert answers questions about the TSA’s new techniques for Popular Mechanics.

Spoiler Alert: the TSA comes off poorly.

Google is hiring, but this paragraph is what caught my eye

This month, Google internally announced plans to give all of its employees a 10% raise in 2011, according to media reports, a move that many in the industry interpreted as an attempt to retain its best workers.

Insane. Ahem.

Thank you, Bill Watterson, for the greatest comic strip ever.

The American Traveler Dignity Act. Call your congressman.

Text of the Bill.

Jay Rockafeller hates that Americans watch those stupid Fox and MSNBC channels. How dare they give Americans exactly what they want to watch. I love the faces of the TV execs.

Post-acquittal detention power. It gave the judge a nice out though.

Mark Twain’s autobiography vol. 1, comes out today, 100 years after his death as he  requested.

Dang it, I already have 2 books stacked up waiting to be read.

An excellent overview of the net neutrality issue from NPR. Audio only, though. Sorry.

Tom Lehrer’s song is making a bit of a comeback lately. Second time I’ve heard it in as many weeks.

Peter Rez, a physics professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, did his own calculations and found the exposure to be about one-fiftieth to one-hundredth the amount of a standard chest X-ray. He calculated the risk of getting cancer from a single scan at about 1 in 30 million, “which puts it somewhat less than being killed by being struck by lightning in any one year,” he told me.

While the risk of getting a fatal cancer from the screening is minuscule, it’s about equal to the probability that an airplane will get blown up by a terrorist, he added. “So my view is there is not a case to be made for deploying them to prevent such a low probability event.”

If Americans thought that these measures would in any way actually stop a terrorist attack, they probably wouldn’t be so upset about the whole thing. As it is, I’m glad I’m not flying any time soon.

Also, it’s nice to see Americans united in  drawing a line anywhere on privacy invasion.

Hmm: Airports can use private security instead of the TSA. Though the government still has all the control since they are paying for it and regulating it.

He’s either naive or stupid if he really is surprised by this development. On the other hand, the stupid and naive are a significant proportion of the country and deserve representation in the government.

This would be politically astute of the GOP. Therefore I expect them to ignore it.

What does that mean? [NSFW language]

This post was clearly written by some impostor because any Gen-Xer that hasn’t been disillusioned since about high school isn’t really a Gen-Xer. Or was on some hippie drugs or something.

Of course the coming hyper-inflation will not be the fault of the government that can’t stop spending and then printing money to pay for it. Since it’s a bit late to be blaming Bush for things these days, time to switch gears. It’s those darned annoying kids and their rabble-rousing ways. Hyper-inflation takes over the economy, blame the Tea Party. Global Warming/Cooling is killing the polar bears, blame the Tea Party. LHC keeps interfering with itself from the future, blame the Tea Party. Aliens abduct the president, blame the Tea Party.

Kinda shocking facts about Britian’s government. There’s a cool pic if you follow the link too.

Britain – even more than the US, I think, which is going to be rescued by the values of the Tea Party movement – is en route to disaster. The share of our economy taken up by the government (ie the public sector) is now 53 per cent; in Communist China the figure is 25 per cent. Even at the peak of the Soviet Union the figure was only 70 per cent. At the height of Britain’s economic power in the Victorian era, the figure was 10 per cent.

The rest of the world is upset at the Fed’s decision to keep printing money. While I think America should concentrate on fixing the American economy, if we destroy the world’s economy while fixing ours, I doubt we’ll be much better off in the long run.

Since August, when the prospect of more Fed QE became real, cotton prices are up 68pc, sugar prices have risen 66pc and rice is up by a third.

That’s why QE will be blamed for so much more than “unfair” currency devaluations and for imposing a “soft default” on America’s creditors.

This crazy money-printing is going to be seen as the primary cause of Western inflation, food riots and a commodity price spike.

I’m just guessing here, but since IPv6 has been around for so long and the Internet people have known about this change was coming for so long and given that no business  will willingly lose massive amounts of money due to something easily preventable like upgrading their infrastructure and rolling that out to consumers I think they have it under control.

I like how he compares it to Y2K, which, if I remember correctly, ended up a non-issue. And if you do manage to read to the end of the article, that’s pretty much his conclusion.

Why Firefox is switching to tabs on top.  I didn’t even realize that Chrome had tabs on top, but now that I do, I like it better. Especially on my smaller netbook screen.

American Exceptionalism.

Here’s something you’d never read while Bush was in office.

Bacon soda.

Some man on the street reviews. I’d try it. I’ll try food that’s not actively dangerous once. I’ve added it to my wishlist since, as I’m sure you remember, my birthday is coming up soon.

There are some non-violent felonies that I wouldn’t have a problem with the felon working with children. Or you do something when you were 18 and now your 45 and a completely different person. But I can understand why schools wouldn’t want to deal with the hassle of figuring out which is which. And some other parent is going to be outraged and sue them no matter what they decide.

Hey, there’s a new The Aquabats EP! Radio Down!

While not ska, it’s still classically Aquabats. My favorite is Best Day Of My Life!. How could you have a bad day if you woke up to that song? I don’t know.

I figure if it’s good enough for the passengers, it’s good enough for the crews. Everyone should suffer under the clueless hand of the TSA equally.

Not that I want any of us to suffer under the clueless hand of the TSA. I’d say get rid of it but I’m scared they’d put something even stupider and more demeaning in its place.

Panoramic photos of the Discovery space shuttle. If you don’t do it full screen, you’re wasting your time.

Make your iPad work like a laptop… by spending even more money on accessories. Or you could just buy a laptop at half the price.

Scientists didn’t know boas were parthenogenetic until this boa constrictor gave birth. And then it gets weird.

A popcorn kernel popping at 6200 fps.

Republicans should bear in mind that we didn’t like them either two short years ago as they go forth to spend our money, make new laws and repeal old ones.

See also.

I don’t understand this video, but it is awesome.

The ultimate intelligence test. According to this test, I’m dumb as a stump. I only scored well, and by “well” I mean above the 5oth percentile, on the ones that had to do with words. On those, I was in the top 10%. You start making me rotate shapes and remember strings of numbers  and positions and I’m out.

Oh, and it only counts if you do it straight through. No fair taking a break and coming back to the later ones rested up.

A nice essay on how the saints aren’t as bizarre as we might think.

Tube-free toilet paper.

Polio could be completely eradicated in a few years.

When you cite Star Trek in your judicial opinion, I would think you would want to cite the actual point of the movie, not the point that gets proven wrong.

If Americans wanted the needs of the many to outweigh the needs of the few we would have formed a democracy instead of a federal republic.

Happy Birthday, Banner Ads! From the people that brought you them in the first place.

Some dude at the WSJ goes off.

We still buy it, even though Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, has researched the topic and spends every October telling the press that there has never been a single case of any child being killed by a stranger’s Halloween candy

Day 30 – Saddest character death

What a happy one to end on!

So, trying to think of a character death that really affected me and I’m having a hard time. Aral Vorkosigan’s was sad and I remember it because I just read it, but there’s nothing in books like the shock and NOOooOO! I felt at Wash’s death. Most of the protagonists in books, if they die, come back (ala Gandalf), so I leave this one basically unanswered.

Netflix is the leader in internet traffic during peak evening hours. I was kinda bummed that during the outage I was watching YouTube clips and didn’t even notice, so no $2 savings for me. 😦

And, apparently, it’s a problem that such a relatively small company uses so much bandwidth, though I’m not exactly sure why because

Day 29 – Current book obsession

Right at this very moment I’m reading through David Edding’s The Belgariad and The Malloreon. I don’t know if this counts as an obsession or not, though. I am entertained enough to keep reading.

P.J. O’Rourke has some harsh words about the Democrats.

A valid point about usefulness of the American abundance of stuff. I still like to keep it all under control for ease of moving purposes.