I like the cut of her (possibly Vice-Presidential) jib

Tucker Carlson interviews Tulsi Gabbard.  She is seemingly under consideration by Donald Trump for potential Vice President.  Clearly he hates women.  Or something.

In particular, if you are worried that she is a typical Hawaiian liberal Democrat, you should skip t0 45:00 or so.  Or 55:00.  but you should really listen to the whole darn thing.

No. this is not (yet) a Borebatch ensorsement for Tulsi Gabbard for Donald Trump's Vice President.  But her journey is a lot like mine, and she is very, very impressive (and very, very not a Mike Pence or Kamalal Harris way).

Keep an eye on Tulsi Gabbard.  Just sayin'.

Henri Vieuxtemps - Souvenir d'Amerique, Variations Burlesques sur "Yankee Doodle"

We are all the way to the middle of the year, and hard up against Independence Day this week.  I have long thought that you can better know your own country by visiting others (at least, this has been my experience).  Sometimes a foreigner can tell you something you hadn't known about your own land.

Henri Vieuxtemps was a Belgian composer and violin player in the first part of the 19th century.  A child prodigy, he toured all over playing for the Great and the Good.  In the 1840s he came to tour America.  He left us this, what is perhaps his most famous composition, at least on these shores.  It's quite different from other versions of the song, which makes it interesting (at least to me).

Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, etc.

 In my most recent post, I brought up the 25th Amendment. The comments uniformly consider the impact from a national perspective. Which candidate and party will win the White House in November? Would leaving Pr. Biden in office improve the GOP's chances?

If it was only that simple.

Military and political leaders in every country in the world watched Pr. Biden's performance in the debate. They looked at his expressions. Watched Jill Biden help him off the stage and then praise him like a toddler at the after party. I suspect they already knew but now everyone knows and we know they know.

Every day he remains in office is a day we don't have a Commander in Chief. 

Hillary Clinton once ran an ad asking who you wanted answering the phone at 3 AM when a crisis happened. The answer wasn't Hillary, but it's a good question.

Who is answering the phone at the White House tonight?

 

Let's Be Honest

I am not suggesting that Pr. Biden step aside and allow his party to select a different candidate in this year's election.

I am stating that the Vice-President and the Cabinet are duty bound to invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment and remove Pr. Biden because he is clearly unable to discharge the duties of the office.

Dad Joke CCCXXX

I just burned my Hawaiian pizza.  I should have baked it at aloha temperature.

The Rat Bastards lose a privacy battle

Good:

One of the major data brokers engaged in the deeply alienating practice of selling detailed driver behavior data to insurers has shut down that business.

Verisk, which had collected data from cars made by General Motors, Honda, and Hyundai, has stopped receiving that data, according to The Record, a news site run by security firm Recorded Future. According to a statement provided to Privacy4Cars, and reported by The Record, Verisk will no longer provide a "Driving Behavior Data History Report" to insurers.

Skeptics have long assumed that car companies had at least some plan to monetize the rich data regularly sent from cars back to their manufacturers, or telematics. But a concrete example of this was reported by The New York Times' Kashmir Hill, in which drivers of GM vehicles were finding insurance more expensive, or impossible to acquire, because of the kinds of reports sent along the chain from GM to data brokers to insurers. Those who requested their collected data from the brokers found details of every trip they took: times, distances, and every "hard acceleration" or "hard braking event," among other data points.

You will no doubt be shocked to hear that car dealers "helped" customers opt-in, as part of getting their brand new vehicles ready for the road.

But it looks like the revenue from this didn't offset the bad PR and customer bad feelings associated with the program, and so they dropped it like a hot potato.

GM quickly announced a halt to data sharing in late March, days after the Times' reporting sparked considerable outcry. GM had been sending data to both Verisk and LexisNexis Risk Solutions, the latter of which is not signaling any kind of retreat from the telematics pipeline. LexisNexis' telematics page shows logos for carmakers Kia, Mitsubishi, and Subaru.

...

Disclosure of GM's stealthily authorized data sharing has sparked numerous lawsuits, investigations from California and Texas agencies, and interest from Congress and the Federal Trade Commission.

Act like a Rat Bastard, get treated like a Rat Bastard.

Illegal food

It seems that there are some types of food that are illegal in the United States - for example, you can't sell horse meat for human consumption.

Enter Illegal Chips, which allows you to taste these forbidden fruits in potato chip form.

I had not known any of that.  Of course, my tastes are more mainstream, such as Walkers Roast Chicken crisps.

Sweet Sixteen

This blog is sixteen years old today.  Dang, in a couple of years it will be able to vote.

Lots of changes in the last sixteen years.  I started blogging because of the Heller decision.  The gun control wars continue, but it's an entirely different landscape today than it was then.  Good.

I do miss a bunch of the old regular blogs I used to link to - Gormogons, Aretae, Fosetti, a bunch of others.  Miguel has now joined them.  I can understand the feeling as I came within a whisker of giving up myself 9 or 10 years ago.

It's weird that the blog has been around long enough that it saw Wolfgang's entire life, from when I first got him to that last awful day.  I still go back through the "Wolfgang" tag once in a while.  He's a dog that is taking some getting over.

The blog saw me move from Massachusetts to Atlanta to Maryland to Florida.  That's a lot of moving around in not a lot of time.

And it let me introduce The Queen Of The World to you.  She kind of scratched her head at the whole blogging thing at first, but she's the one who suggested I post about film scores and Dad Jokes.  I need to do more of both of those.

Because the old passionate topics - gun control, global warming, politics - have gone stale for me.  I've said pretty much all I have to say on them, and have come to realize that the world has gone mad and shouting into the wind is just adding hot air to cold.  I actually feel better doing Dad Jokes, not getting myself all wound up.  

The Queen Of The World has helped here as well.

I emailed Miguel when he hung up his blogging spurs to tell him that I was sorry to see him stop but understood his motivation.  He was very gracious in his reply, complimenting my stuff - but I am convinced that my best blogging days were long ago, 2009-2012 or so.  That's a decade in the rear view mirror.

So apologies if this place isn't what it used to be.  I'm not what I used to be, and that is probably a good thing.

In any case, when I put up my first post, what I did not expect at all was:

16 years
Almost 14,000 posts
Over 50,000 comments (!!!)
Over 14 Million page views (!)

I guess that predicting the future is hard, especially about things that haven't happened yet ...

Anyway, thank you to everyone who stops by here.  It's the readers - and especially the commenters - that make this place what it is, and keeps me coming back.

Vaya con Dios, Miguel

Miguel is hanging up his blogging spurs, which is a shame - but I understand his motivation.

Thanks for the free Internet ice cream, buddy.

Adobe updates License terms to be less douchy

The key word here is "less":

Adobe has promised to update its terms of service to make it "abundantly clear" that the company will "never" train generative AI on creators' content after days of customer backlash, with some saying they would cancel Adobe subscriptions over its vague terms.

Users got upset last week when an Adobe pop-up informed them of updates to terms of use that seemed to give Adobe broad permissions to access user content, take ownership of that content, or train AI on that content. The pop-up forced users to agree to these terms to access Adobe apps, disrupting access to creatives' projects unless they immediately accepted them.

...

On X (formerly Twitter), YouTuber Sasha Yanshin wrote that he canceled his Adobe license "after many years as a customer," arguing that "no creator in their right mind can accept" Adobe's terms that seemed to seize a "worldwide royalty-free license to reproduce, display, distribute" or "do whatever they want with any content" produced using their software.

...

Adobe's design leader Scott Belsky replied, telling Yanshin that Adobe had clarified the update in a blog post and noting that Adobe's terms for licensing content are typical for every cloud content company. But he acknowledged that those terms were written about 11 years ago and that the language could be plainer, writing that "modern terms of service in the current climate of customer concerns should evolve to address modern day concerns directly."

...

"You forced people to sign new Terms," Yanshin told Belsky on X. "Legally, they are the only thing that matters."

The original story is here.

I'm not sure this brouhaha is over.

Quote of the Day - Cancer edition

This week's ordeals made me think of a Churchill quote - unexpectedly a quote about Sir Winston, rather than by him.  His great bete noir in Parliament was Lady Nancy Astor of the Unionist Party (Churchill led the Tory Party).  Probably the most famous Nancy Astor story is the one where, after a particularly contentious Parliamentary debate she remarked "Winston, if you were my husband I would poison your coffee" and he replied "Nancy, if you were my wife I would drink it with pleasure."  Good times, good times.

But that's not the quote, although it does come from Lady Nancy.  Churchill developed a tumor, and it was removed.  Naturally, this was front page news throughout the realm.  A week or two later, the news reported that the tumor was benign.

At this, Lady Nancy remarked that "They seem to have removed the only non-malignant part of Winston".

UPDATE 25 JUNE 2024 14:27: Dwight has more Churchill here.  Funny and interesting at the same time.

Oldest bottle of wine unearthed

Long time readers will recall that awhile back I posted about a bottle of Roman wine from around 325 AD.  Well, that discovery has just been pushed back by three centuries:

In 2019, a glass cinerary urn containing a reddish liquid was discovered in a 1st century Roman mausoleum in Carmona, southern Spain.

...

Researchers from the University of Córdoba analyzed samples of the liquid to determine its composition. They found that it had a PH 7.5, close to neutral, and contained biomarkers that are exclusive to wine. High-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS) identified seven wine polyphenols all of which matched those in modern wines produced in this area of Andalucía, including dessert wines from Montilla-Moriles, sherry-type wines from Jerez, and manzanilla from Sanlúcar. 

Cool.

Operation after action report

So yesterday had the expected and the unexpected.  The procedure itself went smoothly - it was a Mohs surgery, where they shave off layers of skin and then have a pathologist analyze them under a microscope.  If there's cancer in the cells, then GOTO 1 and repeat.  Keep going until there's no cancer left.  Simples.

I assumed (correctly) that they'd numb my ear right up so I wouldn't feel a thing.  What I hadn't expected was that I would hear everything, up close and personal.  Scrapey-scrapey.  Then when they were done they cauterized the area, which kind of sounded like crackle-crackle.  And the whiff of black smoke that floated past and the smell of burnt barbecue just added to the whole experience.

Still, it's better than cancer.

My cancer was Squamous Cell Carcinoma, the middle (on the deadly scale) skin cancer.  The one you want if you get one is Basil Cell Carcinoma, which doesn't really spread.  The worst kind is melanoma.

I had noticed a bump on my ear that didn't go away.  I went to the dermatologist after a couple months because, well, it didn't seem like it was improving with age like a fine wine.  While I was there I pointed out various other bumps and blemishes which they were unconcerned with, but they told me that they weren't going to let me leave with the thing on my ear.  And so off it came.

A week later they called and said that the pathologist had determined squamous, and I had to come back in for Mohs.  And none of that waiting six months for the next open appointment slot, can I come in next week?

And so there I was yesterday.  Done and cancer free.

What was unexpected was how bad I felt yesterday when I got home.  Everything was out patient, and I drove myself.  But I kind of felt like I had been run over by a bus.  Probably it was something unrelated (summer cold) that happened at the same time.  Spent most of the afternoon in bed and crashed early, but feel pretty good now.

Lessons learned:

1. Early detection is A Very Good Thing Indeed.  When something pops up on your skin and doesn't go away in a couple of weeks, go get it checked out.
2. Wear a hat.  I've been in Florida for 4 years and do a lot of walking.  It's Florida for crying out loud.
   

Going under the knife today

Skin cancer - hey, it's Florida, right?

I expect this is just going to be a pain in the butt (well, ear) since we caught it early and since it's not the nasty variant.  Back later.

55 year old bug fixed

This may be the oldest bug fix in history, in the 1969 "Lunar Lander" text based computer game.  I really enjoyed that, back in the 1970s.

And yes, it printed out on paper.  The story is very cool:

In 2009, just short of the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing, I set out to find the author of the original Lunar Lander game, which was then primarily known as a graphical game, thanks to the graphical version from 1974 and a 1979 Atari arcade title. When I discovered that Storer created the oldest known version as a teletype game, I interviewed him and wrote up a history of the game. Storer later released the source code to the original game, written in FOCAL, on his website.

...

Fast forward to 2024, when Martin—an AI expert, game developer, and former postdoctoral associate at MIT—stumbled upon a bug in Storer's high school code while exploring what he believed was the optimal strategy for landing the module with maximum fuel efficiency—a technique known among Kerbal Space Program enthusiasts as the "suicide burn." This method involves falling freely to build up speed and then igniting the engines at the last possible moment to slow down just enough to touch down safely. He also tried another approach—a more gentle landing.

"I recently explored the optimal fuel burn schedule to land as gently as possible and with maximum remaining fuel," Martin wrote on his blog. "Surprisingly, the theoretical best strategy didn’t work. The game falsely thinks the lander doesn’t touch down on the surface when in fact it does. Digging in, I was amazed by the sophisticated physics and numerical computing in the game. Eventually I found a bug: a missing 'divide by two' that had seemingly gone unnoticed for nearly 55 years."

Very cool story.

A Roman bath that has been in continual use since the 1st Century

The narrator kind of drones on a bit, but this is pretty amazing - a Roman bath that has been used continually for almost 2000 years.

Dad Joke CCCXXVIIII - special Father's Day edition

Why wasn't one Father's Day gift better than the other?

Because it was a tie.

It's time to opt out of Windows Recall

Holy cow, what a nightmare:

Microsoft is not giving up on its controversial Windows Recall, though says it will give customers an option to opt in instead of having it on by default, and will beef up the security of any data the software stores.

Recall, for those who missed the dumpster fire, was announced on May 20 as a "feature" on forthcoming Copilot+ Windows PCs. It takes a snapshot of whatever is on the user's screen every few seconds. These images are stored on-device and analyzed locally by an AI model, using OCR to extract text from the screen, to make past work searchable and more accessible.

The ultimate goal for Recall is to record nearly everything the user does on their Windows PC, including conversations and app usage, as well as screenshots, and present that archive in a way that allows the user to remind themselves what they were doing at some point in the past and pull up relevant files and web pages to interact with again. The archive can be searched using text, or the user can drag a control along a timeline bar to recall activities.

But security testers have raised doubts about the safety of recorded information and have developed tools that can extract these snapshots and whatever sensitive information they contain. The data is for now stored as an easy to access non-encrypted SQLite database in the local file system.

"Dumpster fire" doesn't even begin to describe it.  It's easy to imagine all sorts of ways that this would violate laws (e.g. storing healthcare PII unencrypted is a HIPAA violation).

Never mind what sort of reindeer games hackers might get up to - after all, Windows has historically been so difficult for viruses and malware to invade, amirite? 

If you're still using Windows, you should configure it to opt out of Recall.  Or upgrade to Linux.  All the cool kids are.

This is getting out of hand

Someone is going to die if this keeps up:

England's NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) has issued an urgent call to O Positive and O Negative blood donors to book appointments and donate after last week’s cyberattack on pathology provider Synnovis impacted multiple hospitals in London.

On June 4, operations at multiple large NHS hospitals in London were disrupted by the ransomware attack that the Russian cybercrime group Qilin (a.k.a. Agenda) launched on Synnovis.

The incident impacted blood transfusions, with many non-urgent procedures being canceled or redirected.

 And so for the lack of adequate backups, Blighty is running out of blood.

Alternative to Adobe Photoshop

OldNFO points out a post at Lawrence's place about how Adobe has changed their terms of service.  Basically, you have to agree that they own all the work you create with their software, in order to get access to your work that you created on their software.

Sweet. 

Now IANAL, and so don't know how the (inevitable) Class Action lawsuit(s) will play out.  However, I am an enthusiastic user of The GIMP, a free (as in speech) Open Source Photoshop-alike application.

Yes, it has a Photoshop-worthy learning curve, but it is full featured and powerful, cross platform, and free.  No weird terms of service getting changed at midnight.

If you're looking for an alternative to Photoshop, I highly recommend this.

In which I (kind of) disagree with Divemedic

Divemedic posts a complaint about squishy RINOs.  I actually don't have any disagreement on this.

Where my opinion diverges from his is that the old "left" vs. "right" paradigm is kind of ending.  I haven't seen a good name for hte new emerging paradigm, so let's just call it "populists" vs. "business as usual".  Lousy name, but this is where the political action is, both here and all over the place (Argentina, El Salvador, France, Germany, the UK).

The Press is hyperventilating about the emergence of the "far right" in Europe, which entirely misses what's happening.  I've posted endlessly about this, but this is maybe what comes the closest to a (non-Borepatchian length) summary.

Populism is regularly trashed by the Great and the Good, but the inroads that Trump is making with the Black community doesn't seem to be typical pandering, but rather tapping into a real sense of dissatisfaction with Business As Usual.  Kind of like what the rest of us feel.

It also seems that RFK's support comes from the same well spring of dissatisfaction.  If that's true, it implies that RFK's candidacy will hurt Trump more than Biden.  And I still have the feeling that there's a non-trivial chance that the Deep State will try to assassinate Trump, and maybe succeed.  The Great and the Good keep complaining that Trump has "overturned norms" but it sure looks to me that they're the ones that are doing that.

Your mileage may vary, void where prohibited, do not remove tag under penalty of law. 

Dad Joke CCCXXVIII

If someone is playing a sub par round of golf, are they playing well or poorly?

A day for remembering

80 years ago the Allies stormed the Atlantic Wall.

Via Chris Lynch, we see that the French High School kids in Normandy remember.

82 years ago was the battle of Midway.  The torpedo bombers sacrificed themselves almost to a man but that opened the way for the dive bombers to rip the heart out of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

106 years ago the Marines went on the assault at Belleau Woods in the Great War.  It was one of the costliest days in Marine Corps history, and took heroes like First Sergent Dan Daly to rally the men: Come on you sons of bitches!  Do you want to live forever?

 

Truly a day for remembering.  Remember them.

Google has a remembrance today, too.

Some lesbian writer.  So brave, no doubt.  So very brave.  

Hey Google - french kids spent minutes chanting U-S-A!  You might ponder what that means.

Are any readers familiar with configuring Palo Alto Networks gear?

I know Cisco, not Palo Alto.  If any of you do know hoe to do this, Old NFO could use some help.

There are only 61 living Medal Of Honor recipients

There used to be 62.   God speed, sir.

Rest in peace, and rise in Glory.

Dad Joke CCCXXVII

I made a playlist for hiking.  It has music from Peanuts, The Cranberries, and Eminem.

I call it my trail mix.

Beach Art

We ran across a local artist whose work we quite like, Tim Steller from Stellar Art Works. Here are a couple of examples:

Of course, The Queen Of The World is a mermaid.  He has that, too.

One of the things we really like is how he takes local materials and creates works that look one way during the day and a different way when light up at night.

Recommended.  I have no business relationship with Tim, I just like his work.

Oh, yeah, he does some with gun, too.  Go check his work out.