On the Internet nobody can tell if you're a dog

Politeness is a sign of dignity, not of subservience.

- Theodore Roosevelt 

But everybody can tell if you're an asshole.

Divemedic posted his stance on the vaccine: get it if you think it's right for you, don't get it if you don't think it's right for you.  A more sensible position is hard to imagine.

And then The Internet appeared in his comments section, with SumD00d telling him he was wrong (well, I think that's what he said because the comment was fairly incomprehensible; hey, it's The Internet, amirite?).

And while the comment was moderately incoherent, the attitude of the commenter was anything but.  Commenter "Hedge" is an asshole.  He may (or may not) be a dog with a keyboard but he is unmistakably an asshole with one.

Sigh.

I am very grateful indeed that the commenters here are almost always respectful and intelligent - and the commenters on the Dad Jokes are funny as hell.  I almost never need to step in to tell folks to settle down and mind their manners - maybe only 2 or 3 times in the 13 years I've been here.

People think wrong when they think that the Internet gives them anonymity.  It doesn't.  It gives pseudonymity, which is not at all the same thing.  If you post under a pseudonym (like Hedge and I both do), you still develop a reputation.  Quite frankly, you can't comment anonymously here, so anything you say in the comments here will add to (or in rare cases detract from) your reputation.

Divemedic certainly doesn't need me to fight his fights, that's not the point of this post.  I love  comments and the two way (or multiple way) discussions we have here.  But I'm not going to tolerate Internet Assholes like Hedge here.  Cathedra mea, regula meae - my place, my rules..  If you don't like it, don't stop by.  This really isn't very hard.

It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy. 

- Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom Of Life 

Badass - ur doin' it wrong

 

Spotted by the eagle eye of The Queen Of The World.

Busy now

Back later.  Hey, at least I'm not trying to fix this:

Well, I don't own a boat anymore, but he's absolutely doing it wrong.

Sometimes the contrarian perspective is just silly

I'm not arguing against being contrarian, since I do that a fair amount here.  I's saying that if you're going to do it, you need to carefully lay out your case.  Otherwise, you'll look silly, like the folks at PC Magazine saying that the Chinese weren't spying on the US Defense establishment:

The knee-jerk interpretation to this disclosure (and others) is that China is a powerhouse of cyber espionage capable of stealing whatever secrets they want and that the U.S. is powerless to stop them. This seems very unlikely.


Last week, the New York Times ran a piece which delved into China's hacker culture, revealing a disparate band of private contractors and not a team of highly trained hackers operating in lock-step with the government.

"Another former hacker said the monolithic notion of insidious, state-sponsored hacking now discussed in the West was absurd," wrote Edward Wong for the Times. "The presence of the state throughout the economy means hackers often end up doing work for the government at some point, even if it is through something as small-scale as a contract with a local government office."

Some of these pilfered secrets have made their way back to the central Chinese government, but it's just as likely that they were taken by individuals or companies and then sold to someone else. As is the case with other forms of cybercrime, the hackers are generally trying to make money off the information, not use it themselves.

This is just silly.  Who does the author thinks will pay money for the stolen information - the designs of the F-35, the Littoral warship, the anti-missile defenses?  Hello?  Bueller?

Just because you don't have a Ministry Of Cyber Espionage with a tony building in downtown Beijing, does anyone think that it's remotely plausible that there isn't a market for that sort of information?  Or that the People's Liberation Army isn't the top buyer for that sort of information?  Who does he think is paying for it - Anonymous?

And so the entire article is silly.  It makes a distinction that lacks a difference.  Of course the Chinese government is behind this.  It makes no difference whatsoever whether it was directly via the Ministry of H4X0rz or by  a revenue trail leading to chinese h4x0rz.  Macht nichts.

And please no whinging that the Red Chinese are not our enemies, and is actually a friendly government.  Again, that's a distinction without a difference.  The old saying is true here: there are friendly foreign governments, but there are no friendly foreign Intelligence Agencies.

*Facepalm*

I see what she did there.

I suck

Traveling, no time to make ice cream. Hopefully later during my 3 hour layover in Toronto.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Hotel locks easily bypassed

This is an update to a post from last August where some security researchers came up with a way to bypass security on the electronic locks used in hotels world wide.  Back then, the gear to crack the lock was bulky and suspicious, and would attract attention.  They've miniaturized the gear and hidden it in a dry erase marker:

Well, depending on what type of key system is used at the hotel you’re staying in, it might be possible for someone with a “dry erase marker” to bypass the door key system and walk right in. No, you can’t circumvent hotel door security with an actual dry erase marker, but security researchers recently demonstrated a tool disguised as a dry erase marker, which can be used to access some hotel door locks.

The locks in question are used in more than four million rooms, found in 22,000 hotels around the world. Is your preferred hotel chain one of them? Perhaps. The manufacturer of the affected lock system has promised to fix it ASAP.

I'd recommend that you assume that your lock can be opened by anyone who wants to, carrying items that won't trip any suspicions.  Use the deadbolt and chain/latch which are physical and provide more layers of security.  Don't leave valuables in your room when you're out (I don't like the in-room safes either; just like web sites have password reset features the hotels will likely have the "quick open" magic combo for people who've forgotten the combo they set).  I think I've only once used the hotel master safe, and so can't say whether that's a good bet or not.

The obligatory Independence Day fireworks "Hold mah beer" post

Well, we don't know that beer was involved, but there's a good chance:

Fireworks for Bainbridge Island's [Washington State - Borepatch] Fourth of July show, along with fireworks for neighboring Poulsbo's show, were packed, organized and stored ready to go in a container at an auto-wrecking yard a few miles away. Then, authorities say, the operator of the wrecking yard decided to go outside and try out his new rifle.


This is the part of the story where everybody winces.

"One of the shots hit a junk car in his yard and must've ricocheted and struck the (container) that contained $80,000 worth of fireworks. Well, within about a second the box contained no explosives," said Ron Krell of Viking Fest, who is helping organize Poulsbo's 3rd of July show. "It exploded, and we had the greatest fireworks show you ever would have wanted to not see."

It seems that Our Hero was zeroing his new boom stick at 1:00 AM.  Me, I'm voting that beer was involved.

It seems that this part of the Great State of Washington was most recently in the news when a gentleman there tried to loosen a reluctant lug nut with a 12 gauge, with hilarious results.

To my readers in Washington State, I'm relieved that you had a safe Independence Day ...

(via)

Mac Fanbois: use a PC when shopping online

Man, I never thought I'd type those words.  And only do it at sites that you know (i.e. where the risk of malware is low).  But the shopping sites know what computer you use, and jack up the prices for shoppers using Macs:

In a finding that many have subliminally known about for years, but never been actually proven, yet is still quite shocking, the WSJ is reporting that tourism portal Orbitz "has found that people who use Apple Inc.'s Mac computers spend as much as 30% more a night on hotels, so the online travel agency is starting to show them different, and sometimes costlier, travel options than Windows visitors see.

Of course, I have my own opinion on Orbitz.

But if it isn't them, it will be someone else.  You see, I see you:

Your disloyal browser is selling you out, and vendors are starting to figure out that since Mac Fanbois shell out the yuppie bucks for their computers, they'll shell out more for things like Hotels.  Well, Orbitz seems to, at any rate.

Note to Mac users: if you run a VMWare image on your Mac that has a Windows container, and use that to shop, I betcha that stupid Orbitz would give you a better price - because they're too stupid to figure out your cunning plan.  But then, you're too smart to use Orbitz, right?

Note to Orbitz marketing droids: you sure bough yourself a bunch of bad PR here.  And with me.  That's a gift that will keep on giving.  Love and kisses, Borepatch.

Useful Idiots

Peter has a must-read post about how the Catholic Church seems surprised that the Obama administration is more or less forcing them to violate their doctrine in the name of "health care".  Peter quite correctly points out that the Catholic Church was one of the biggest advocates of Obamacare, and so they don't really have call to be surprised that Progressives are doing what Progressives do.

I mean, the Cardinals were so sure that Obamacare would go so far and no further.  How can they be on the short end of the stick now.  And where the heck did the stick go?

Some are calling this "feed the crocodile so he eats you last".  I see it that the Cardinals were Useful Idiots - tools who saw some things that they'd like about the New Progressive World and who simply couldn't wrap their brains around the historical fact that Progressives have been sworn enemies of organized religion in general (and the Catholic Church in particular) for well over a century.

Give Progressives tons of new coercive power to do things that you like, and you're surprised that they do coercive things you don't like?  Inconceivable!

There's a message here about the GOP and their big visions, too (*cough* Patriot Act *cough*).  TSA pat downs?  I just thought you were keeping us safe from terrorists!

Inconceivable!

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition

On December 7, 1941, the United States was deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.  Nobody had seen that coming, and the US Military personnel had to adjust as best they could.  The attack took place early on a Sunday morning, soon after reveille.  The defenders scrambled to their battle stations, plans for the morning Church service in shambles.  Some of the ratings asked Chaplain (Ensign J.G.) Forgy what they should do.  His reply is famous:

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

Sometimes death seeks you out unexpectedly.  Sometimes, you're caught off guard, or unawares.  Chaplain Forgy tells us that you have to do the best you can with what you have.  Of course, it's better to make sure that what you have is something worth having.

Today the gun banning crowd wants everyone to light a candle for the people who have died from gun violence.  It's not a bad sentiment, as far as it goes, and I'm actually sympathetic to a lot of the thought.  People who found themselves facing sudden death, unexpectedly, deserve our remembrance.

But we should also remember Chaplain Forgy.  Violence can sometimes appear out of a bright morning sky.  At that point, good men and good women should praise the Lord, and use the tools that the Lord and human ingenuity have given them.  If some Meth addled thug pulls a knife on me as I walk back from the supermarket, I will put my faith in the Lord, in jacketed .45 ACP hollow points, and in 19-by-God-11.

I lit a candle for the innocent victims, praying that the gun banners would stop trying to disarm them.  And to those who would unleash violence unexpectedly on good people, I agree with Col. Cooper:

One bleeding-heart type asked me in a recent interview if I did not agree that "violence begets violence." I told him that it is my earnest endeavor to see that it does. I would like very much to ensure—and in some cases I have—that any man who offers violence to his fellow citizen begets a whole lot more in return than he can enjoy.

To the innocent victims, I pray: Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.

And to the animals who brought unexpected violence to then, I offer this:

Or the 1911.  It'll kill the goblin just as dead.  Think of the muzzle flash as lighting a candle.

Why I shifted from Google to Bing

I made the switch, in all of my browsers.  Bing is now the default search engine for me.  No, this isn't because of Google's long and sorry neglect of American patriotic holidays, although that's always been an annoyance.

It's because I don't trust the search results.

Ever wonder why Wikipedia comes up very high (top 5) results for just about any Google search?  Even for very obscure search terms, where the number of web sites discussing the term is so low as to make the statistical algorithm become unreliable?  Well, Google has a mechanism where they can manually tweak Wikipedia's score, raising it artificially (and arbitrarily).

Think about that.  What can get dialed up can also get dialed down, right?  So does Google selectively, artificially, and arbitrarily downgrade certain sites in the search rankings?

Yup.

Consider the term "Global Warming".  You would think that this would lead you to the major climate science blogs.  Using Google, you'd think wrong.

The site Watts Up With That is probably the most important - and most visited - skeptic web site.  It gets what is simply enormous traffic: Alexa has it's rank in the top 16,000 web sites.  Think about that - less than 16,000 Internet sites get more traffic than this one does.  By way of contrast, I'm not quite in the top 800,000.

So where is wattsupwiththat.com in the Google rankings for the search term "Global Warming"?  Not on the first ten pages.  It may not be in the top twenty pages - I gave up looking.  Just to level set, a site called the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine is on page ten, ahead of wherever Google has wattsupwiththat.  OISM's Alexa ranking is higher than mine, meaning that I beat them for traffic.  And yet somehow, Google has them as a more authoritative source than wattsupwiththat.

Bing has wattsupwiththat.com on the second page of search results.  Lower than I'd put it, but plausible.

And so, I no longer trust Google to give me the best search results.  Even worse, I suspect (but cannot prove) that they have chosen to arbitrarily change results in pursuit of a political agenda, one that I do not share.  Like I said, I cannot prove this, but the fact that I wonder is all that matters.  I wonder, what other topics are unreliable?

It's exactly the same reason that I stopped reading the New York Times and listening to PBS: I developed the suspicion that they were poisoned sources of information, and that they were distorting my world view.  Were they?  It doesn't matter - once the suspicion forms, once trust is lost, there's simply no getting it back.

Essentially, I'm comfortable using Google for trivial searches of no import; for anything actually important, I can't afford to take the chance.  And so, hello, Bing.

In Internet Security terminology, this situation is called "Denial of Service via Resource Poisoning".  I don't know whether Google thought they could poison the resource, directing traffic away from wattsupwiththat.com.  It's very hard to see how they could not have intended exactly this.  What they don't seem to realize is that they've poisoned their own resource.

So go ahead and keep being evil, Google.  You'll do it with one less user whose searches you'll no longer be able to sell.

A homework assignment for anyone so interested: compare what turns up for the search term "Gun Control".

A helpful reminder when you're packing in your waistband

Finger off the trigger until you're lined up on target.  Boy, howdy.

Airport security FAIL

The entire justification for the Security Kabuki that is the TSA is to protect the traveling public. Sure, some of us are nasty and suspicious enough to think that the real raison d'être is to build a huge staff of unionized public employees, but the stated justification is keeping little Janie safe when she's flying back from her trip to Sleeping Beauty's castle. The TSA has utterly failed at this, and in fact is putting little Janie and her family at increased risk.

It's because they're not focused on the problem, but rather following a rote checklist of acts designed by a faceless bureaucrat in some windowless office a thousand miles away.

The TSA checks your ID and makes you go through a scanner (usually metal detector, but maybe PervScan®) to detect weapons. This is the source of the fail.

The goal isn't keeping weapons off airplanes, it's protecting little Janie's life. So what does the TSA do?

They make little Janie wait in line in an unsecured lobby with literally 400 other travelers. If you were a terrorist and wanted to terrorize the traveling public, what would you do?

You'd book a hotel room overlooking the lobby (thanks, Orlando International Airport!), you'd wait until the lobby was full of travelers impatiently waiting in the TSA line, and you'd shoot them.

The worst part of this? It's already happened.. Rome and LAX, not to mention the non-airport (but definitely hotel) scenario of Mumbai.

Little Janie's only chance is incompetent terrorists. She's in danger, placed there by incompetent bureaucrats.

The TSA should be made to fix this tomorrow, or it should be disbanded. The public would be safer with no airport security than this.

Do it for teh children™

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Orlando International Airport

From the Department of Irony

Documents in the Julian Assange rape case leaked to the Internet:

The ongoing rape-and-sexual-molestation investigation of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is taking another in a series of odd turns. A file containing 100 pages of interview transcripts, investigatory notes and other material in the case has appeared online, where it’s being eagerly dissected by Swedish WikiLeaks-watchers.

Transparency.  Information wants to - and will - be free.  You can also find this story under Petard (hoist by).

Censuses have consequences

Via TJIC, we find that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts expects to lose a congressional seat due to the last census.

Maybe if they didn't keep enacting obnoxious laws, insane taxation schemes, and all around treating everyone like a child, guys like might still live there (and they might not be losing a seat).

Then again, if we had some ham, we could make ham and eggs. If we had some eggs.

Climate Science Reasoned Discourse™ breaks out!

An Anonymous Coward stopped by this post, and left a comment I reproduce here in its entirety:

hey dumbass, that is why it is called weather (conditions over a short period of time) and not climate (conditions over a long period of time)

how quickly the deniers try to move light away from the reality that 2010 was the warmest year on record (long period of time, get it?)

but to your ignorant point, as the oceans become warmer more moisture is evaporated into the atmosphere, that leads, inevitably, to heavier rains in the summer and more snow in the winter.

you and inhofe need t service each, and quick, to deal with this latent bloviation you have bottled up inside

Whew! Glad for the constructive engagement!

Let's look at the science briefly, and then move on to the more interesting part.

1. The "2010 is the warmest year EVAH" is based on satellite measurements, which only go back 31 years. That's some righteous "long term" right there.

2. The 2010 figure does not include November or December, which have seen widespread record cold in the northern hemisphere. You're counting chickens that haven't hatched, AC.

But here's the interesting part. When skeptics like me use precisely the same tactics that the warmists use ("It's a record heat wave! ZOMG!"), folks like AC pop up with his Reasoned Discourse™: "dumbass", "ignorant", "bloviation".

Why people like this think they're great Defenders Of Science like this is quite frankly mystifying.

But thanks for providing the plucky comic relief, AC! Stop back soon!

Memory leak in Call of Duty: Black Ops

#1 Son says that the lag is so bad that it's unplayable.  He also says a patch is coming.

UPDATE 11 November 2010 17:08: #1 Son says that the patch is out, and automatically downloads when you run the game.  Careful, though - it's 8 MB, so depending on your connection, it might take a while to download.

Prediction: ur doin it wrong

Hat tip: #1 Son.

Concealed weapons

Ur doin' it rong. Seriously, repeatedly rong.

Hat tip: Don, via email.