An Illinois man was arrested early yesterday after he called 911 on several occasions to complain that his iPhone was not working.
Michael Alan Skopec, 48, dialed police emergency operators five times to beef about his malfunctioning Apple product ...
Somehow, it made me think of Ron White's joke about vegitarians:
Have you ever seen a healthy-looking vegetarian? They look like shit! They're all gaunt and yellow. After a while, their bodies become intolerant of other things. I'll give you an example: I was out to lunch with a comedian friend of mine, and later in the day he said- and I quote- "I feel nauseous and I have a headache. That soup I had must have had beef broth in it." Your system's kickin' back broth? You're a manly man, aren't you?
I did learn a couple things. First, factory reloads can be "cool" loads (loaded with less propellant). Not really a problem there - it makes the ammunition a bit less expensive and it makes the round a little slower. I guess that it's possible that some ranges like that, although it probably doesn't make enough difference to tell.
However, your gun might care. Less propellant means less energy, which means that the recoil spring will compress less than it would on a hotter load. My 1911 had been having intermittent problems where the slide didn't return to battery (the firing position). It would once in a while stop about a quarter inch from where it would in a full cycle. Pull the trigger, no bang.
I'd been shooting reloads from a local Texas company that had been recommended. Back in Atlanta, I had short some reloads from Atlanta Arms, which is what the range stocked.
I was thinking that I'd need a gunsmith to look at it. But I picked up a couple boxes of white box, and it worked flawlessly. The white box rounds are hotter.
I guess I'll feed the 1911 factory new ammo from now on.
The second thing I learned yesterday is that shooting slings are like corsets: they both work only when they're good and tight. I kept tightening the sling every time I took a run with the Enfield, and think that I probably need to tighten it a bit more. But man, it sure improves your groups.
Many people have heard Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, with its opposing national themes and artillery accompaniment. But Tchaikovsky wasn't the first to do this - Beethoven was.
But Beethoven was enthralled by Napoleon's fall. Originally a big fan of the First Consul, Beethoven flew into a rage when he heard that Napoleon had had himself crowned Emperor, ripping out the dedication page to his Third Symphony ("Eroica", the Heroic) which he had dedicated to Napoleon. Now, seeing the moving finger write, and anticipating that having writ it will move on, he turned himself to praising Napoleon's foe.
Wellington's Victory is very interesting indeed. In it, you will hear two themes, representing the British and the French sides in the battle of Vitoria. The theme representing the English Army is well known to you: Rule Britannia (and also God Save the King). The one representing the French Army will likely be a surprise. It's from a wildly popular French folk song, Marlbrough s'en va-t-en guerre ("Marlborough Has Left for the War"), whichyou will probably recognize as "For he's a jolly good fellow" (or possibly "The Bear went over the Mountain"). In 1813, this was still an exclusively French folk song.
The premier in a newly-liberated Vienna was to great acclimation, and great commercial success for Beethoven. Not only was the score explicitly patriotic, it was scored for accompaniment by field artillery (as was Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture some time later).
Games are as big as Hollywood, or bigger. So major introductions are watched like new major motion films for opening day financials. So what was CoD:MW3's opening day take?
Today is the South Texas Blogshoot, and yesterday was Veteran's Day. What better music to celebrate these with than a great song by a veteran. Don Walser was a Texas National Guardsman for years and years. While he wrote and performed a lot of music, his Guard career kept him from going to Nashville. As a result, be became one of the best known Country artists in Texas, while being little known outside the Lone Star State.
He was an interesting meeting of the old and the new. Influential in the Alt-Country scene, he still preserved the Old School country from the 1940s and 1950s. He was also known for his yodeling, and called the Pavarotti of the Plains. Quite a contrast, right there.
Today's song wasn't one of his, but rather one of the old greats he helped keep alive. Shotgun Boogie was one of Tennessee Ernie Ford's hits from way back. No yodeling, just great toe tapping music.
There it stands in the corner with the barrel so straight
I looked out the window and over the gate
The big, fat rabbits are a-jumpin' in the grass
Wait'll they hear my old shotgun blast
Shotgun Boogie I done saw your tracks ...
Look out Mr. Rabbit when I cock my hammer back.
Well, over on the ridge is a *scaley bark
Hick'er nuts so big you can see 'em in the dark
The big fat Squirrels they scratch and they bite
I'll be on that ridge before daylight
Shot-gun Boogie all I need is one shot ...
Look out bushy tail, tonight you'll be in the pot.
Well, I met pretty gal she was tall and thin
I asked her what she had, she said: "A FOX 410."
I looked her up and down and said: "Boy, this is love."
So we headed for the brush to shoot a big fat Dove
Shot-gun Boogie boy the feathers flew ...
Look out Mr. Dove when she draws a bead on you.
I sat down on a log, took her on my lap
She said: "Wait a minute, bub, you got to see my pap,
He's got a 16-gauge choked down like a rifle
He don't like a man that's a-gonna trifle."
Shot-gun Boogie draws a bead so fine ...
Look out big boy, he's loaded all the time.
Well, I called on her pap like a gentleman oughter
He said: "No brush hunter's gonna get my daughter."
He cocked back the hammer right on the spot
When the gun went off, I outran the shot
Shot-gun Boogie I wanted wedding bells ...
I'll be back little gal, when your pappy runs out of shells.
What to bring: Water is good, although it will be pretty temperate tomorrow. Any loud fun toys are always welcome; I plan on bringing the Enfield, along with a couple others (Watch out! He has an arsenal!!!1!). I stopped at McBrides and cleaned them out of .303 and got a shooting sling. Go me!
If anyone in Austin wants to go and needs or wants a ride, email be by 0800 tomorrow.
Doctors in America are up in arms over the suggestion that they have no business advising their patients on gun ownership and safety. The incensed medics insist that it's their duty to tell Americans not to keep guns in the home, or if they do, to keep them unloaded and locked away.
The debate on this issue was kicked off in June when a law went into effect in Florida which placed limits on doctors' ability to ask their patients what guns they owned and how they kept them stored, and prevented them entering any such information into people's medical records. ...
The passage of the Florida law made Dr Eric Fleegler of the Children's Hospital Boston pretty mad. He and some colleagues have written a paper, published today in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, which contends that guns kept at home are a major danger to Americans - particularly to American children.
...
A different press release issued by the Journal of Preventive Medicine editorial office also adds:
The American Academy of Pediatrics ... notes that a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to be used to kill a friend or family member than a burglar or other criminal.
And so once again we see a situation where orthodoxy is imposed via crummy statistical methods. Run up a dodgy study, suppress reporting of egregious mistakes in the study via a biased media that's stuck in a swamp of confirmation bias, and voila! Instant "settled" science.
Personally, if my doc tries to pull this on me, I'm going to warn him that (a) I almost certainly understand the statistics better than he does, (b) I absolutely understand the broken "scientific" process in play better than he does, and (c) unless he can convince me that I'm wrong on those, I will assume that his acceptance of quackery is more of a health risk to me than having a gun in the house.
But the conversation will probably never happen. It's Atlanta, not Boston, and so it means we're more likely to discuss which caliber is better.
We honor our veterans for the sacrifice they make. The saying goes that some gave all; all gave some. Others will write more eloquently than I about those who laid their ultimate sacrifice on the altar of our freedom. Today, I want to write about those whose sacrifice was less, but still terribly real.
It takes a special kind of strength to be a military wife, and growing up as the child of a military person is different in ways unimaginable to people who do not walk in those shoes. There's a void, an empty space where there should be a parent. And for that deployed parent, there's a void where the entire family should be.
Think on that, on what sacrifice is made for us. A sacrifice not just by the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines, but by their wives, husbands, and especially by their children. That sacrifice is for us.
That deserves more than a day of remembrance. Remember the families without whom we could not have these veterans.
Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
What I found most objectionable about the entire exchange—besides the fools in the audience cheering on Wagner and Maher, was Blue Collar Comedian Bill Engvall deciding our rights are his to compromise ...
Engvall has lost me as a fan when he says he doesn't see any reason for a person like himself to own an AK-47. This was just after he said he should be able to protect his family and that he is a avid hunter and fisherman. Fudds like Engvall need to realize that the gun prohibitionists see his deer rifle with a scope as "high-powered sniper rifle" and they will be coming after that as well.
Engvall needs to realize that the folks who buy tickets to his performances, who watch him on TV, who purchase his DVDs and who hire him to entertain their members aren’t the smug and snarky Maher crowd.
I kind of like Engvall, and went to one of his performances with #1 Son. But he is entirely out of touch with his audience, and needs to wake up. Fast.
The problem that the Dixie Chicks had wasn't that they spoke their minds (well, Natalie Maines spoke her mind, and wouldn't shut up). They did so to suck up to a foreign audience, in a time of national emergency. Of course, they had every right to do so - nobody has suggested prosecution for their statements.
But what they didn't understand is that there is a song that's played every single day on the radio stations that they relied on for their success.
Sean May, 26, a front desk supervisor at the hotel, told WJXT TV-4 in on Thursday that his boss told him to remove his lapel pin or go home. He went home.
May is now fighting the policy. [May has since been fired - Borepatch]
St. Johns County Commissioner Mark Miner, a sergeant in the Florida National Guard, criticized the hotel's management.
"The Casa Monica Hotel and Kessler Enterprises certainly have the legal right to forbid their employees from wearing an American flag pin," Miner said in a written statement Friday. "However, their inability to discern between the flag of our nation and other pins and buttons their policies forbid is of great concern to me."
I agree with Sgt. Miner. The hotel (and Marriott) have every right to set their own employee standards and policies. No question.
And I have every right to think that they are unpatriotic jerks who will never see me at their property. And to recommend the same to anyone who will care to listen.
As someone who has been in the vicinity of the Marketing Department for some time, let me just say that this is enormously damaging for both the hotel and for Marriott (note: the hotel is independently owned but is a Marriott franchisee). This story will reach a bunch of people, in a high impact manner. It would have been much less damaging for the Hotel to let employees wear any old badge they wanted.
And guys like me are angry enough to do things like choose a highly specific blog post title for this post. Google pays more attention to metadata (things like post titles) that regular data (the body text), and so if this moves up in the Google rankings, there's at least a chance that anyone who searches for the hotel name will find this.
And quite frankly, they should find this. Perhaps they won't really care. But if they do, they may choose a different hotel, and that would serve the unpatriotic jerks who own the Casa Monica Hotel with a bit of poetic justice. They'll also learn something about Marriott corporation, too. What they choose to do with that is up to them.
Remember marketeers: Google sees all, forgets nothing.
And let me leave an open invitation to the marketing folks at the Casa Monica and at Marriott: if you want to reply here (in the unlikely even that you even find this post), you have an open invitation. I will post your statement unedited. I may snark on it, so if you bring me drivel, please make it high caliber drivel.
Comrades! The People's Commissars in the West Wing have set up a bolshoi organ for petitions from the Masses. One has come to our attention that deserves your support. Show the Kulaks, Hoarders, and Wreckers that their obstructionism will not hold back the Glorious Five Year Plan! Stirring words have been written, and your signature on the petition will enshrine them:
We demand a vapid, condescending, meaningless, politically safe response to this petition.
Since these petitions are ignored apart from an occasional patronizing and inane political statement amounting to nothing more than a condescending pat on the head, we the signers would enjoy having the illusion of success. Since no other outcome to this process seems possible, we demand that the White House immediately assign a junior staffer to compose a tame and vapid response to this petition, and never attempt to take any meaningful action on this or any other issue. We would also like a cookie.
Go and sign, Comrades. The future of the Revolution is at stake!
Yup, Philosopher Kings, running the Government. I mean, who didn't see that if you let people submit online petitions, it will soon look like an Internet forum? Or Geocities. (answer: the Philosopher Kings running the government never imagined in their wildest dreams that this might occur)
In the now-agreed narrative, the current, or soon-to-be-ex prime minister of Greece is a villain, because he threatened to set in motion a chain of events that would have prevented Europe from giving Greece yet more money it has no intention of paying back. But if he is replaced and his successor agrees (reluctantly? “oh, all right, if you insist”?) to let Europe give Greece yet more money it has no intention of paying back, along the way agreeing to ‘austerity’ conditions it has no intention of actually implementing, you can guarantee the market will cheer this as a positive and healthy development and rally like gangbusters.
It’s enough to make you wonder where on earth Wall Street gets its reputation for being populated with brilliant minds.
I've been working in the Internet Security industry for a long, long time. Long enough not just to have published in the technical press, but to have those publications go out of print (all you PlayStation Network kids get off my lawn!).
I say this not to boast, but to establish my bona fides. I've personally been involved in the process of contacting a computer vendor to tell them that we've found a vulnerability in their product. Some vendors have been great to work with - Microsoft was very good, even in the 1990s: they'd just ask that we hold an announcement until they had a patch written and tested. After all, it doesn't do anyone any good to announce a vulnerability if there's no fix.
Hey, all y'all are really screwed! Aren't we the cleverest kids on the block?
We worked very hard at Responsible Disclosure, which is more or less described above. Not everyone did. Sometimes, they were Black Hats, keeping their exploits to themselves ("Day Zero" exploits, called that because the vendor hasn't created a patch yet, and so the clock can't start running on your patch cycle).
Sometimes, announcements went out because a vendor simply refused to make a patch, or sometimes even acknowledge that they'd been told. The security mailing list archives are filled with threads along the line of I'm announcing because Foo, Inc won't reply to my notification about their vulnerability in FooOs.
Protip to vendors: it's considered polite to have a "security@foo.com" address, with someone who actually reads the emails.
And so to the big security news, about Apple's App Store basically having no security at all. Reader Joseph emails to point us to this:
A man who created a bogus stock price tracker app for the iPhone that was in fact malware has been thrown out of Apple’s developer program. That would seem uncontroversial until you discover the app was designed to highlight a security flaw rather than cause damage or steal data.
Charlie Miller was told his right to create and upload apps had been terminated “effective immediately.”
If Miller’s name seems familiar, that may be because he’s a perennial winner at the PWN2OWN competition, held at the CanSecWest security event in Vancouver each year. Contestants can ask judges to visit a URL using various combinations of hardware, operating system and browser, with the latest publicly available security updates applied. Last year was a particularly bad day for Apple with a MacBook Pro running Safari the first computer to fall (Miller being the successful attacker) and the iPhone the first smartphone hacked.
Now this is an interesting situation. Miller did not notify Apple until after he had created his app. Some people in the industry think that's a no-no. Certainly, this is why Apple expelled him from their Developer program.
Me, I'm not sure that this was the right thing to do. I personally have had vendors tell me that they don't want to fix a vulnerability I've reported to them. There are lots of excuses they give; if they're honest, they'll say "it's too hard" - this happened with Sun Microsystems, where the bug was buried deep in the guts of RPC. The code was 15 years old then, and nobody really knew how it worked (yes, this happens more than you'd think). Everyone was afraid to touch the code, because the breakage they might do in "fixing" the problem might be horrific. OK, fair enough.
But usually the official excuse you get back is "we were unable to recreate the bug, and so view the problem as theoretical". The proper response to this is OK here's some exploit code, biatches. Usually gets the proper level of attention.
But how do you do this in the App Store "Walled Garden" environment? The exploit has to be an app. And the app has to come through the App Store - if you jail break your phone, there's no guarantee that the code works the same way. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.
If you're talking about a serious vulnerability, you need certainty, because the cost of the fix will be measured in tens of thousands of dollars to get the patch created, and much more for everyone to get the upgrade installed. You really really don't want to go off half cocked here. Word will get around the security community.
So what was Miller supposed to do? Yeah, he could have notified Apple, but they are infamous for their lousy attitude to security. And that notification would put them on the lookout for interesting App Store submissions from Miller.
Infinite Loop. n. See Loop, Infinite. It's in Cupertino, actually, and Apple's HQ is right there.
And so, Jeremiah Wright like, Apple's security chickens are coming home to roost. They've demonstrated repeated contempt for the security industry, and have repeatedly flouted expected practice. They are presumptively in perpetual wagon-circling mode, and so they can't play the victim card that mean old Charlie Miller isn't following the rules when he basically said here's your exploit code, biatches.
And so the way that they expelled him from their App Developer group looks petty and spiteful. It also looks pathetic. Consider: Miller is perhaps the world expert in Apple exploits. He can feed information to any of a thousand other App Developers.
And a note to Apple users: most of you think that you have good security. You really don't. That will change when Apple gets as good an attitude towards security as Microsoft has. For now, assume that you have nothing, plus or minus twenty percent.
Not an "assault carbine", but a full, belt fed 7.4 pound machine gun. And plastic cased ammo for it that is light enough so that every infantryman can be a machine gunner.
El Reg gives us the skinny:
But US military boffins at the famous Picatinny Arsenal have been working on this situation for some time. Since ammo weight and bulk is much of the problem, they have come up with a new kind of ammunition: Cased Telescoped cartridges.
In a cased telescoped round, the bullet is no longer attached to the tip of a brass case full of propellant powder. The new case is shorter, fatter and made of plastic, so weighing substantially less, and the bullet is sunk into the middle of the propellant which makes the whole round shorter - it has been "telescoped". A shorter round weighs less itself, and also means that the gun's action, feed equipment etc is smaller and thus lighter as well. It's a trick originally developed for tanks, to make the turret smaller and easier to protect.
According to the Picatinny scientists, their new LMG and a thousand rounds of its plastic-cased-telescoped ammo weigh no less than 20.4 pounds less than the current M249 (a version of which is also used by British troops) and a thousand ordinary 5.56mm brass cartridges. The new LMG shaves no less than 8.3 pounds off the 15.7-lb M249, coming in at just 7.4lb - actually lighter than a standard British SA80 assault rifle! This, perhaps, explains Specialist Smith's opinion that it would be reasonable for all soldiers to carry such weapons, rather than just heavy-weapons specialists.
This brings to mind the Garand, and why it's chambered in .30-06. A 6.5mm round would probably been better - adequate stopping power combined with lighter weight. But the Army had millions of rounds in .30-06 in warehouses, and so the Garand was designed for that caliber.
Shifting from the poodle-shooter 5.56mm NATO round to either the plastic cased telescope round (or better yet to fully caseless - if they can make it work) would mean cheap ammo for all of us, but a big expense for the Army. And so technical committees will meet for years, tests will be run, and no decision will be made.
And Our Guys will have to hump heavier, less capable weapons into harm's way. Some may die because of it. Too much of the military works like this:
Two privates are on latrine detail, sweeping up soiled bits of toilet paper around the latrines. Just as they get all the bits swept up into a pile for collection, a gust of wind grabs one piece and sends it swirling into the camp, high above the heads of both soldiers. To their horror, it goes right in the window of the Colonel's office.
One soldier says to the other," I'll go in and get it, the old man is short sighted, half-deaf and naps a lot. I should be fine."
So off he goes, slipping quietly into the Colonel's office. He comes back a minute later, shaking his head.
"Well, did you get it?" says the first soldier.
"No" the second sighs," I was too late. The old man had already signed it."
Yeah, it's an old joke. I'm only laughing on the outside.
I've been ranting about the simply appalling security in SCADA systems (industrial control systems used in factories, power generation and transmission, and other critical infrastructure). The security is roughly as strong as moonbeams or cotton candy, and last year's STUXNET attack on Iran's nuclear enrichment gave not just a great demonstration of the possibilities, but actual source code to people who might be interested.
So ask yourself who might be interested. Criminals, perhaps? Well, guess what's controlled by these very same SCADA systems: prisons:
Strauchs began his project to investigate the security of industrial control systems in prisons after he was asked to investigate an incident during which all the cell doors on one (unnamed) prison's death row spontaneously opened. The cause was eventually traced back to a random power surge, but the incident got Strauchs thinking and prompted him to have a closer look at the security of industrial control systems in prisons.
Industrial control systems in prisons have no business being connected to the internet. Despite this, the team of researchers led by Strauchs discovered every prison system they looked at was connected to the internet one way or another.
So what can you do via a hacked prison SCADA system? Everything: turn the lights on or off, open the cell doors, shut down the CCTV monitoring systems. And control what information is shown to the guards - for example, you could open cell doors while having the display in the control room show that they were closed.
What could possibly go wrong?
Connected to the Internet. Sheesh. I can fix that one ...
Traction Control has a set of suggestions that are very, very good:
Floor Level: Pick a moderately high floor – 3rd or 4th floors provide protection against thrown objects from the street.Highest floors (15th or higher) may be problematic in a fire alarm evacuation.
There are a bunch more. I would add that if someone knocks on your door, you should also call down to the front desk. If the person is not security (or the police), then the front desk guy will call security (or the police).
But you did bring your .45, right? ;-)
This actually happened once to Mom & Dad (who were tragically .45-less at the time). But they called down, and soon the local Po-Po were doing a security sweep of the building.
As a kid, I played the usual sorts of kid's board games - Risk, Stratego, that sort of thing. But my world changed on the Christmas of 1969 when Older Brother got the Jutland game as a present.
This was Jim Dunnigan's first game (yes, that Jim Dunnigan), pitting the Dreadnoughts of the Royal Navy against the Kaiser's High Seas Fleet. And I was hooked, in a big way.
Two liter jug of ginger ale? Check.
Bags o' pretzels? Check
Three day weekend? Double check.
Roll those die and let the gaming begin.
I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when I discovered Steel Panthers ... a digital form of PanzerBlitz!! Keep your joy sticks.
If it doesn't have a diesel engine and pack at least a 75mm gun it's not gaming.
Yeah, we got Panzer Blitz, too, where I learned to love the 81mm mortar. And that led to the hard core drug, from the pushers at Simulation Publications, Inc, the publishers of Strategy & Tactics. Each month you got a magazine full of military history, and a brand new game. Yeah, I got the issue shown here. Don't remember much about the game (other than Yeah, I got it), but I must have gotten something like 60 games from S&T. Plus a bunch that SPI published that weren't included in the magazine.
I suspect that Mom & Dad wondered if I'd date girls, at least for a while.
So Stretch's comment really took me down memory lane. For those of you who might care (i.e. are as big a nerd as I), here are the games that I spent a lot of time playing, back in my misspent youth.
Strategy I. This was a generic gaming design, where the (made up) map would let you play scenarios ranging from Dark Ages Hungary through the 30 Years War to the World Wars and beyond. It was insanely complicated, which as you can imagine totally appealed to my young, intellectually precocious self. The units would change based on the scenario, with the Armor unit representing Panzer divisions or Hungarian Cavalry, depending on your scenario.
A Mighty Fortress. I'm sure that it will shock everyone to find out that I was utterly captivated by a game depicting Sixteenth Century warfare. It was completely Machiavellian, dealt with units that I'd never heard of before, and was a pleasant change of pace from the joys of 81mm mortars. Nice though they are. This game was nominated for all sorts of gaming prizes - probably because it was more than just me that liked a change from the Eastern Front.
Diplomacy. This one was cool, because the military "battles" were even less intricate than what you saw in Risk. Negotiations and treachery were everything, with deals cut in (non) smoke filled rooms (c'mon, we were 14 or so), and shifting alliances all nominally based on World War I. What was particularly interesting to 14 year old Borepatch is that up to seven people could play (there's not so much negotiating when there are only two players) and some of them were girls! Mom and Dad must have breathed a sigh of relief.
It was also when I found that girls could be even more treacherous than boys. Kind of opened my eyes, there.
But if you really wanted to get the chicks over to Game Night (and let's face it, who doesn't?), nothing beats Cosmic Encounter. And I mean nothing. Nominally Science Fictionish, it was a battle between alien races for Galactic Domination. Rules were simple, each "race" had a Special Power (that let them cheat in particular ways), and games only took 15 minutes. This came out when I was in college and winding down from the more hard core military gaming, but this would come out all the time at parties. The chicks would dig it, which meant that we would dig it even more. We ended up getting most of the expansion packs.
There are more, but these were the highlights. Honorable Mention goes to Sniper (WWII urban combat) where I developed a taste for rifle grenades. You had to set up two teams, a rifle grenade fire team and an assault team, and time the attack very well. But if you did that, it didn't matter that you were playing as the Russians with Mosins against the Germans with MP40s. But after a while, nobody wanted to play ...
And of course we played Dungeons and Dragons, but that's not very interesting. Pretty much everyone played D&D. The only thing that's interesting was that I started in 1974.
One reason to own firearms is so that your stuff doesn't get stolen. So what about when you fly? What protects your stuff there?
Your guns.
Via Billy Ockham, we find this very interesting talk (from a security conference, no less) on how to check your guns with the airlines in a way that neither the Airline nor the TSA can get access to the locked container. Of course, you've cleverly sized the container so that your valuable stuff rides along with the gun.
Language warning - there's the usual sort of mild profanity commonly heard at the less "corporate" security conferences.
A lot of folks already knew this, but the talk is particularly informative and entertaining. It's also a window into the security culture that I swim in - there's quite a strong focus on risk analysis and technical mitigations, as well as a quite obvious pleasure in using "The Man's" rules to your advantage.
Video games are becoming much more intricate. #2 Son's favorite video game was Oblivion, which he played for months. Skyrim - the sequel is coming out on Friday (expect him to sit up with a six pack of Monster starting Friday night).
There are serious actors doing the voices - actors like Christopher Plummer.
Not much of a gamer, myself (the original Civilization convinced me that seeing the sun rise through the office window because you were gaming all night is, err, sub-optimal for me). But this industry has become something very interesting indeed.
A lot of the regulation - everything from bolt threads to type fonts - is carried out by tens of thousands of standardization agreements worked out by the industries involved. The solutions that arise aren't always optimal, but they usually end up being workable. After two decades of fumbling, we have settled on a de facto standard for computer operating systems. It has imperfections - some serious - but it generally works. Imagine being saddled with a computer architecture defined by some central planning committee in 1983 ...
Putting the decision-making process in the hands of an informed leadership sounds attractive but it more often than not ends up being less efficient that the trial-and-error consensus process of Western democracies. And when you think about it, the standardization agreements I've discussed are decision-making by an informed leadership. In fact, they are decision-making by the informed leadership.
The French celebrity website Staragora said Mr. Obama’s comment was “risky” and “not very cool, for the French president [was] humiliated in public.”
“Barack Obama has openly and publicly ridiculed the physical [appearance of] Nicolas Sarkozy,” Staragora said, adding that Mr. Obama’s comments were delivered “without pity.”
All we can do is dream of the day when a President notorious for his unthinking malapropisms leaves the Oval Office, and we don't have to be ashamed to be Americans on our vacations to Paris.
Global Warming hysteria has had a good run - over twenty years, but we're approaching the end of the road for the Global Warming Industry (bloated scientific bureaucracies, bloated green NGOs, the bloated UN IPCC, etc). While I shall shed no tears for this crowd, it's not my dislike of the corrupted state of the science that leads me to this conclusion; rather, it's a merciless financial calculus that is playing itself out across the globe.
And just in the nick of time, too. While terribly damaging to the world's economies, the worst part is the terrible impact green policies are having on the developing world. The result of the anti-growth/anti-industrialization policies is literally keeping a billion people in poverty, with its associated high mortality and associated misery.
A quick level set before I get to the meat of my argument. This is an outstanding introduction to the entire situation. The first part recaps the state of the science, and lays out how pathetically weak the "consensus" view really is. The second part lays out the political landscape: where this came from (Al Gore came to this very late) and where it's going. Warning: this video is over an hour long, but is well worth watching in its entirety.
The film ends on a very depressing note, pointing out (rightly) that the huge bureaucracy is entrenched, and will resist all efforts to reform it. My take: it doesn't matter.
The green movement is about to get steamrolled by what's steamrolling the entire Progressive welfare state: all governments world wide are in a fiscal crisis. Some are in bad shape (the United States and Germany), some are in worse shape (the PIIGS countries - Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain), and some are in denial (Red China). The state has grown aggressively, economies are buckling under the load, and Progressives are finding that they have run out of other people's money.
It's at this moment that the IPCC has asked for a multi-tens of trillions of dollars of wealth transfers to the developing world (money funneled through the UN, natch) for "Climate Change abatement". And please pay no attention to the past ten years of cooling weather and a series of very public scandals in the Climate Science establishment.
Not happening, despite the entrenched green bureaucracy and their cheering section in the biased Main Stream Media. But that's not the end of things.
As austerity bites hard, governments will be forced to slash programs. They'll be on the lookout for expensive programs that aren't particularly popular, no matter how ideologically committed their supporters are. We are in fact already seeing this: Spain has dramatically slashed its solar power subsidies, to the point where "green" companies are going bankrupt. You see, the subsidies were the entire profit margin, and then some - how else can you deliver electricity that would normally cost five times as much as the alternatives?
Remember, this is the "renewable" power program that Obama modeled his now-stillborn "renewable" power program on. Not happening. But that's not the end of things, either.
The green establishment has been living on hyping disaster - ZOMG Thermageddon!!!1!!one! - for over a decade. Essentially, it's all they know. So they'll go try to wring a few more drops out of the public rag by amping the hype even more. Expect the next IPCC report (Assessment Report #5, in perhaps 2 years) to be positively biblical in its predictions of utter destruction by a vengeful Goddess Gaia.
This will all be going on as the Euro collapses and all governments are wondering what else they can cut. If it gets noticed at all, it will be a political problem for governments that would normally be sympathetic. In the collapse, they can't afford to be.
As an example, ask yourself whether Obama would choose to put a billion dollars into the IPCC and the science establishment, or into ACORN? Now spread this calculus across all of Europe and Asia as well.
There may be ten billion dollars a year going into the maw of the green bureaucracy. As that bureaucracy makes life unpleasant for governments in the middle of a very painful retrenchment that is simply unavoidable, they'll make themselves a huge target. Add in the continuing scandals, and it's easy to imagine a fig leaf of we're not canceling anything, just suspending the programs until we get the scandals sorted out.
Which somehow never seems to get sorted out, and ultimately the cuts become permanent.
Like I said, this isn't a rant about the corrupt science. It's not even much of a prediction, because it's easy to call an outcome when there are no other alternatives. But it's the end of the road for the green establishment. Their ideology lives by eating other people's money, and now the money's run out. They're fixin' to find out where they live on the priority list.
Hint: they'll find their place at the unemployment office. And good riddance.
UPDATE 6 November 2011 21:50: This is incredibly important, about how it's quite simply immoral to keep the developing world in poverty. I don't really agree with the whole green energy bit, but everything else if God's Own Truth. The hard core Greens should be ashamed of themselves.
Passing through Tyler, I was channel surfing the radio waves and this came on:
Judy Garland show tunes, in the Borepatchmobile. Not that there's anything wrong with that. And followed by Nat, Deano, and Doris Day. Made for a fun change of pace.
I've been away for two weeks, and the birdfeeder is empty. Probably has been for a week now, based on how fast the birds clear it out. It's causing an unexpected protest.
Rimsky-Korsakov was one of the group of Russian nationalist composers known as "The Five" - Modest Mussorgsky was also one of the group, and after Mussorgsky's death, Rimsky-Korsakov arranged much of his material now part of the common Orchestral Canon.
Mut Rimsky-Korsakov was a fine composer in his own right. Probably his best known long piece is his Orchestral Suite "Scheherazade". Undoubtedly, this is his most famous short piece. You've very likely heard it.
It's insanely complicated, to the point that it is an irresistible challenge to musicians of all types. If you need to prove your musical chops, this is the one to dust off. The original score is for flute, but other instrumentalists pick up this gauntlet, too - for example, the Canadian Brass on Tuba:
Did it in my usual 14+ hours. The trick is to not stop much - I stopped four times, to gas up the Jeep.
Man, the traffic on I-35 stinks. All along the way - Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas until Waco - drivers were courteous to a fault. On I-35, not so much. Or at all.
Driving ProTip: if the speed limit sign says "70", then going 65 in the left hand lane on a two lane highway is considered bad form, mkay?
Fifteen years ago, we were in Weston Super Mare, in England. We were lately arrived from the US to spend a year in Blighty. We went for a seaside weekend at one of the old hotels on the Irish Sea.
It was November 5th, and we had never heard of Guy Fawkes before. As we sat in the grandstand of the Weston Super Mare Rugby Football Club, watching fireworks getting launched into the cloud deck 100 feet over our head, we learned the story.
Guy was a Catholic, in an England still in the grips of religious war. Guy formed a gang, and plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament - and King James - in what's known as the Gunpowder Plot.
The plot was betrayed, and Parliament saved. Guy and company were hung, drawn, and quartered. It was such a jolly good time that ever since Brits build enormous great bonfires, and burn "The Guy" in effigy. In this enlightened age of Tolerance, the Pope is (mostly) mo longer burned as well.
Naturally, adult beverages are enjoyed. So build a fire, open a beverage, and join in the jolly good fun. Even if fireworks aren't being launched into the rain.
Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot.
The Greenhouse effect attributed to Carbon Dioxide is generally thought to cause a warming of around 1.2°C for a doubling of CO2. So why do we hear about catastrophic warming of 5° or more? Positive forcings.
The theory is that as the planet warms, the increased temperature will cause other reactions that cause further warming. Essentially, these feedbacks cause an amplification of a modest warming into an out of control disaster.
Well, that's the theory, anyway. So how does experimental evidence stack up against this theory? Not so well, actually:
OK, so the world has warmed up a bit since 1950. This is terrible, because it means that the huge amounts of carbon stored in peat bogs will now start to be emitted into the atmosphere, which will cause more warming, which will release more peaty carbon and so on until all the Earth is a baking lifeless hell.
It must be true - it says so in New Scientist ("Peat bogs harbour carbon time bomb ... the process appears to be feeding off itself ... It's a vicious circle ... we have disturbed something critical that controls the stability of the carbon cycle in our planet"). Aaiee!
Steady on. Boffins working in Canada and Germany have looked into this properly, and they say it's a load of cobblers. Studying the decomposition of bog peat in the lab over two years, they have found that increases in temperature have no effect on peat's ability to sequester (that is, keep out of the atmosphere) its huge stores of carbon.
You know, you'd think that if the science were so rock solid, experimental evidence supporting Global Warming would be found everywhere. Odd that so much of it isn't.
I've traveled a lot at work, for the last fifteen years or so, and this has led to a lot of time away from home. The "Glamor of travel" mostly isn't very glamorous, and doesn't make up for the time you missed baby's first steps, or a concert of Little League game.
But life goes on, and duty calls. By the time this posts, I'll be in Alabama, heading west on I-20. It's not a hotel room waiting, but FOB Borepatch, but it doesn't have family there.
But close your eyes and pretend, and count the days until the travel ends. At least for a little while.
Trent Willmon is a Texas singer/songwriter, who released this song on his eponymous 2004 album.
Exit 65, Room 232
It's nothing fancy, ain't much of a view
It's no white house with picket fences
But we close our eyes and pretend
At our home sweet Holiday Inn
Wish I could keep you,
But it's out of my hands
It's best that I can do,
I pray you'll understand
How much I love you, God I feel guilty
So I try to make amends
At our home sweet Holiday Inn
I just get a couple of days
To steal you away
Make up for all the time
I missed
And I hope that we can fit it all in
At our home sweet Holiday Inn
You've grown so fast that
I just can't believe
How much you're changing,
But you still look like me
Maybe some day,
This will all be different
But baby until then
We've got out home sweet Holiday Inn
Your daddy loves you
And I'll be dreaming of you
And counting the days until I see you again
At our home sweet Holiday Inn
At our home sweet Holiday Inn
Kudos to Redmond for a quick turnaround mitigating a Day Zero bug being exploited to install malware:
Microsoft has issued a temporary fix for a critical Windows vulnerability that has already been exploited to install highly sophisticated malware that targeted manufacturers of industrial systems.
In an advisory issued late Thursday, Microsoft said the previously unknown flaw in the Win32k TrueType font-parsing engine affected every supported version of Windows, including Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008, which are the most secure to date. The critical vulnerability was recently exploited to spread Duqu, malware that some researchers say was derived from last year's Stuxnet worm that sabotaged Iran's uranium enrichment program.
All Windows versions are vulnerable, and this new attack is no joke. Here's what you do:
On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003:
For 32-bit systems, enter the following command at an administrative command prompt:Echo y| cacls "%windir%\system32\t2embed.dll" /E /P everyone:N
For 64-bit systems, enter the following command from an administrative command prompt:Echo y| cacls "%windir%\system32\t2embed.dll" /E /P everyone:N Echo y| cacls "%windir%\syswow64\t2embed.dll" /E /P everyone:N
On Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2:
For 32-bit systems, enter the following command at an administrative command prompt:Takeown.exe /f "%windir%\system32\t2embed.dll" Icacls.exe "%windir%\system32\t2embed.dll" /deny everyone:(F)
For 64-bit systems, enter the following command at an administrative command prompt:Takeown.exe /f "%windir%\system32\t2embed.dll" Icacls.exe "%windir%\system32\t2embed.dll" /deny everyone:(F) Takeown.exe /f "%windir%\syswow64\t2embed.dll" Icacls.exe "%windir%\syswow64\t2embed.dll" /deny everyone:(F)
You should be able to copy and paste the command into a command shell window.
A patch is coming, but this will keep you protected until then.
The conversation naturally spilled onto the support section of Apple's web site, with one particular thread attracting heavy viewership and numerous theories, explanations and solutions for the mysterious battery problem. All without public input from the company that actually makes the iPhone 4S.
Now, after more than two weeks of silence, Apple has released a statement acknowledging the battery problem, which can be traced not to the battery itself, but to bugs in Apple's update to its mobile operating system, iOS 5.
Sadly, their culture seems to be closed, secretive, and reluctant to admit any problems exist. We've seen this before, where they lag other companies by months getting security updates out for serious problems in Java. Among other things.
A fair amount of security comes from culture. When a company recognizes that it's important, you get better security over the long haul. Mozilla has always had an aggressive security approach, with rapid fixes to problems. Microsoft, once famous for its lousy security, has had the religion for almost ten years now. Windows 7 has pretty decent security, probably as good as Apple's OS X.
Yeah, you heard me right. Windows is probably as secure as OS X.
Note to Apple: Windows 8 is on the horizon. Microsoft's security trajectory is headed upwards; yours is headed downwards. Do the math.
Apple users, there's plenty to like about their products. Just don't kid yourselves that your security is any better than anyone else's.
The scene: dinner at The Counter (awesome burger join on Mansell Rd in Roswell, GA; recommended). The TV at the counter (with the volume mercifully turned down to zero) is playing Fox News, where the talking heads are talking about how Herman Cain is still beating Mitt Romney in the Rassmussen poll.
#1 Son: If Cain gets the nomination, it will at least get rid of the race argument in the election.
Me: Yeah. Mitt's pretty white.
#1 Son: He's a Mormon from Utah. You don't get whiter than that.
#2 Son: Unless you're a vampire.
#1 Son: Is Romney as gay as Twilight?
Me: Romney is more gay than Twilight. Not in a clinical sense* but in an actual, you know, gayer than Twilight sense.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
* Rather, in a gayer-than-Twilight sense. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
The first generation of the system built it, and knew how to run it; they had some actual familiarity with it. The second generation saw it built, and understood how it was supposed to work, even if they weren’t directly familiar with the country it was designed to control. The third generation just knew if you got into certain universities and parrotted certain things, you could get power.
This third generation- miserable, helpless twits and teacher’s pets- are the ones in charge now, and their lack of distinction at anything except getting good grades in high school and high SAT scores explains why they are so completely helpless in dealing with reality or political opposition except by calling out the thought police.
You don't necessarily know how to play it. Al Fin looks at rich people's "Survival Houses", and waxes skeptical:
The problem with many of the country club survivalists is that they are not likely to have the level of common sense and practical skills which allow them to compensate for their expensive technology -- when it inevitably breaks down.
Once the design engineers and construction contractors are gone, it is up to the owner to keep all those expensive gadgets from breaking down and leaving him vulnerable to the elements and the unfriendlies. Gold, food, and practical trade goods might attract competent helpers, of course. But the smart survivalist will try to make his survival plans in conjunction with a competent community of widely skilled, practical minded persons -- and not try to go it alone, no matter how much money he can put into the project.
This applies to gun owners too, natch.
And how is it that I haven't had a TEOTWAWKI tag until now?
Wisconsin's Catholic hierarchy have told the faithful that they'd really prefer them not to pack heat when they go to Mass, after the state enacted a new law authorising the carrying of concealed weapons.
But, the Bishops add, if parishoners do want to come to mass with guns, tasers, knives and billy clubs, well, that's OK too.
Me, I want the Padre to bless some silver bullets. Those things could come in handy. Actually, this would, too:
This is a simply outstanding - and utterly damning - indictment of the current state of Climate "Science". Pass this on to your friends who think that the science is settled. But the carefully reasoned summary of the scientific discussion leads to this:
At least* sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive, duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as this griffon vulture.
At least crop circle believers cannot almost double your electricity bills and increase fuel poverty while driving jobs to Asia, to support their fetish.
At least creationists have not persuaded the BBC that balanced reporting is no longer necessary.
At least homeopaths have not made expensive condensing boilers, which shut down in cold weather, compulsory, as John Prescott did in 2005.
At least astrologers have not driven millions of people into real hunger, perhaps killing 192,000 last year according to one conservative estimate, by diverting 5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel*.
That’s why it matters.
Yeah, this matters. Lives are literally at stake; the environment is literally at stake, the world is in terrible danger of being ruined.
It's 1993. You're the manager of a former Soviet factory. You know that the future is Capitalism, not Communism. You know that you need to export to survive. You put your Top Marketing Team on the problem.
You don't know that all they know about Western TV is what they saw watching MTV.
Dancing (former) Soviet soldiers chanting I want you and Position number 2 are perhaps not the most reassuring marketing campaign. Even if one of the soldiers takes a drag on his cigarette and says Relax.
There's quite a lot to be learned about the Cold War from this advert.
Greece on Tuesday reshuffled its military chiefs amid a political crisis that could see a government downfall following a controversial decision to put an EU debt rescue deal to a referendum.
A state security council under Prime Minister George Papandreou replaced the heads of the general staff, the army, navy and airforce, and discharged a dozen army and navy officers, the defence ministry said in a statement.
But don't worry:
A defence ministry source told AFP that the reshuffle was previously scheduled and not linked to political developments.
William the Coroner reminded us that Life's symphony sometimes plays fortissimo, and sometimes plays pianissimo, but always plays. If we listen, and remember:
Never Forget.
Never forget that the freedoms we enjoy were paid for in blood. The founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their honour to establish them and young men died to keep them.
Never forget that freedoms are hard to maintain, and we must be vigilant and avoid external and internal enemies. Freedom must be maintained not only at the borders but at the ballot box. That corruption is insidious, and might be more dangerous than a blustering demagogue. It is also worth remembering that the worst devils have the fairest faces and the most seductive voices.
Never forget that there are many symbols on the gravestones, and many skin colours of the people underneath them but blood is always red.
Never forget that there are men still on duty, from the jungles of southeast Asia to the beaches of Normandy, from Bellau Wood to the Coral Sea
Government economists (and government-sympathizer economists like Paul Krugman) like to talk about a "multiplier" effect, where government spending is amplified by the ripple effect of money injected into the economy. This was in fact a major justification for Keynsian spending programs in general and the "Stimulus" in particular.
So riddle me this, Keynsianman: what's the multiplier for the "Green" jobs programs, like Solyndra? It seems that it's not just less than 1.0, it's actually negative:
Q: When is a job not a job?
A: When it's a green job.
This is not a joke, it's not funny and it's not new. Anyone who reads this blog has been aware of this inescapable truth for some time. They'll have read (back in March 2010) about the research by Dr Gabriel Calzada Alvarez of the Rey Juan Carlos University in Spain showing that for every "green job" created by taxpayer subsidy another 2.2 jobs are destroyed in the real economy. They'll have read (February 2011) about the even more damning research from Verso economics, showing that for every "green job" created by taxpayer subsidy another 3.7 jobs are destroyed in the real economy. They'll have read about the report by Economics professor Gordon Hughes, appropriately titled The Myth Of Green Jobs. And they'll surely be aware of the stupendously large quantities of US taxpayers' money – $38.6 billion of it – which has been squandered by President Obama on futile enterprises like the solar energy company Solyndra.
Remember how Obama was modeling the US Solar Power effort on the Spanish model? Every solar job there came at the expense of 2.2 jobs lost in higher taxes.
Quite frankly, I'd be more impressed with the governing elite if they actually would do their homework once in a while.
A drunk taxi driver was caught naked by police in Moscow following a rampage in which he smashed into 17 cars. City police became aware of Vitaly Grodi's erratic driving after he ignored a road sign and refused to stop.
The driver bumped into 17 vehicles including a police van. He also narrowly avoided hitting a school bus. The driver was finally caught by officers who were shocked to find him in nothing but his birthday suit when he emerged from his cab.
Must have been trying to complete Stolichnaya's Glorious Five Year Plan ...
ARTICLE I: You do not have the right to a new car, big screen color TV or any other form of wealth. More power to you if you can legally acquire them, but no one is guaranteeing anything.
ARTICLE II: You do not have the right to never be offended. This country is based on freedom, and that means freedom for everyone—not just you! You may leave the room, turn the channel, express a different opinion, etc., but the world is full of idiots, and probably always will be.
I was going to carve an AK-47 too, but life got in the way. But really - does Hello Kitty with EYES OF FLAME really need an AK-47? Only your Gormogons know for sure.
