Because Windows XP and any random printer are retarded when working together, here’s a handy tip for when you print job gets hung and you can’t purge it:
Go to Control Panel
Choose Admistrative tools
Choose Services
scroll to Print spooler and double click
stopThis will close spooler compleatly.
Ok back out and then go back to same page and click start
Spooler comes back to life empty!!
All spelling errors property of the original author.
All have consumed the Ethanol kool-aid. Not good. The only positive thing about Thompson’s new position is at least he recognizes national security as part of the equation. I wish someone which teach these guys about entropy. Corn based Ethanol doesn’t help anyone. Expect for those ADM folks. And maybe some Tennessee folks.
Adam Kleinheider of Volunteer Voters gave a little link love on an idea I first presented on KnoxViews.
Maybe this can help some gunnys in protecting 2nd Amendment Rights?
From today’s NiT post that Adam linked on VV.:
See through frogs. You know, so you don’t have to dissect them. Sometimes, scientists kinda scare me.
CALL Gov’s Sac number (916-445-2841)
Press 1 – for English
Press 2 – for Voice your opinion on Assembly Bills
Press 1 – for Micro Stamping Bill (AB1471)
Press 2 to OPPOSE the gun control bill.Via RuffRidr, who says:
You don’t have to speak to anyone. This takes 20 seconds. That’s it! I repeat, you do not need to speak to anyone
In other news, there’s now an automated system to support or oppose legislation?
You just knew this would happen. The United States had the “Mother of All Bombs”, the MOAB. But now the Russians have developed the FOAB, the “Father of All Bombs.”
Once again we have a mineshaft gap.
This is one seriously big bomb. Kills everything within three miles and causes deafness within four miles.
Some neighbors of ours held a garage sale. They told us about it and asked if we wanted to sell any thing. We had some junk in the basement that we wanted to get rid of so I loaded up the truck and took it over.
On sale day, about half way through the day, the police show up. They inform my neighbor that there is a fee and permit required to have a garage sale. And you’re limited to two sales per year (my neighbor was in no trouble of violating that one). Officer friendly let just told him to remember that next time. No harm, no foul. I did some research (i.e., talked to some people who would know) to find out why the limit; why there’s a fee; and why there’s a form to fill out. Turns out, it’s a law that has been on the books for a long time but it was never enforced. Until Ebay. Seems a lot of folks run Ebay based businesses out of their homes. Whenever stuff wasn’t selling on Ebay, they’d have garage sales. And, apparently, people started complaining that certain other people were having garage sales every couple of weeks and were basically operating a trafficked business from their homes. And these sales caused traffic problems and, generally, made life hard on their fellow subdivision denizens.
Anyway, the garage sale was a success. So much so that the Mrs. wants to have one in our yard because we’ve found all sorts of other stuff that, at one time, we absolutely had to have but we now no longer need. Like my robot (looks like this). So, being the law-abiding sorts we are, she wants to pay the fee and get the permit. She called. Turns out, there is no fee. But there is an application and it is designed just to ensure you limit your sales to two per year.
Also, she was googling up yard sales and fees and Maryville and her first result was Les Jones. Small internet.
The future of bullet proof vests and home insulation may be “frozen smoke”, also know as Aerogel. It is 98% air. The Brick Brigade Team, a group of eight 11 year olds, has more.
A MIRACLE material for the 21st century could protect your home against bomb blasts, mop up oil spillages and even help man to fly to Mars.
Aerogel, one of the world’s lightest solids, can withstand a direct blast of 1kg of dynamite and protect against heat from a blowtorch at more than 1,300C.
Scientists are working to discover new applications for the substance, ranging from the next generation of tennis rackets to super-insulated space suits for a manned mission to Mars.
The company has successfully converted a Mini into an electric vehicle (EV) with four direct-drive wheels, each with an electronic hub motor of 160 break-horse-power. This combined 640 bhp allows for an acceleration of 0-60mph in 4.5 seconds and a top speed of 150 mph (240 kph).
A small 250cc petrol engine charges the car’s battery while the car is being driven. In this mode it will run for up to 900 miles before needing to re-fuel, while in pure EV mode it will run for 200 miles. Previous electric models barely managed 60 mph (100kph) and had a range of less than 100 miles.
Part 3 in the three-part series is excellent reading. The punch line:
There are no good guys in this story. Misguided and incompetent regulation combined with utilities that found ways to game the system resulted in what had been the best communication system in the world becoming just so-so, though very profitable. We as consumers were consistently sold ideas that were impractical only to have those be replaced later by less-ambitious technologies that, in turn, were still under-delivered. Congress set mandates then provided little or no oversight. The FCC was (and probably still is) managed for the benefit of the companies and their lobbyists, not for you and me. And the upshot is that I could move to Japan and pay $14 per month for 100-megabit-per-second Internet service but I can’t do that here and will probably never be able to.
In case you haven’t been reading Crigley’s blog (and you should be), Part 1 and Part 2.
Remember the Hydrogen economy? We all had a good laugh with that one. The idea you could run your car on seawater, what a fantasy.
Until now. Like most great inventions this was an accident discovered when a former broadcast executive tried to discover a cure for cancer.
Meet John Kanzius.
Heh: Apparently, weather satellites measured a million zillion google times more tropical storms in the Atlantic in 2006 than they did in 1901.
Poker champion Phil Laak has a good chance of winning when he sits down this week to play 2,000 hands of Texas Hold’em — against a computer.
It may be the last chance he gets. Computers have gotten a lot better at poker in recent years; they’re good enough now to challenge top professionals like Laak, who won the World Poker Tour invitational in 2004.
But it’s only a matter of time before the machines take a commanding lead in the war for poker supremacy. Just as they already have in backgammon, checkers and chess, computers are expected to surpass even the best human poker players within a decade. They can already beat virtually any amateur player.
“This match is extremely important, because it’s the first time there’s going to be a man-machine event where there’s going to be a scientific component,” said University of Alberta computing science professor Jonathan Schaeffer.
As to details:
The Alberta researchers have endowed the $50,000 contest with an ingenious design, making this the first man-machine contest to eliminate the luck of the draw as much as possible.
Laak will play with a partner, fellow pro Ali Eslami. The two will be in separate rooms, and their games will be mirror images of one another, with Eslami getting the cards that the computer received in its hands against Laak, and vice versa.
That way, a lousy hand for one human player will result in a correspondingly strong hand for his partner in the other room. At the end of the tournament the chips of both humans will be added together and compared to the computer’s.
Should be interesting. I can’t see a computer being bluffed off a hand or slow-played, which is important against a human.
So, R. Neal reports 15% savings from switching to CFLs. Sounds excellent. So, here’s the deal: Save bedroom lamps, practically every light in my house is a can light. Anyone know of any CFLs made for can lights? I am, of course, some number of years away as the last house had can lights too and we changed maybe two out in two years. They last a while.
I’ll still get some CFLs for the lamps though.
Update: Excellent pointers in comments. And the issue is compounded as my can lights are on dimmer switches. Also, we also have a lot of ceiling fans (at least one per room). I suppose regular CFLs will fit those and look OK?
Al Gore wrote in the New York Times on July 1st, “This is not a political issue. This is a moral issue, one that affects the survival of human civilization. It is not a question of left versus right; it is a question of right versus wrong. Put simply, it is wrong to destroy the habitability of our planet and ruin the prospects of every generation that follows ours.”
The former Vice President goes on to give a science lesson on Carbon Dioxide and the Planets of the Solar System. He manages to get almost everything wrong.
Mr. Gore’s “facts” are so egregious that a well thought out response titled “Gore: Ignorant or Dishonest?” was written by George Reisman. It is well worth the read.
You spend $600 for a iPhone and the batteries are soldered in?
Genius.
The iPhone’s battery is apparently soldered on inside the device and cannot be swapped out by the owner like most other cell phones.
Apple spokeswoman Jennifer Hakes said Thursday the company posted the battery replacement details on its Web site last Friday after the product went on sale.
Users would have to submit their iPhone to Apple for battery service. The service will cost users $79, plus $6.95 for shipping, and will take three business days.
Via WBIR by way of “The Tennessean” comes a shocking headline, “Ten percent of Tennessee children now diagnosed with ADHD.”
Give me a break. The story says, “Causes are unknown.”
Oh please. One in ten? Since when did this happen? Does that seem in any way probable to you? Is it even possible? A lot of young kids are being raked over the coals.
Super Dave on why he’s not getting an iPhone:
I love the MP3 player, but I want my $600 back that I spent on my 3G 20gig iPod. The battery has died twice on it, now it won’t even sync anymore.
I bought a 4gig Nano a few months ago as my replacement. I just don’t have the coin at the moment to splurge on an 80 gig, and I definitely am not interested in the iPhone.
Well, I’m not buying one for the same reason I don’t buy anything from Apple: None of their stuff works with any of my other stuff. It’s a bunch of proprietary crap that is useless to me. People went nuts over the iPod. Not sure why. I looked into it and, unsurprisingly, it’s not compatible with anything I have. So, I’m not in the iCult and don’t drink the iKool-iAid.
In the early 1990s, I bought a pretty fancy home stereo. And in the mid 1990s I bought a big screen TeeVee. All this stuff now resides in The Play Room. Upstairs in the living room, I have a plasma TeeVee. Anyway, the receiver on my downstairs stereo blew up. And whenever I replace the offending fuse, it blows up again. I figured it’s toast. So, I went to Best Buy (wherein, I got a ticket) to check out getting a new one. Well, this home entertainment stuff is now absolutely and completely different than when I last bought any thing. I mean, I stared at the offerings with literally dumbfounded amazement and had no idea what I was even looking at. I’m guessing in the next bit, I’ll have to upgrade in addition to buying a new receiver. So, I figured I’d go ahead and get something compatible with potential future upgrades because my downstairs TeeVee (while quite nice) is old.
So, is there any sort of Post 1990s Home Entertainment For Dummies? I mean, what should I get? How much should I expect to shell out? Anything that’s a waste of money? I really am clueless.
Update: Oops. Apparently, I closed comments by mistake.
Ask, and ye shall receive.
I guess we’re all immigrants. Even the trees. Via Chris.
The universe continues to piss me off.
So, I got this Windows Movie Maker. It only saves files as .wma, which sucks. Any way to change that? If not, any other good (preferably downloadable) video editing software that you recommend?
And TiVo too.
So, me, the Mrs. and Junior were watching live TeeVee the other day. A commercial comes on. Junior, obviously concerned, says Where’d the show go? It occurred to us that she was three years old and had never seen a commercial before.
From Slate:
Scientists may have figured out how to make stem cells without embryos.
Old trick: Put a nucleus from a skin cell into a gutted human egg, and let the egg’s processes turn it into an embryo, thereby producing embryonic stem cells (ESCs).
New trick: Identify the relevant processes and apply them directly to the cell, turning it into an ESC with no egg or embryo required. Pro-lifers approve the new method.
Remaining hurdles:
- We’ve only done this in mice; it might be harder in humans.
- We did it with viral genetic engineering; we need to find a safer method.
- Some of the genes that worked also caused cancer in many of the mice; we need to find other genes.
Optimistic view: We’ll solve all these problems and fulfill the promise of stem-cell therapy.
Realistic view: We don’t need to solve the safety problems to achieve what stem cells are really about: facilitating disease research.
While I never saw anything wrong with harvesting embryos for stem cells, now that a good alternative appears promising, we should probably stop doing it. After all, it would be great if the social harm caused by abortion opponents didn’t spill over into curing diseases.
I dunno, Google maps can be scary. Of course, per Google, my house is still a field.
Via Kim, I am now using the Foxit Reader to read PDF files. Adobe Acrobat Reader is a big, fat chunk of bloatware that frequently crashes my browser or locks up during print jobs. Foxit is nice and small. Loads fast, doesn’t crash Firefox and generally is an all around superior product. And it’s free.
A long-time friend of mine has started a blog: Diary of a Mad IT Manager. Check it out.
This is the short form. Follow closely.
Here we learn that if you have herpes it may protect you from “bubonic plague and other bacterial contagions, at least in mice”.
But, here we learn that herpes may cause ” Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia”.
Yet here we learn that “Marijuana’s Key Ingredient Might Fight Alzheimer’s”.
And over here we learn that “Red Wine May Help Prevent Alzheimer’s” also.
This is science as we currently understand it.
The same “science” that supports man-made Global Warming. So if you don’t want to get Alzheimer’s you better spend most of your time stoned drinking Red Wine. Don’t despair, at least you won’t get bubonic plague, at least in mice.
This may explain why so many people have fallen for the man-made Global Warming scam.
On the pic of the Mars sunset, Tam:
For every mouth-breathing idiot who wants to kill his neighbor because of their race, religion, or choice of dandruff shampoos, there are a dozen brilliant, dedicated people toiling away to make the future happen.
The downside of the tubes: Building landing strips for gay Martians.
Co-blogger #9 has written extensively about YouTube and its potential effects on politics and society. Well, there’s one thing on there that I can’t stand and Brittney reminded me about it. See, I hop on YouTube on occasion to watch old music videos and the like. And I search for songs for which I have never seen the video. And I was shocked and happy to learn that one of my favorite songs of all time had a video. Cool! Then I realized that it did not. Seems people like to just film themselves lip-synching to someone else’s tune. No, I’m not upset about copyrights and whatnot. I just don’t care to watch some guy lip-synching and doing it poorly. As to one of my favorite songs of all time, here’s the video of some guy no one knows mouthing the words:
Seriously? One’s always there. I have several. But I also always have a cell phone to keep me abreast of the time. My office has a clock and a computer to let me know the time. I’m always in view of a clock at my house. My car has one. Any place I go has one.
So, why do I wear one?
Seen over at Les Jones:
“The page view has been the traditional measure for advertisers to compare which websites provide the most opportunities to display their ads to consumers. The large portals and social networking sites tend to dominate this way of looking at engagement.”
“However, as the technology that publishers use to deliver content to the user moves away from static, reloaded pages to be more streamlined content-e.g. online videos- the page view is becoming a less relevant gauge of where might be the best place to advertise online.”
“Consequently advertisers will have to look at other metrics, such as time spent or visits, to see where their online ad pound might be best spent.”
Well, the average visitor here sticks around for two minutes and twenty-one seconds. Don’t know if that’s good or bad.
I mentioned my first text message here. Last night at the local poker tourney, I got my second (and third through eighth). It was from someone named [redacted]. She wanted to know if we could meet later. She said we met at the ambp (I dunno if that’s text messaging shorthand for something). I tried to be nice and tell her that we’d never met and she had the wrong number. She kept telling me I was wrong and asked what my problem was. I finally just had to stop replying. I may have just ruined some young couple’s relationship.
The funny part is that I’m keeping everyone at the poker table abreast of the situation for laughs. And, finally, one player (a charming older lady) says: I’d stop responding. It’s probably Stone Phillips from To Catch A Predator.
I don’t use Flickr but a friend does. He posted some wedding photos that my wife wants to send off to winkflash to have some hard copies. Anyhoo, right click/save as saves the file as garbage. How do save local copies on flickr?
I used to poke fun at my dad who didn’t quite get computers. Or his cell phone. Or any other electronic doohickey. Then, it happened to me. You see, I got a text message. I’d never gotten one before. My thinking is that if I got something to say and I have a phone then I’ll just call. But my assistant was running late and she sent me a text message letting me know that. I looked at it and thought maybe I should respond. So, I hit reply. Couldn’t quite figure out how to do it. Anything I typed came out like 65#733.
Also, I’ve lost the ability to write sentences by hand. I type everything. I was going to leave a post-it note the other day and my handwriting was indistinguishable from Junior’s. And she can’t write.
And I can officially no longer do math in my head or on paper. I use spreadsheets for everything so as long as I remember Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally, I’m OK. Unless it’s something simple, such as 17,758.67 – 9,211.10. I literally had to look at it and realize that it was just quicker to enter it into Excel than to use some ancient device known as a pencil. It’s quite sad.
San Francisco has banned plastic grocery bags. This is to save the planet. You may remember it wasn’t that long ago that only eco-terrorists asked for paper bags. People would turn in horror and explain how a living tree had to be sacrificed to make that paper bag.
Today we are much wiser. Paper bags are back. We understand that trees are a renewable resource and actually using plastic grocery bags is eco-terrorism. We just didn’t know. Of course really eco-conscious people bring there own burlap bags.
Let me clue you in. There is no right answer. No matter what you do someone will say it is not enough. The reality is we live in a world of Hobson choices.
Let me tell you the next eco-scare that will take about five years to come to fruition. Compact fluorescent bulbs will be banned. California is currently considering banning incandescent lights bulbs because the planet has a fever. Even though most people know compact fluorescent bulbs contain mercury they will buy them because sheeple are followers. Better to do what you are told than to think for yourself.
Do you think the people in California will start recycling programs for Compact fluorescent bulbs before they ban the incandescent bulbs? Probably not. Sheeple have to be led.
Today, for the first time in probably three years, I wrote a check.
Nothing to talk about today. So, I’ll ask you:
What’s the best music download site? I don’t like Napster because, even though it’s a monthly fee, I don’t actually own the tune.
I hate itunes because Apple does what it always does which is to modify the MP3 files so that they’re proprietary and, therefore, generally fucking useless in other applications. That’s why I’ll never own anything ever created by Apple.
Update: Maddox agrees that apple sucks. And what is with the whole quicktime, itunes install. It really attaches its retarded self to the whole operating system.
I’m a complete sucker for information about the ancient Greeks and Romans. It started as an obsession with Greek Myths and the Odyssey in grade school and peaked with an obsession with Aeschylus in college. I’m not quite so fanatical these days, but the easiest way to hook my attention is to hit me with a quirky ancient or midaeval. This article’s lead paragraph was made just to capture my attention:
In the Middle Ages, new mothers in Rome could abandon their unwanted babies in a “foundling wheel” — a revolving wooden barrel lodged in a wall, often in a convent, that allowed women to deposit their offspring without being seen.
The simplicity of such a device! It’s just a barrel in a hole in the wall for anonymous baby placement. And it must be effective too. Wikipedia says they were in use from about 1200 until the late 1800’s.
And today, a modern version is in use in Japan, Germany and Italy, and other countries all over the world. The newer baby hatches are not as simple as a barrel in the wall. They can run €52,000 and include medical devices and alarms so the baby isn’t left alone for long.
I wonder why America has no foundling wheels.
Stewart Brand, ardent environmentalist and founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, predicts changes in common environmental wisdom on four hot issues:
Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbanization, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.
Predicting a shift in opinion in these areas is just a polite way of saying that the current thinking on them is wrong. And he’s right. The current mainstream enviromental stance has got it wrong on all four issues, especially the GMO food and nuclear power.
Interestingly, he doesn’t say why he thinks the consensus will shift on these issues. He just thinks the rational environmentalists will eventually convince the romantic environmentalists. In the long run, I think he’s right– people will eventually realize that we can achieve the great benefits of GMO food and nuclear power in (relative) safety. There’s just too much to gain. Predicting it will happen in the next 10 years, though, is probably overly ambitious.
Nobody pays attention to audible car alarms. At best they garner a lazy “Shut that shit off!” At worst, they’ll get you a rock through the windshield. Now, though, there is a car protection device that really emphasizes deterrence. It’s called the Eye of Sauron Antitheft Device and it has captured the attention of my inner ricer.
Spam, gizmos, cookies and various doodads annoy the average web-surfer. SM tells you how to deal with web annoyances, notably Snap.
In a strange irony the end of the world now has better odds than you winning the PowerBall Lottery this Wednesday. An asteroid may come uncomfortably close to Earth in 2036.
Astronomers are monitoring an asteroid named Apophis, which has a 1 in 45,000 chance of striking Earth on April 13, 2036.
It will only be the end of the world for a City or small region but it is interesting that this is a fraction of the odds of winning this weeks PowerBall which has odds of 1 in 146,107,962.
Rest easy, the United Nations is on the case.
A few years ago, at the dawn of the Tivo era, Jamie Kellner, CEO of Turner Broadcasting said:
[Skipping commercials is] theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you’re going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn’t get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial . . . you’re actually stealing the programming.
He was afraid that 10 years from now, when everybody who has a TV also has a tivo-like device, nobody would ever watch a commercial again. And he wasn’t alone. Lots of broadcasters were bemoaning the death of their business model, as they do whenever a new technology emerges. As it turns out, though, they were all wrong.
[A] lot of people with digital video recorders are not fast-forwarding and time-shifting as much as advertisers feared. According to new data released yesterday by the Nielsen Company, people who own digital video recorders, or DVRs, still watch, on average, two-thirds of the ads.
Since we’re talking about it, I have a question about the more practical things that come from death. I have a will and a living will and insurance and all that. But it occurs to me: What happens to my blog when I die? Or, for that matter, my various email accounts? I also need to make a list of my various accounts and passwords so that in the event I croak, my wife can access things like Google ads and whatnot.
How do you guys do that?
Maybe I need to do an If You’re Reading This, I’m Dead post and set it to post at a future date. So long as I’m alive, I can keep delaying its publication. But if I keel over, it will publish. That way, at least you’ll know. And, you know, that will surely result in a spike in traffic and a subsequent increase in ad revenue. And my wife will need to have a way to collect that. So, we get back to getting her access to stuff.
I was wrong. I thought the whole man made Global Warming issue had been thoroughly fisked and dissected. I thought the hockey stick had been reduced to splinters.
How was I to know that things would get goofy on an unimagined scale? How goofy you ask? There is now a call to try Global Warming Skeptics for War Crimes. Or should that be “thought crimes”? Welcome to the far left extremist world of 1984. Leo Rosten once wrote, “Extremists think ”communication” means agreeing with them. ” And what if you don’t?
Far left extremists say you should be arrested and tried. Grist Magazine’s staff writer David Roberts wrote, “When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.” Roberts has called for the Nuremberg-style trials for the “bastards” who were members of what he termed the global warming “denial industry”.
Okay, Roberts is a full blown nutcase. No way anyone respectable could believe in arresting people for thought crimes. Right?
Er. Not exactly.
Pulitzer Prize winning author Ellen Goodman writes, “Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.”
Dennis Prager writes, “the Ellen Goodman quote is only the beginning of what is already becoming one of the largest campaigns of vilification of decent people in history — the global condemnation of a) anyone who questions global warming; or b) anyone who agrees that there is global warming but who argues that human behavior is not its primary cause; or c) anyone who agrees that there is global warming, and even agrees that human behavior is its primary cause, but does not believe that the consequences will be nearly as catastrophic as Al Gore does. If you don’t believe all three propositions, you will be lumped with Holocaust deniers, and it would not be surprising that soon, in Europe, global warming deniers will be treated as Holocaust deniers and prosecuted.”
I wonder if the ACLU will step in to defend the First Amendment? Or will they step in to prosecute “the bastards”?
Ted Balaker and Sam Staley, coauthors of “The Road More Traveled: Why the Congestion Crisis Matters More Than You Think, and What We Can Do About It”, have written what will be a very controversial piece in the Washington Post. The long and short of it, is the premise that increased wealth is the reason for increased individual automobile driving and that there are many myths about suburbanization and the automobiles relation to Global Warming. The five myths are discussed at the end of the post.
Today is a particularly good day to discuss this as the American automobile is now “Public Enemy Number One” to the newly formed “Global Warming Coalition against the Automobile”. Can you stop Global Warming by walking? We will see.
“Global Cool” launched in London and LA today is a brand new worldwide movement of celebrities, musicians, politicians and business leaders who will use their vast scientific knowledge to tell you how to live. Energy conversation is a magnificent idea and is something I do personally and believe in but you know the material has hit the fan when the rock stars and actors form another “We are the World” group of human micromanagement.
The idea that the planet has only ten years to stop Global Warming is being repeated so often that it is approaching the critical mass of universal acceptance. Never mind that no scientific proof exist to prove this. Also never mind that the people who will preach from the high alter of Global Warming understand nothing about science. Again we will suffer through another assault of “Social Democracy” and junk science. Yes the planet is warming. But is it the sun or humans that are causing Global Warming? Only actors and musicians Josh Hartnett, Leonardo Di Caprio, Orlando Bloom, KT Tunstall, Pink, The Killers, and Razorlight know the truth. And they will tell you how to live.
How long will it take for “Global Cool” to reveal its real agenda?
FlashFog is a security system that floods a room with harmless fog so thick that you can’t see. Then flashes strobe lights so as to disorient any intruders. I guess it’s a good deterrent but if you’re that disoriented, how do you get out?
Porn has always been quick to adapt to the latest formats. If it weren’t for porn, there’d be no VCRs, DVDs, or even Al Gore’s Internets. Unfortunately for porn, HD doesn’t do it any favors:
… pornographic movie studios are staying ahead of the curve by releasing high-definition DVDs.
They have discovered that the technology is sometimes not so sexy. The high-definition format is accentuating imperfections in the actors — from a little extra cellulite on a leg to wrinkles around the eyes.
Or, you know, ass pimples.
I found it odd when I read over at BusyMom’s that there are actually online allowance managers. Allowance is in parents give their kids allowances.
I guess you can wrap any concept up in a webpage and someone will buy it.
I have many computers, a wireless network, and a fine stereo. What’s the best way to play MP3s in my house? I’d like the stereo to just pull the tunes from the computer. Any help would be appreciated.
If you say Ipod, go ahead and smack yourself.
Update: Thinking about this Logitech Wireless Music System for PC . Anyone know anything?
Update: Hats off to Comp USA who recovered all the images (and some more from ages back) from a Mini SD card.
==================================
Last night, the desktop computer crashed hard. We’re pretty good about backing up stuff but we haven’t done a back up since last week. So, all of our Christmas photos were on there, including my boy’s first Christmas. We want the pictures back.
After it crashed, I kept trying to reboot and googled up the error message. The solution from Microsoft was the same as it always is and they said to reinstall windows. I did. However, in the reinstall, it kept getting to a point where it said something like unable to create file system32 and it kicked out of reinstall. I went to Comp USA and grabbed a USB external HD case. Put the hard drive in it to see if it could be read and it could. However, all that is there is the Windows directory. It’s all gone.
So, first, when did reinstalling windows format a hard drive? Second, can I get my stuff back?
Update: Also, the data was on our flash card but was deleted. Is that a better route?
Sometimes when someone tries to do something good they get confused and screw up something else. This is often referred to as the law of unintended consequences. Case in point would be Senator John McCain’s new bill to crack down on child pornography on the Internet. No one wants child pornography on the Internet but the problem is that this bill is so broadly written it could be used to shut down a website with an innocent picture like this.
It is an important cause and something must be done but this bill is so poorly written it could be used to harm people that have nothing to do with child pornography. If this sounds a little like the War on Drugs or the War on Terror there may be a reason. Could it be Congress Critters? Senator McCain is not alone in not understanding the Internet.
From CNET News:
Millions of commercial Web sites and personal blogs would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000, if a new proposal in the U.S. Senate came into law.
The legislation, drafted by Sen. John McCain and obtained by CNET News.com, would also require Web sites that offer user profiles to delete pages posted by sex offenders.
After child pornography or some forms of “obscenity” are found and reported, the Web site must retain any “information relating to the facts or circumstances” of the incident for at least six months. Webmasters would be immune from civil and criminal liability if they followed the specified procedures exactly.
McCain’s proposal, called the “Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act” (click for PDF), requires that reports be submitted to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which in turn will forward them to the relevant police agency. (The organization received $32.6 million in tax dollars in 2005, according to its financial disclosure documents.)
Internet service providers already must follow those reporting requirements. But McCain’s proposal is liable to be controversial because it levies the same regulatory scheme–and even stiffer penalties–on even individual bloggers who offer discussion areas on their Web sites.
More after the jump…
Import Update see comments
When Google purchased YouTube many people said it was one of the dumber business acquisitions in recent history. Mark Cuban laughingly wrote they would be sued out of business. Google prepared a 500 million dollar fund for legal battles.
And there lawsuits. But not as many as expected. Then CBS did an about turn and uploaded 300 clips of their programming. The results have been impressive. The shows CBS pushed on YouTube became bigger hits on Television. It is kind of like windows shopping for new Television shows to watch. David Lettermen and Craig Ferguson of the Late Late Show have received big benefits. Letterman has gained an extra 200,000 viewers and Ferguson’s show is up seven percent. Ferguson’s stand up bits have become classics on YouTube.
The biggest benefit of YouTube for Television Networks may be focus groups. No longer will the studio have to do focus groups the old fashion way. Now they can instantly reach millions of people all across the country and see if the latest sitcom idea will fly.
YouTube may also be the next discovery vehicle for new stars. No more trolling through malls to find the next new face. The next Lana Turner may be discovered not in a soda shop but on YouTube. Lisa Nova hopes it will be her.
Technology pundits have long talked about the convergence of Television and the Internet. All that was needed was an application. YouTube is the killer app for convergence.
To Verizon: don’t advertise that your phone/mp3 player holds 2 gig of music. You should advertise that it takes MicroSD chips that can hold 2 gig of music.
To anyone who has ever developed a program that requires passwords: I realize it’s not good security for me to use the same password over and over. Or even for me to use the same two or three passwords over and over. But for fuck’s sake, I can only come up with so many nonsense words that I can remember. I think I’m up to about 12 now and I still can’t fucking keep up.
To MS Outlook: Why do you even have a default font setting for email when you’re just going to create everything in 10 Arial any fucking way?
To MS Excel: Seriously, make that review toolbar go away. I don’t like it. I don’t use it. Every time I get rid of it, it comes back. I even installed a fucking macro to get rid of it and it still comes back.
To Paypal: I told you to leave me alone. Our relationship is through. Stop sending me email; stop contacting me; and cancel my account. You’re like a clingy old girlfriend who can’t take the hint. I know, your monkeys with keyboards tell me they can’t cancel the account and must keep it open for 7 years but I don’t care. You’ve wasted enough of my time and I will not devote any more time to resolving the issue. In fact, I’m tempted to ask my readers to paypal me $0.01 with the phrase Semi-Automatic Assault Weapon in the subject line. Though it’d be funny, you’d make money from it.
Went to the dentist this morning. Told you before how I get the gas ’cause my girly teeth are all sensitive. Anyhoo, had the MP3 player and it was kind of cool to listen to Five Minutes Alone and The Color of Money with a huge gas buzz.
Oh, and the title of this post is a combination of the title of Pantera’s album and the brand of light I stared at for 30 minutes.
The point: I dig the MP3 player.
MacGyver has nothing on the inventiveness of American troops dealing with the problem of invisible trip wires on hidden bombs. As inventive is one Mom in New Jersey who is sending “Silly String” to troops in Iraq.
Now, 1,000 cans of the neon-colored plastic goop are packed into Shriver’s one-car garage in this town outside Philadelphia, ready to be shipped to the Middle East thanks to two churches and a pilot who heard about the drive.
“If I turn on the TV and see a soldier with a can of this on his vest, that would make this all worth it,” said Shriver, 57, an office manager.
The maker of the Silly String brand, Just for Kicks Inc. of Watertown, N.Y., has contacted the Shrivers about donating some. Other manufacturers make the stuff, too, and call their products “party string” or “crazy string.”
Bleg: I just got my first MP3 player. Ok, actually, I got a phone (this one) that happens to play MP3s. I converted a few CDs to MP3 a while back. Now, when I convert them in Windows Media Player (which is what works with my phone), they’re WMAs. So, what are those? And what do I need to know about this MP3 player business?
Rikki has a good post on racism on KnoxViews. Gene Patterson just posted a different look at racism on his blog. Between reading the two different posts I found myself asking a question.
Is there an industry that uses racism as a product? Are there race merchants? I am not talking about anything as obvious as Jesse Jackson, is there a hidden industry of race merchants disguised under the cloak of academia or human resources management?
In Gene Patterson’s post he quotes a column in the Knoxville News Sentinel by Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, who points to a Harvard test as proof that we all have latent racist attitudes. Gene took one of the tests and he writes, “I took the test and it showed that I – on a scale of slight, moderate and strong – have a slight preference for European Americans. That, according to the test, makes me a racist.”
Alphie looks at advertising in a DVR world:
This is how the free market operates, adjusting to changes in technology. While Hollywood works with our legislators to stifle technology (like forbidding fast-forwarding through commercials), creative minds are working to come up with ways to deal with the new reality.
There are coupons hidden in the frames that folks with DVRs and TiVos can find. Interesting. I haven’t watched commercials in about three years. The only downside, as far as I can tell, is I never know what movies are playing and I had no idea what a Nintendo Wii was until I saw my friends.
BTW, I must get a Nintendo Wii. For the kids, of course.
At this moment almost at midnight on Monday Michael Richards is going through something I can not describe. It is part confessional part testimony and so many things that are difficult to quantify.
For those that have not heard here is the story.
Tomorrow afternoon or maybe even early this morning this will be on YouTube. It is an unprecedented development that there is now a digital library available for free and is online in just a few hours.
This extension of instant news and knowledge will have a profound affect on everyone’s lives. There are endless possibilities. The great danger is that any mistake a person makes will be captured in a detail never before possible and will last forever. The world just got several billion new cameras and their owners can have any Television program or live event on the Internet in less than an hour.
Update:
In less than the time it took to write this post the video is up here. It is on the Drudge Report in less than eight minutes.
Everyone knows that this past election was different but so far no one has put their finger on what it was that made it different. It was the Internet. Actually an Internet site, it was YouTube. The Internet has been around for a long time but until this election the Internet was not a player.
Many people felt the 2000 Presidential Election would be when the Internet would be seen as a vehicle of change. But it wasn’t time yet. Something was missing.
So it was a slam dunk that the 2004 Presidential Election would be the Internet Election. But it wasn’t to be.
The reason? People don’t like to read. They would rather watch. The solution was YouTube. In the advertising world they measure impressions. In Television news Karl Rove and James Carville types worry about the news cycle. So what happens when impressions multiply beyond comprehension and news cycles are extended indefinitely?
Mistakes are amplified and exaggerated.
That is what happened in this election. For George Allen it was macaca. For John F. Kerry it was a bungled joke about education and Iraq. For Harold Ford it was the “Memphis Meltdown” and the “bimbo ad”.
In the days before YouTube these “impressions” and “news cycles” where very brief. After all, do people make a video tape of these moments and exchange them with their friends? Of course not, too much trouble. But YouTube changed everything. Hook your TV up to your computer and pesto chango you have a file you can upload to YouTube for FREE. Then you can link it to any number of Blogs for FREE.
The politicians were caught flat-footed. Most mistakes can survive a limited number of impressions and a short news cycle. But what do you do when you say macaca and it never ends? You lose. That is what happens.
But the YouTube phenomena is not just for elections. All across this country every City Council meeting, every County Commission meeting, every State Assembly meeting, and every meeting of the United States Congress is now a potential YouTube adventure.
YouTube is the inverse of Big Brother. The citizens now control the picture. We the people control the image, we control the horizontal, we control the vertical.
A new revolution has begun and politicians should be warned. We are listening to and watching every word you say.
Today, I received a fax from an employee. They went to a webpage, printed it, and faxed it to me. All this, as opposed to emailing a link. I guess we see why some folks can’t operate voting machines.
Netvibes looks pretty darn neat. I’ve not played with it yet but will probably start. Via Der Commissar.
In the comments to my Flood Insurance post, Straightarrow pointed to the hole in the ozone layer as an example of how climate scientists perpetrated a fraud on the world. After all, he says, this was a big deal and now we never even hear about it. It’s a good question. Fortunately, there’s a good answer.
The reason we don’t hear about ozone anymore is because it’s a solved problem. There’s no need for further action, so you no longer hear the calls to action. The hole is still there, but it’s size peaked in 2000. Scientists believe it will heal itself in the next 50 years or so.
The reason the hole is closing is becuase international agreements brought down CFC usage enough to make a real difference. The 1985 Vienna Convention and the 1989 Montreal Protocol are really good examples of how international cooperation can work. Even if we don’t meet the 2010 target of eliminating CFC production, we’ll be ok.
Contrary to the ozone hole being an example of chicken little hysteria (or scientists conspiring to lie in return for grant money), it’s actually a success story. You can see an ozone timeline if you scroll down this page. Read what the NOAA says about ozone. It’s one of the few times science saw a threat, raised a cry, and the world (eventually) responded.
When you live just a few blocks from the edge of a small island, the prospect of global warming and rising seas can be extremely scary. The worst case scenarios say the oceans could be almost a meter deeper by 2100, but I had no idea whether that meant I should buy some flood insurance. Fortunately, somebody repackaged a googlemap to show how far the seas can rise before you need to grow gills.
At 1 meter, my neighborhood’s coastline barely moves. While some major streets would flood, my personal little bit of dirt would be unaffected. In fact, it appears I’m good to 10 meters, assuming I don’t mind a flooded basement.
Here in New York, our local telco is Verizon, a monopoly provider of traditional telephone service. For the last three weeks, my phone hasn’t worked and neither has my DSL.
Both Verizon and my new DSL provider have been incredibly incompetent throughout, and I still don’t have service. I won’t list my travails here, but suffice it to say that all my problems started when Verizon was supposed to switch me to a competing DSL provider. I believe Verizon is being purposefully uncooperative to prevent me from switching.
The hours spent on Verizon’s tech support merry-go-round convinced me to seek other options, and happily I have found one. Using a software package called Asterisk, it is possible to get telephone service over the internet for negligible money ($2/month for the same base services I currently pay about $40 for).
We use Asterisk at work. It’s just like using a regular phone. Every once in a while I have moments of poor sound quality and each month it will go down for an hour or so. But it’s incredibly cheap, and you never waste a whole day waiting for a tech who never shows up.
I have an old computer gathering dust. I’m going to install the software, buy the $80 bit of hardware I need to connect it to my phones, and never bang my head against Verizon’s walls again. It’s great to watch a monopoly crumble.
I delete mine. Always have. But Knoxviewer metulj doesn’t. He recounts 15 years of email:
# First spam — July 11, 1993
# First Nigerian scam — May 10, 1995
I’ll have to get some of these:
I bought 15 (or 18?) bulbs for $75. Each bulb saves about 40 watts. I estimate 3 hours per day of usage. Over a year, that means I save 657 kilowatt hours (356*15*3*40/1000). At fifteen cents per KWH, that’s a dollar savings of $98.55. Cool. I will recoup my $75 in less than a year. (Except for the NY state cost of electricity, most of these numbers are my own estimates, reflecting a mix of bulb sizes, replacements, and daily usage. A key point – each swirl CFL bulb uses only about one-quarter as much electricity as the bulb it replaces; a 15 watt swirl casts as much light as an ordinary 60 watt bulb.)
And, apparently, they’re environmentally friendly.
I do not encourage its use, but this the remote sniper is damn cool:
The Remote Sniper. Hah, forget about those pathetic TV-B-Gone things, mad person, and build yourself a Godzilla version which can control a TV or VCR from a quarter of a mile away. Tshaw…take that, sad Idol fans. $30.00 for the plans.
Good news. We can now get stem cells from embryos without destroying the embryos. While I see the “embryos = human life” argument as a bunch of semantic nonsense, this gets that issue off the table. We can get all the benefits of stem cell research without all the messy political fighting.
We’ll soon know whether the scientific community exagerrated the benefits of stem cells to win the political battle over federal funding.
As far as I can tell, the only purpose an indicator light on any electronic device serves is to let you know that the indicator light is broken.
First of all, those guys at Microsoft are supposed to be pretty smart. But they do all kinds of dumb shit. My biggest peeves with their software are as follows:
1 – The fact that when you open an Excel document from an Outlook attachment, it opens that stupid review toolbar. This monkeys with my settings and costs me valuable time, 0.25 seconds at a time.
2 – That MS Word documents opened from Outlook open in document map mode
3 – That the Links folder in Internet Explorer will perpetually come back no matter how often you delete it.
Fortunately, I found solutions for these items:
1 – Can be solved by adding some code to your personal.xls file. See here.
2 – Can be solved by clicking Tools\Options. On the general tab, unclick the box the box that says something to the effect of Allow starting in reading lay out.
3 – There’s a way to fix using a registry editor but I just use Firefox.
Microsoft products do other stupid shit but those are the ones that annoyed me this week.
From the NYTimes. It’s short, so I’ll quote it in full:
The first seven months of 2006 were the warmest such stretch in the continental United States for any year since climate record-keeping began in 1895, federal scientists said. Scorching temperatures in July, particularly strings of hot nights, were almost certainly related in part to the continuing buildup of heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases linked to global warming, said Jay Lawrimore of the National Climatic Data Center. “The long-term trend we’re seeing cannot be explained without the influence of greenhouse gases,” Mr. Lawrimore said.
A German scientist has been testing an “anti-stupidity” pill with encouraging results on mice and fruit flies, Bild newspaper reported on Saturday.
It said Hans-Hilger Ropers, director at Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, has tested a pill thwarting hyperactivity in certain brain nerve cells, helping stabilise short-term memory and improve attentiveness.
“With mice and fruit flies we were able to eliminate the loss of short-term memory,” Ropers, 62, is quoted saying in the German newspaper, which has dubbed it the “world’s first anti-stupidity pill.”
Or maybe the water cooler at The Brady Center?
Federal agents requested and retrieved records from Google concerning a Gmail account that contained threatening speech, Google Watch has learned.
The agents requested the records on June 22nd, 2006 after the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) notified the FBI they had received a threatening e-mail.
It’s not like I didn’t know that was going on as I’m pretty sure the feds snooped in mine recently. But I have to say that, in this case, there’s no foul. Google was served a warrant and they complied with it.
This is neat. Finches in the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin did a bunch of his initial research, are evolving fast enough that we can see it happen.
A medium sized species of Darwin’s finch has evolved a smaller beak to take advantage of different seeds just two decades after the arrival of a larger rival for its original food source.
In the beginning, I referred to the Internet as Al Gore’s Internet, since he invented it err took the initiative in creating the Internet or some other bogus claim. Then, after Veep Cheney referred to it as The Internets, I started calling it Al Gore’s Internets. Now, enter Ted Stevens (Insane Babbling Old Geezer – Alaska):
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
I’m not quite certain how to incorporate that bit of dumb-assery into my blogging on Al Gore’s Internets vernacular but, rest assured, I’m working on it.
Remember, these guys who run the country are about as tech-savvy as a bottle of Dr. Pepper Berries & Cream. And they’re much closer to missile launch buttons than you and me.
We all know the scene: the departmental coffee room, with the price list for tea and coffee on the wall and the “honesty box” where you pay for your drinks – or not, because no one is watching.
In a finding that will have office managers everywhere scurrying for the photocopier, researchers have discovered that merely a picture of watching eyes nearly trebled the amount of money put in the box.
Melissa Bateson and colleagues at Newcastle University, UK, put up new price lists each week in their psychology department coffee room. Prices were unchanged, but each week there was a photocopied picture at the top of the list, measuring 15 by 3 centimetres, of either flowers or the eyes of real faces. The faces varied but the eyes always looked directly at the observer.
In weeks with eyes on the list, staff paid 2.76 times as much for their drinks as in weeks with flowers. “Frankly we were staggered by the size of the effect,” Gilbert Roberts, one of the researchers, told New Scientist.
I wonder what the impact of a picture of someone holding a gun would be?
Some people think the question of whether homosexuality is biologically determined has some bearing on whether it’s ok to discriminate against gays. Legally, there might be something there, but morally and socially, it’s all the same to me. Bigotry is never cool, even if you can twist up some limp rationalization for your hate.
The people that say gay people choose to be gay never identify the mechanism of that choice. They make it sound like there are guys who wake up one day and decide to fall in love with men. They make it seem like lesbians should just learn to love men. It’s a strange viewpoint, and those that hold it describe people so unrealistic that you wonder what kind of person thinks anybody else is wired that way.
Here’s another bit of evidence that homosexuality is all about the nature, not the nurture.
Via the Comedian, comes this awesome graphic of the relative size of planets in our solar system and the sun.
Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.
Uncle Pays the Bills
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