N.J. Judge Retains Case Over Estate of Formosa’s Wang
It’s really not a particularly interesting story, but the hed is prize.
Category: 40yrs
Deep Thought, IT Edition
This only represents only a small minority of Mac users, and I can see someone doing this with a penguin* too.
*Linux.
Not Photoshopped
And now, as the saying goes, the rest of the story:
The kicker is that there is no plaque, so you don’t get the sculpure unless you are in the right place by accident.
Great Googly Moogly!
That man is an Afghan policeman.
What he is holding in his hand is an unexploded and fully armed “Bouncing Betty” mine, or perhaps a bomblet from a cluster bomb, that he found on a rooftop.
I do not work around munitions, and I know how f*&^ing dangerous doing this is.
H/T Danger Room
How Do You Feel About Bilingualism?
Of Flop Sweats and Vista
Well, I’ve been off for a few days. I got a cheap HP tower at a computer show, and I’ve been making it work.
OK, so I got myself a brand new HP/COMPAQ DC7900 tower.
Intel® Core2® Duo® CPU E6550 at 2.33 Ghz, 4 g RAM, one 80 & one 500 G hd, and an integral video on the mb.
On the physical level everything went together with an ease unimaginable a few years ago, without the level of tools, PITA and knuckle scraping that would have been required.
I added the 200 G HD and modem from the old machine, and added a floppy drive, and copied the files off the old 5 G HD.
This required an IDE to SATA adaptor for the HD, a floppy cable (witg a twist), and power adaptors from SATA to IDE and floppy, found local at CyberGuys.biz.
I can do this, but I really hate it. As soon as I crack the case, I start to sweat profusely….and stink.
The machine has 3 (whisper quiet) fans (!), one on the power supply, one exhaust for the case, and an inlet fan blowing over the plumbing (!) of the heat sink.
It appears very solidly built.
The big winner in this process is Firefox Portable. No backup, no reinstall, just copy over the directory, like in the good old DOS.
It’s designed to run off a memory stick, which I don’t generally do, because there is a performance hit doing that.
Running it on a hard drive, there is no performance hit once running, though it loads about 5 second slower.
Honorable mention here goes to Feedreader 3, which can be setup to do the same thing, but the folks at PortableApps.com get the gold medal because they have made this work for a number of other people’s software, including OpenOffice.
The big loser, the 10 yr old HP 6200C scanner. It died over the past few months, confirmed through 2 computers, operating systems, and USB cables, in all combinations, and nothing recognized it.
As to Vista, the machine is blisteringly fast compared to my older machine, so I can’t compare performance, though it seems stable on new and powerful equipment.
Vista dislikes:
- Downgrading to XP appears to be a labor of Hercules.
- Too much nannying….I have to tell the computer that I REALLY want to do this a lot.
- Can’t figure out how to turn off wallpaper, so I used a solid color to approximate it.
- Had to JFGI* to figure out how a DOS path is set up (setx). I miss autoexec.bat.
- Still can’t figure out how to share the data drive on the network..
- It puts up a security warning for F-Prot anti-virus, because it does not like how it talks to the OS. It still works, but it needs to change how it reports that it is running to the OS
In any case, this is the first thing that I’ve posted in about 4 days as a result.
So over the past 4 days, volume was down, but the quality of the writing probably increased.
*Just F%$#ing Google It.
OK, There is Someone Stupider than Amity Shlaes
Hard to believe, but true.
It turns out that Gregory Levey is stupider than conservative affirmative action baby Amity Shlaes, the woman who was fired by that Communist rag the Financial Times for extolling Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina in her reporting on the storm and its aftermath, because Mr. Levey is suggesting that Barack Obama should appoint George W. Bush as his Middle East envoy to aid in his diplomatic efforts in the region.
In related news, he suggested that Hannibal Lecter as chairman of the special White House committee on nutrition, Mary “Typhoid Mary” Mallon as head of food safety at the FCC, Timothy Leary as Drug Czar, and South Carolina Governor Rick “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” Sanford as head of the special working committee for ethics in government.
Great googly moogly.
Power Back On
Light posting though, until I catch up on my delayed job search work.
The Death of the Rock of Boston
CBS Radio is shuttering WBCN to make space on the dial for yet another sports radio station in Boston.
I spent a year in Boston, and woke up to Charles Laquidara’s “Big Mattress”, and was down there nearly every week in my college days.
I know that when I talked with my brother, who still lives in the area, and some of my classmates from UMass, that it was a shadow of what it once was (thanks a lot, Oedipus), but it’s sad to see a part of my youth go.
Chinese Military Unleashes Illegal and Immoral Weapon
See the 3rd eye?
There it is again!!!
It appears that the Chinese Communists are developing genetically engineered furries as super-soldiers.
With no respect for the norms of civilized behavior, they intend to inflict furrie soldiers with mutant 3rd eyes (see top pic) upon an unsuspecting world.
And you know what’s paying for their inhuman efforts?
McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, that’s what.
Every time one of your kids gets happy meal toys, the PLA puts a penny on their evil plans.
They must be stopped!
Too Funny Not to Share
It appears that CNBC’s dissing of bloggers has offended someone who knows photoshop:
Link
Jeepers????
I was just on the phone with a recruiter for an agency, a very nice guy, and in the course of our phone conversation, I related my background:
- Medical Test Equipment
- Nuclear Power
- Military Vehicles
- Automotive
- Locomotive
- Missiles and space
- Food processing equipment
- Sheet metal
- Shop floor interface
- Electronics packaging
- CAD
- FEA
In response, he said, “Jeepers.”
He said it, and he said it without any intent of irony.
Woah. I guess it must be a Midwest thing.
The Best Press Release Ever
Cyclone Power Technologies issued the following press release regarding rumors of it creating flesh eating zombie hordes:
PRESS RELEASE
Cyclone Power Technologies Responds to
Rumors about “Flesh Eating ” Military RobotPOMPANO BEACH, FL, July 16, 2009. In response to rumors circulating the internet on sites such as FoxNews.com, FastCompany.com and CNET News about a “flesh eating ”robot project, Cyclone Power Technologies Inc. (Pink Sheets: CYPW) and Robotic Technology Inc. (RTI) would like to set the record straight: This robot is strictly vegetarian.
On July 7, Cyclone announced that it had completed the first stage of development for a beta biomass engine system used to power RTI ’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR™), a Phase II SBIR project sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Defense Sciences Office. RTI ’s EATR is an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling.
RTI ’s patent pending robotic system will be able to find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment. Despite the far-reaching reports that this includes “human bodies,” the public can be assured that the engine Cyclone has developed to power the EATR runs on fuel no scarier than twigs, grass clippings and wood chips – small, plant-based items for which RTI ’s robotic technology is designed to forage. Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions, and is certainly not something sanctioned by DARPA, Cyclone or RTI.
“We completely understand the public ’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population,but that is not our mission,”stated Harry Schoell,Cyclone ’s CEO.“We are focused on demonstrating that our engines can create usable, green power from plentiful, renewable plant matter. The commercial applications alone for this earth-friendly energy solution are enormous.”
(emphasis original)
Somehow, I do not think that this press release will help much. They just cemented their position in the public view as a manufacturer of Cannibal Zombdroids™.
If Leno, O’Brien, Letterman, Colbert, or Stewart’s writer’s hear about this, it will be how your company is introduced to mainstream America.
H/t Noah Shachtman.
Proof of God’s Existence
He has a Facebook page.
One F&^% of a Wake-Up Call
Yes, I know, this picture of an F-18 doing a flyby at the start of a boat race on the Detroit river is an artifact of a long lens and forced perspective, but it’s still an impressive photo.
(click for full size)
iHymen
Yes, someone has 
released an iPhone ‘purity ring’ application:
The iPhone has applications for almost everything, from helping people to choose the best wine for a meal to locating supermarkets in Holland. Now there is one to help them to stay chaste until marriage.
For just 59p, consumers can download an application that allows them to take a purity pledge and then display a silver ring on their phone to prove their commitment to abstinence.
I would note that people who take purity pledges are more likely to engage in oral sex, anal sex, unprotected sex, and parenthood, so the mind boggles at what sorts of risky behavior that this application will engender.
H/t Jessica Valenti
Dayam! I Get Some Whack Email!
And it wasn’t even addressed to me about this blog, it was on a little Yahoo Group that I run to facilitate the Owings Mills Jewish community.*
I have new members set to “moderated” so as to prevent the phenomena where some joins, posts spam, and leaves, and someone posted this over the top screed that appears to call for the murder of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama!
I looked at it, and was about to delete it, and then I looked again and thought that the phrase, “The death time of lucifer and united states and clinton is come. GOD said: ” Kill clinton , Destroy united states !” was enough.
I contacted the Secret Service, read them the letter over the phone, and they had me send a copy to them.
Jeebus, the hate out there is scary.
*Note that the poster is not Jewish. When the opening ‘graph reads, “I am called by Hashem of Israel – my Father GOD, the Most High, and the Son of GOD, the Messiah of Israel – my LORD Yeshua to convey GOD’s Words to people in the last days. I have proof, the visible Sign of HOLY SPIRIT like a Light Dove on my forehead, and the Sign of Light Cross on my face,” it’s clearly one of the Evangelical proselytization group, like J4J or MJ, behind this.
An Editor Needs to be Fried Fired
I May Put a Sarah Palin Bumper Sticker On My Car
Not mine, it was posted on the by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS.
We Want Your Immortal Soul
Seriously, there is a Latvian banker who is demanding borrowers souls as collateral, Viktor Mirosiichenko of the Kontora loan company:
Clients have to sign a contract, with the words “Agreement” in bold letters at the top. The client agrees to the collateral, “that is, my immortal soul”.
Mirosiichenko said his company would not employ debt collectors to get its money back if people refused to repay, and promised no physical violence.
I hope that this is not the face of market reform in other parts of the former Warsaw Pact nations.