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At the ISS conference, Soghoian taped astonishing comments by Paul Taylor, Sprint/Nextel's Manager of Electronic Surveillance. In complaining about the volume of requests that Sprint receives from law enforcement, Taylor noted a shocking number of requests that Sprint had received in the past year for precise GPS (Global Positioning System) location data revealing the location and movements of Sprint's customers. That number?
EIGHT MILLION.
Sprint received over 8 million requests for its customers' information in the past 13 months. That doesn't count requests for basic identification and billing information, or wiretapping requests, or requests to monitor who is calling who, or even requests for less-precise location data based on which cell phone towers a cell phone was in contact with. That's just GPS. And, that's not including legal requests from civil litigants, or from foreign intelligence investigators. That's just law enforcement. And, that's not counting the few other major cell phone carriers like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. That's just Sprint.
Here's what Taylor had to say; the audio clip is here and we are also mirroring a zip file from Soghoian containing other related mp3 recordings and documents.
"My major concern is the volume of requests. We have a lot of things that are automated but that's just scratching the surface. One of the things, like with our GPS tool. We turned it on the web interface for law enforcement about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests. So there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone. So the tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement. They also love that it is extremely inexpensive to operate and easy, so, just the sheer volume of requests they anticipate us automating other features, and I just don't know how we'll handle the millions and millions of requests that are going to come in."
( Read more... )
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/surveillance-shocker-sprint-received-8-million-law
If we don't let any old law enforcement agency unconstitutionally wiretap everyone on any whim.... THE TERRAH-ISTS WILL WIN!!!!!!1!!!!!!one!!!
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The way our politics of fear is now constructed, there is no limit to the costs involved in nation-building in every conceivable failed state that could be a safe harbor for Jihadists. We cannot have the adult conversation about how much terrorist damage the US should tolerate compared with the costs of trying to control this phenomenon at its source. We are not mature enough as a country to have that conversation. And Obama has decided it isn't worth confronting that question now.
This is indeed what this is all about. To avoid a potential terrorist attack we are willing to invade countries and conduct wars to the end of time, if necessary. We are a country of cowards. And we're not too bright, either.
Not a good combination of traits. And soon enough we'll be bankrupt. But it all goes to the point that we'd rather ravage the armed forces and bankrupt the nation than risk a bomb going off in a rail station in Philadelphia. We no longer are in a state where we can guarantee 100% that we can't get hit by a terrorist. That world doesn't exist anymore. The sooner we wrap our tiny little heads and hearts around that notion the better off we'll all be. Instead, i had to forfeit my bottle of Wisconsin horseradish mustard at the airport cause it contained more than 3 oz. of a condiment used to flavor links of compressed pig guts.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/12/land-of-the-afraid.html#more
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[mackys@shell ~]$ ping www.gully.org
PING www.gully.org (67.18.176.202) from 199.4.150.5 : 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 67.18.176.202: icmp_seq=0 ttl=54 time=46.8 ms
64 bytes from 67.18.176.202: icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=46.7 ms
64 bytes from 67.18.176.202: icmp_seq=5 ttl=54 time=46.8 ms
64 bytes from 67.18.176.202: icmp_seq=6 ttl=54 time=46.6 ms
64 bytes from 67.18.176.202: icmp_seq=7 ttl=54 time=46.8 ms
64 bytes from 67.18.176.202: icmp_seq=10 ttl=54 time=43.8 ms
64 bytes from 67.18.176.202: icmp_seq=11 ttl=54 time=42.9 ms
64 bytes from 67.18.176.202: icmp_seq=12 ttl=54 time=93.0 ms
64 bytes from 67.18.176.202: icmp_seq=14 ttl=54 time=50.0 ms
64 bytes from 67.18.176.202: icmp_seq=16 ttl=54 time=46.9 ms
64 bytes from 67.18.176.202: icmp_seq=18 ttl=54 time=46.9 ms
64 bytes from 67.18.176.202: icmp_seq=19 ttl=54 time=46.6 ms
64 bytes from 67.18.176.202: icmp_seq=24 ttl=54 time=47.0 ms
--- www.gully.org ping statistics ---
26 packets transmitted, 13 packets received, 50% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 42.9/50.0/93.0 ms
[mackys@shell ~]$
More or less returning every second packet. That's amusing...
Linode is apparently having network-wide issues due to a botched upgrade.
> During a shared library update distributed to our hosts, a number of the hosts incorrectly
> have marked Linodes as being shut down. To recover from this we may be issuing host reboots
> to upgrade their software to our latest stack, and then bringing the Linodes to their last
> state. We're working on this now and expect to have additional updates shortly. We'll also be
> notifying those affected via our support ticket system. Please stand by.
http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4765
I didn't see any other threads, and their forums are down with the rest of their site so I figured I should post here.
One of my linodes has been down 2 hours now and another 2 for about 20 minutes each. Linode has been disturbingly quiet on updates. The last one was an hour ago as of this writing via twitter: "Linodes are continuing to come up as we recover from the outage"
Linode has some serious customer service issues here. First of all these updates are not nearly frequent or informative enough. Further, there is no reliable way for customers to receive updates. Their forums are useless if their entire site is going to be down, and they have no status page. They should have a SEPARATELY HOSTED status site that doesn't go down with everything else. It's ridiculous to force users to go searching for any sort of communication on twitter and elsewhere.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=900539
SRSLY Linode - having a 2nd location where you can host a status page when a back-hoe digs up your main site's fiber is networking 201. How come you guys can't figure that out?
Also, who's the genius who pushed out an update so poorly tested that it crashed every last linode? You *do* test your code before you deploy it, don't you?? (No, don't answer that. I don't want to know. Or rather, I already know...)
I'm not really complaining. Linode is a great deal and I'm not about to stop giving them money. And it's not like I'm hosting anything important or necessary on Linode. But I do have to wonder what they're thinking sometimes... or if they even are thinking at all.
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http://chythaicuisine.com/
Odd that I've never been there before lunch today - it's right next to the GameStop that I hit every couple of months. I don't eat Thai much, so don't take this too seriously, but the red curry here is the best Thai red curry I've ever personally eaten. Really, really, damn good.
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Okay, look, I realize that the MSP430 is an embedded chip and might require a little more clue than average to program. But for fuck's sake TI, none of the following should ever be required to write a word to flash:
- Copying code to RAM
- Running code from RAM
- Having execution return to the address just after the last address in the block you erased (I'm not kidding - this is actually how it works)
All of the above are known, in technical terms, as UR DOIN' IT RONG.
For the love of god, STOP USING THE GODDAMN PROGRAM COUNTER AS YOUR FLASH WRITE ADDRESS! There is no reason to do that! If your silicon designers are telling you that you don't have enough die space for one more 16 bit register, SHOOT THEM IN THE FUCKING HEAD AND GET DESIGNERS WITH A CLUE! Shit, man, you put no less than three separate FCNTL registers in this thing! How about deleting two of those, and using that silicon space for your flash address register!
You know how writes should work? I write the address to the FADDR register, I write the data to the FDATA register, I wait for !BUSY, I set the write bit. Interrupts (other than WDT) should be disabled automatically. And the PC should stay right the fuck where it is - not jump off to some random location in Flash memory. (If you want to disallow writes to the same block that the PC is in, that's fine with me.)
I'm going to end up writing more lines of code just to put a single word in flash, than I am for all the rest of my project combined. That's how much of an enormous pain in the ass you're making this for me.
It would be easier for me to redesign my board and tack on an external SPI flash, and bit-bang the goddamn SPI, than to write the routines to write to the internal flash. That's how much of an enormous pain in the ass you're making this for me.
All I have to say about this is, you are damn lucky that I didn't get to pick the chip this project was done on. Cuz I would have trashed the MSP430 in a fucking heartbeat when I found out about this incredible shit-cockery. I'd have trashed my board layout and started again with an AVR or PIC. In a fucking picosecond.
You guys are nutjobs to drag your customers through this shit-pile. Do you even use your own chips?? I don't think so. You would already know that this was fucking broken as hell if you did. What the fuck were you morons thinking??
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Capstone and Hilleman’s microturbine hybrid supercar features a Capstone C30 (30-kilowatt) microturbine that runs on diesel or biodiesel, which is housed inside a sleek Factory Five Racing GTM body. The Capstone C30 microturbine is so clean it does not require any exhaust after treatment to meet stringent clean air requirements of the California Air Resources Board or EPA 2010.
The CMT-380 features lithium-polymer battery cells that can be charged at home or at a public recharging station. While driving, the sports car can operate on 100 percent battery power in zero-emissions mode for a range of up to 80 miles. When the batteries reach a pre-determined state of discharge, the Capstone C30 microturbine quietly fires up and recharges the batteries on the fly to extend the driving range up to 500 miles.
The diesel-fueled C30 microturbine requires less maintenance than traditional combustion engines and produces ultra-low exhaust emissions.
"The sleek-looking, high-performance supercar car definitely raises hybrid’s cool factor several levels," said Jim Crouse, Capstone’s Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing. "The CMT-380’s design performance numbers speak for themselves: 0-60 mph in 3.9 seconds, 150 mph top speed and an unheard of driving range of up to 500 miles on a single tank of fuel, all with ultra-low exhaust emissions that rival any hybrid on the market today."
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/prnewswire/200911300937PR_NEWS_USPR_____AQ17802.htm
Run it on biodiesel and you're carbon-neutral, too.
Now it just needs an EEStor ultracap bank in there to catch the energy from the regen braking system, and this performance monster could be the most efficient car ever built. (Thank you, 90% efficient A/C induction motors.)
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"The standard Beltway dogma is that there would be serious political costs from reversing the Bush/Cheney abuses of the Constitution and civil liberties. The success of Obama's campaign - which emphatically and repeatedly vowed to do exactly that - ought to have permanently retired that excuse."
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/11/27/civil_liberties/index.html
Sp8tzel
IMHO, It's not so much a dogma (in that anyone inside the beltway actually believes this) as a mantra repeated for the masses to ensure that interested parties on all sides, democrat and republican, don't face repercussions for their indefensible actions over the past decade.
AlexWhite
Wonderful.
Except Obama has not done anything to reverse those abuses since taking office. He requested the Patriot Act be extended, continues warrantless wiretapping, wants indefinite detention without trial, changed the law to bury photos of the military committing illegal acts of torture, has refused to investigate Bush/Cheney abuses, and now commits war crimes of his own routinely, having blown up more civilians along the Af/Pak border in the past ten months than Bush did his last three years in office.
So much for emphatic vows made while campaigning.
http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/a97av/the_standard_beltway_dogma_is_that_there_would_be/
Q: How do you know that a politician is lying?
A: His lips are moving.
It just makes me laugh like a loon to see otherwise intelligent liberals continue like and even support Obama in spite of his obvious continuation of pretty much all that was evil about the Dubya administration.
But even funnier is how the slightly more intelligent people, who at least have the intellectual integrity to not deny or blind themselves to Obama's flaws, continue to express how shocked - SHOCKED!! - they are over his obviously evil actions.
People are fucking stupid and they don't learn. Like the battered wife, they keep running back to politicians, in spite of the mountains of historical proof that it'll never change anything. "Obama's *different*! He's not like all the other politicians! He won't fuck us all over in the name of maximizing his own power, pandering to special interests inside the beltway, and ensuring his own re-election!"
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Go ahead and laugh if you want (though you’ll benefit your brain more if you smile), but in my professional opinion, yawning is one of the best-kept secrets in neuroscience. Even my colleagues who are researching meditation, relaxation, and stress reduction at other universities have overlooked this powerful neural-enhancing tool. However, yawning has been used for many decades in voice therapy as an effective means for reducing performance anxiety and hypertension in the throat.
Several recent brain-scan studies have shown that yawning evokes a unique neural activity in the areas of the brain that are directly involved in generating social awareness and creating feelings of empathy. One of those areas is the precuneus, a tiny structure hidden within the folds of the parietal lobe. According to researchers at the Institute of Neurology in London, the precuneus appears to play a central role in consciousness, self-reflection, and memory retrieval. The precuneus is also stimulated by yogic breathing, which helps explain why different forms of meditation contribute to an increased sense of self-awareness. It is also one of the areas hardest hit by age-related diseases and attention deficit problems, so it’s possible that deliberate yawning may actually strengthen this important part of the brain.
http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/1109/expert.html
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Nobody gives away a free physical thing. There's always a catch. So up front: you have to pay shipping. Other than that, it's open season.
* $100 max per household
* You pay shipping
* Limit of $100,000 in giveaways for the day
* Starts 9AM MST January 7th, 2010
* Ends 11PM MST January 7th, 2010 (or when we hit $100k, whichever comes first)
* Rainchecks for popular items will be allowed
Why are we doing this? It's not that I want to create hell for the shipping, production, and the IT teams at SparkFun. There's a multitude of reasons.
First and foremost, we want to give back. We've had a stellar year in 2009, and it's all because of you. So please, have a beer (or a Stepper Motor Driver) on us.
Second: We wish we could sponsor more groups but we don't have a sound way of selecting appropriate projects. Because we can't afford to say yes to everyone, we have to say no to everyone. It pains us every time we have to do it. So this is a way for us to evenly enable all the students and great minds of the world to pickup a $100 worth of free gear. Go for it!
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/news.php?id=305
Gotta arrange one of those delayed email services to send me an email on Jan 5...
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Face it, the vast majority of sci-fi and fantasy fare - and I mean books, movies, videogames, comics, and so forth - are written by and for men and boys.
When it seems like nobody is paying attention to you, the slightest bit of attention paid by anyone can seem like a huge deal - come to think of it, it's often one of the first things (however unconsciously) noted by real-life "Bella Swans" right before they wind up in abusive, co-dependent relationships with the first real-life "Edward Cullen" who shows something resembling interest.
Now, am I saying that all this context somehow justifies or minimizes the blight of "Twilight?" Hell, no! In a way, I think it makes it worse. Bad art is just bad art, but what Stephanie Meyer (and her publisher, and Summit) are doing amounts to selling tainted water to an audience that's dying of thirst in the desert. Plus, they're driving down the value of the genre even further by occupying it. Anyone trying to pitch a good female-centric supernatural romance franchise will inevitably have their work compared to "Twilight" and taken less seriously as a result.
So while it's all good and fun to bag on Meyer's crappy books and their goofier fangirls, just keep in mind how hard it is out there for the women of geekdom. Their own culture relegates them to the subgenre-ghetto, and the "Twilights" of the world grow fat and wealthy keeping them there.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/moviebob/6797-Twilight-of-the-She-Geeks
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I can't wait to see how many downmods stupid sheep heap upon me for this:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/a7mpc/how_does_a_free_market_correct_itself_when_a/c0g8ohg
My big problem with big-L libertarians is that they generally don't believe that markets can fail. Even though we've seen time and time again how supposedly "free" markets can fail - and badly - due to external factors, network effects, or information asymmetry within the market.
But don't tell it to a Randroid, lassiez-faire "capitalists". They're unable to even concieve of the idea that the same aspirin that relieves their headaches in low doses, could destroy their kidneys if they take way too much.
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1. Crossing the Bay Bridge, I glance back for a last nostalgic glimpse of the skyline. Then I reach over, slide the back cover off my cell phone, and pop out the battery. A cell phone with a battery inside is a cell phone that’s trackable.
About 25 minutes later, as the California Department of Transportation database will record, my green 1999 Honda Civic, California plates 4MUN509, passes through the tollbooth on the far side of the Carquinez Bridge, setting off the FasTrak toll device, and continues east toward Lake Tahoe.
What the digital trail will not reflect is that a few miles past the bridge I pull off the road, detach the FasTrak, and stuff it into the duffle bag in my trunk, where its signal can’t be detected. Nor will it note that I then double back on rural roads to I-5 and drive south through the night, cutting east at Bakersfield. There will be no digital record that at 4 am I hit Primm, Nevada, a sad little gambling town about 40 minutes from Vegas, where $15 cash gets me a room with a view of a gravel pile.
http://www.wired.com/vanish/2009/11/ff_vanish2/
It's a fun little article. I think they could have cut out a couple of pages without losing too much, but it's still worth a read.
Reading this article, and seeing all the elaborate trouble people are willing to go to locate this guy purely for fun, reminds me very strongly of Clay Shirky's idea of a society-wide "cognitive surplus".
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http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters
Finally, a Haskell tutorial for imperative programmers that doesn't utterly suck!
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The "jet-sled car split" is now officially the coolest thing I've ever seen on Mythbusters.
Hopefully the segment will make it up onto YouTube so everyone can see it. Even if you're not a big fan, this one is worth watching.
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A researcher at the NASA Ames Center has developed a proof of concept device which can convert an iPhone into a chemical sensor capable of detecting ammonia, chlorine gas, and methane. The chem sniffing device is a small silicon chip (no bigger than a stamp) that plugs into the phone. Upon detection, the chip uses the phone to alert others. It was developed as part of Homeland Security’s Cell-All program. The US hopes that one day a small, inexpensive, and portable chip such as this one could be used to turn thousands (or millions) of mobile phones into a means of quickly detecting hazardous chemicals in public environments. That detection could save lives and help direct first response units. Of course, for the nerds out there the device’s true importance is easy to see: it’s the next step to developing a tricorder from Star Trek.
http://singularityhub.com/2009/11/17/nasa-develops-tricorder-adapts-iphone-to-detect-dangerous-chemicals/
You call that a tricorder? Those of us with an Android phone already have a tricorder. ;]
P.S. I had the idea of making a chip to plug into the bottom of the iPhone and do cool stuff (in my case, a 3-channel digital storage oscilloscope) last year. So there!!
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http://www.devilstuningfork.com/download.php
Very interesting. You have to give these guys credit for creativity, too. I've never heard of any other game based on this concept.
Evidently requires a pretty good graphics card, and there's no saving. But levels do have checkpoints, so you don't lose everything if you fall down a pit.
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Software has, from the time it became important enough to build businesses round, always had flaky methodologies and people who try to sell them. Just in my experience, first there were the "OO will save the world" hypesters, including the design patterns evangelists - this was the crowd Jamie encountered. Then there was RUP, then XP, then agile, now "lean software".
The common pattern in all these fads (and a quick way to recognize these things as fads) is to realize that the set of people who try to sell methodologies and the set of people who are brilliant programmers, product designers and so on are completely disjoint.
Do a thought experiment. Think about some brilliant programmers you know, the "change the world with code they write" type folks. For me these are people like Peter Norvig and John Carmack and Paul Graham and Linus Torvalds. You may have other heroes. Can you imagine these people peddling agile? Just try envisioning it. Linus Torvalds trying to become a Scrum Master?
Here is the secret. Nobody who is really good at programming/product design/marketing/business (or anything) will demean himself by trying to make money telling other people how to do what they are good at. They'd rather do whatever it is they are best in the world at. World Champions may become coaches when they are old and tired and broken down, not when they can still play and win.
http://pindancing.blogspot.com/2009/09/let-agile-fad-flow-by.html
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On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) j_b wrote:
> http://www.star-telegram.com/crime/story/1761304.html
Wow, man! You know, I've heard stories about horses that run away
from llamas. Because even though a horse is way bigger and stronger,
it just doesn't have the vicious streak a llama does.
The good news is, llamas that live in herds never do this. The ones
that live alone though... they get kinda crazy. Notice that this was
a llama that was living with a herd of goats. Not an optimum situation.
So this wasn't just a llama attack; this was a PSYCHO LLAMA ATTACK!
Which, incidentally, would make a great name for a rock band.
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So it's deadline time again, which means - you guessed it - Flash is making my life hell again with its broken inability to do even the SIMPLEST GODDAMN THINGS.
Basically I needed to use unloadAndStop(). I had to do this because, as I've explained before, Adobe are incompetent fucks and their regular old unload() function... just doesn't. Moreover, Adobe knows about this problem but refuses to fix it - citing "compatibility". (Memo to morans: being compatible with old bugs is not some kind of virtue!) Using unloadAndStop() means you have to compile for Flash Player 10, because unloadAndStop() isn't guaranteed to be in Player 9. So I go into Project/Properties/Flex Compiler and change the minimum version to 10.0.0. Clean the workspace, and waited for it to rebuild. It doesn't rebuild successfully.
Evidently some of the code was using constructors with arguments. Which worked just fine in Flash 9, but was yanked out of Flash 10 because of... some stupid political considerations about future compatibility with ECMAScript, evidently. You go and design your language by committee, there, Adobe! That's always worked out so well! See, this is how Adobe operates. "We're going to maintain compatibility with old bugs, but we're also going to yank useful working features out of the language between versions! We wouldn't want any code you've written in the past to continue to work. We want all of your code broken. And we'll fuck you from both sides to ensure that your code either stays broken (by maintaining compatibility with old bugs), or becomes broken (by removing perfectly working features from the language)!" Fucking boneheads...
The class in question that was daring to use constructors with arguments was named big.long.packagename.Vector. So I open it up, and go and spend half a day fixing it so the constructors don't take arguments. Then I spent another half day fixing all the references in other code. You know, taking a perfectly good line like: "var myDist:Vector = new Vector(point1, point2);" and replacing it with obnoxiously verbose, failtacular crap like: "var myDist:Vector = new Vector(); myDist.makeFromPoints(point1, point2);"
So now everything compiles with no problem. But when I actually try it, it throws a run-time error:
Error #1007: Instantiation attempted on a non-constructor (at line NNN)
The code on line NNN reads:
var deltaVec:Vector = new Vector();
The constructor declaration in Vector.as is:
public function Vector()
{
// Nothing
}
Let's stop right here and reflect upon the magnitude of failure we're witnessing. Adobe is so utterly fucking incompetent that their runtime can't even instantiate an object correctly.
This isn't programmer error. There's nothing wrong with that constructor decl. The compiler is being run with maximum warnings, and isn't complaining about anything. (Oh, it certainly *should* be complaining about an ambiguity around big.long.packagename.Vector, but since when has Adobe been able to make a compiler that didn't shit all over itself??) No, this is pure Adobe fuck-tardery, written in mile-high blazing letters all across the heavens, like a fucking nuclear armageddon.
You see, I already know what's going on. I've worked with Adobe products long enough now that I know that Adobe is more than stupid enough to pollute namespaces. Their runtime is absolutely going to confuse my big.long.packagename.Vector with the built-in top-level Flash 10 "Vector" class - even though the two are NOTHING alike. They don't even live in the same goddamn namespace, for fuck's sake!
You want proof of my assertion?
I change the name of the class from "Vector" to "Wector".¹ And thank god for Eclipse, it quickly runs through the code and changes all the appropriate occurrences of "Vector" to "Wector" for me, so I don't need to waste half a day doing it myself. I clean the workspace, and let the auto-build do its thing...
NOW EVERYTHING RUNS PERFECTLY.
-----
¹ Walter Koenig surrenders.
"Pulling teeth" and "kicking dead whales down the beach" doesn't even begin to describe what working with Flash is like. Making even the simplest fucking thing work on this platform is like stabbing myself in the balls with a rusty, jagged butter knife while ten thousand yowling cats scream in my ears. Above all: I am so sick and fucking tired of being Adobe's janitor. I don't complain about shitty compilers and platforms when they're free - I believe that you often do get what you pay for. But this stuff is not free. My Flex Developer plugin license was fucking $600!! CS4 is like $1200! Truly, Adobe is the new MicroSoft. They develop shit-quality products, sell them at 1000 percent profit, and yet every stupid fool and their mom are lining up around the block to suck their dick 24/7. The success of Adobe as a company is proof that Jesus died in vain.
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QUIT USING MY USER-AGENT: HEADER TO SEND ME TO A SHITTY, NON-FUNCTIONAL PAGE FULL OF FUCKING JAVASCRIPT (WHICH I DISABLED WITHIN THE FIRST TEN SECONDS OF PICKING THIS THING UP!). I DON'T WANT TO SEE YOUR FUCKING USELESS, LOSING, FAILURE, PIECE OF SHIT "MOBILE" SITE!
I type in http://google.com, I get a blank page on my Droid. Laying down a bookmark reveals that I've been redirected to "http://www.google.com/m?client=ms-android-verizon".
Google: Stop this worthless-ass bullshit NOW.
You stupid-ass, fuck-tarded morons. You really did this? REALLY?
Nobody wants a "mobile" web browser. Nobody wants to see your ugly-ass, half-broken "mobile" site. IT CHOKES ON TEN THOUSAND BUCKETS OF COCK.
AND EVERYBODY IN THE ENTIRE WORLD KNOWS THIS. EXCEPT (APPARENTLY) YOU.
...
Been a while since I used <font size=9>...
The bigger question is, do you think Google and Verizon will give a goddamn? I, myself, do not. I believe Google has some kind of backroom deal going with Verizon to redirect Droid traffic to certain pages. And they don't give a damn if nobody likes it, or if it ruins people's ability to use Google, because there's big bucks involved.
So, as usual, I'm just howling at the moon here... because I just enjoy howling at the moon.
I guess my Droid goes back to the Verizon store TOMORROW.
Edit: I recommend Droid owners set a bookmark at:
http://www.google.com/search?q=FuckYouGoogleAndFUCKYourUsabilityDestroyingAndroidUser-AgentRedirection
That will allow you to use Google search without getting redirected to the broken-ass Javascript-required mobile page. It will also leave a big pile of shit in the search text box. Just click on said box, then do ALT-DEL to clear it all out.
Now that I have workaround, I'll give Google a little more time to fix this problem...
(In the mean time: The physical keyboard space bar will go down a page in the web browser. Shift-Space goes back a page.)
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http://www.gully.org/~mackys/findprime.c.txt
http://www.reddit.com/r/coding/comments/a3659/a_coding_challenge_given_an_integer_n_find_the/c0fmqtf
This was mostly interesting to me from a mathematical perspective. I was surprised and gratified to find out that there was such a simple and easy upper bound for pi(x). Also, the 6k+1/6k+5 optimization.
When I first read this problem, my intuition told me that there was a prime between N and 2N. Couldn't prove it if my life depended on it, but somehow I just knew... and lo and behold: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand%27s_postulate !
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When you run a SWF file, Adobe has set up the Flash security model so that SWF can be one (and only one) of these:
"local-filesystem" - The SWF can access local files, but cannot access any network resources. Including, say, a network socket.
"local-with-networking" - The SWF can access network sockets, but cannot access any local files. (Standard restrictions on network sockets - i.e. crossdomain-policy.xml and such - still apply.)
SWF files that need to communicate via sockets will, of course, need network access. And this will cut them off from loading local files. That probably won't be a big problem most of the time. Your SWFs probably aren't loading stuff from files on the hard drive.
You can change between these two options by re-compiling/re-exporting your SWF file. In CS4 (on the PC) this option is in File/Publish Settings/Flash tab/Local Playback Security. If you're using Flex, this is the "-use-network=yes" command line option to the mxmlc compiler.
However, if for some reason you need both network and file access, there is another way. This only works if you download and install the stand-alone flash player. To be specific, only the DEBUGGER version of the stand-alone flash player.
Once you have downloaded and installed the debugger version of the stand-alone flash player, go to C:\Windows\system32\Macromed\Flash\ (or if you're on a 64-bit Vista, C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash\).
If there isn't a directory named "FlashPlayerTrust" there, make one. Then, go into that directory and create a text file. You can name the text file anything you want, but by convention these files usually have a ".cfg" extension. I will assume you chose to name the file "example.cfg". Open up your example.cfg with any text editor (Notepad works fine) and put "C:\" in it as the first line. Then save the file.
Basically, what you've just done is to tell the Debug Stand-Alone flash player that if it loads a SWF file from anywhere on C:\, that SWF is to be completely trusted by the flash security model. The SWF file can access local files, AND it can access the network too. This is known as "being in the "local-trusted" sandbox."
HTH, HAND, HAGN, HMOFG, HTFSIK, HHGTTG, TANSTAAFL, YMMV, FOAD, etc, etc, etc...
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"That's an actual company. I know. They wanted me to work there. No, I know what you're thinking, and I'm not delusional, and I'm not projecting my own issues on to the canvas of the movie. There are just too many of the details that line up. I wish I could tell you the name of the company, but there's no way I'm going to remember it, and at this late a date I probably can't even find it with a Google search. You see, there were a lot of companies in that particular business niche at the time, and after I got fired from MasterCard, there were about a dozen of them that were desperate to hire me. All of them offered to pay my relocation, and offered me a 50% salary increase over my already fairly impressive $48k/yr salary from MasterCard. Only one of them was from Austin, Texas, though, and the urban landscape in that movie is unmistakable to anyone who's seen even pictures of the real Austin, Texas. (If one needs more proof, let me point out that Mike Judge is from Texas; the only place he would know that would have that particular job would have been in Austin, the "technology capital of Texas.")"
http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/130778.html
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I'm thinking it's about time I dusted off the old whitelist script again, that bounces any email sent to me from an email address that's not pre-approved...
On another note: How do spammers get my email address? I never type it into web forms (that's what mailinator.com is for), I don't have it published in text form anywhere...
Edit: I first made a backup copy of, then edited my /etc/postfix/main.cf. Then used /etc/init.d/postfix restart to restart the mail system. Upon attempting to send an email from an outside domain, the following DNSBLs were dead and had to be removed from the .cf: relays.ordb.org, opm.blitzed.org, list.dsbl.org, multihop.dsbl.org.
( My final config line looked like this. )
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While the cores might not be overly complex, the on-chip busses are. Each Gx core has 64K of L1 cache, 32K data and 32K instruction, along with a unified 8-way 256KB L2 cache. The cache is totally non-blocking, completely coherent, and the cache subsystem can reorder requests to other caches or DRAM. On top of this, the core supports cache pinning to keep often used data or instructions in cache. On the 100 core model, the Gx has 32MB of cache.
Tiles are the name Tilera uses for for a basic unit of repetition. The 16 core Gx has 16 tiles, the 64 core Gx has 64, etc. A tile consists of a core, the L1 and L2 caches, and something Tilera calls the Terabit Switch. More than anything, this switch is the heart of the chip.
Remember when we said that cramming 100 cores on a die is not a big problem, but feeding them is? The Terabit Switch is how Tilera solves the problem, and it is a rather unique solution. Instead of one off-core bus, there are five. Each of them has a dedicated purpose, and that not only gives huge bandwidth, it also goes a fair way towards minimizing contention. Cache traffic will never be stepped on by user data, and so on.
The five networks are called QDN, RDN, FDN, IDN and UDN. In the last two generations of Tilera chips, all of these networks were 32 bits wide, but on the Gx, the widths vary to give each one more or less bandwidth depending on their functions.
http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/10/29/look-100-core-tilera-gx/
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According to sources at the Pentagon, American quagmire-building efforts continued apace in Afghanistan this week, as the geographically rugged, politically unstable region remained ungovernable, death tolls continued to rise, and the grim military campaign persisted as hopelessly as ever.
In fact, many government officials now believe that the United States and its allies could be as little as six months away from their ultimate goal: the total quagmirification of Afghanistan.
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/u_s_continues_quagmire_building
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This guy is feeling through a piece of machinery made from metal and silicon. That's some crazy, year 2010 stuff right there...
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We're [Heavy Metal] right now on the verge of a comeback and usually, as sad as this sounds, it is around the world politics. When Peace Sells... But Whose Buying? came out, what was going on then? Well we were having a standoff with the Middle East. When Countdown to Extinction came out, Rust in Peace came out, what was going on with those records? Well Rust in Peace, we were having a standoff with Khadafi, and with Countdown, we were having more problems with Saddam Hussein. Several years later we have another problem, the world is at an absolute mess right now. And I think when people get to this point they know that they can always rely on heavy metal to understand what you’re feeling, and to give you that resolve to get up and to go continue the good fight. That may sound like a Deepak Chopra wearing studded underwear kind of monologue, but for me I really believe in what I do. I believe in the people that are in it and that’s why I’m a champion for the cause of heavy metal.
http://www.metalinsider.net/interviews/dave-mustaine-endgame-is-going-to-launch-the-return-of-heavy-metal-in-america
When I saw there was an interview with ol' Mega-Dave, I thought to myself: "So he's going to ramble and bullshit like usual, and not say much interesting." The interview is, for the most part, like that. But there's that little interesting bit that I quoted above. You really don't need to read the rest of the interview, though. You've already read the good part.
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In a ceremony Wednesday, US President Barack Obama signed legislation authorizing the largest ever military budget, a gargantuan $680 billion for the Pentagon, including $130 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On Thursday, he signed a spending bill funneling another $44 billion into the Department of Homeland Security, to strengthen the apparatus of state repression within the United States.
The back-to-back bill signings are a clear demonstration that Obama is extending and intensifying the program of militarism and attacks on democratic rights for which the Bush administration was deservedly hated, in the United States and worldwide.
Each of the bills contained provisions aimed at further restricting democratic rights. The Pentagon budget bill authorizes the use of military tribunals to try prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and others seized illegally, either overseas or within the US, as part of the “war on terror.” It also bars the release of Guantanamo prisoners—even those found completely innocent—into the United States. It prohibits bringing Guantanamo prisoners to trial on US soil without a 45-day advance notice to Congress.
The Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill effectively prohibits the release of photographs taken by US military personnel during torture sessions at US bases in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. It exempts these photos from the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, under which the American Civil Liberties Union and several media outlets have filed suit in federal court. The exemption would apply, not just to the photos sought by the ACLU, but to any photos taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 to which the Pentagon has objections.
Obama signed the record Pentagon budget less than three weeks after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/dfns-o30.shtml
I know, I know...
TL; DR.
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For thirty-six years, Warren Hern has been one of the few doctors in America to specialize in late abortions. George Tiller was another. And when Dr. Tiller was murdered that Sunday in church, Warren Hern became the only one left.
http://www.esquire.com/features/abortion-doctor-warren-hern-0909
This one hits close to home, because Hern is right here in Boulder. In fact, about eight years back, I used to live on the other side of the same block his clinic is on.
The ROV whirred farther into the darkness. The ocean floor lifted a little whenever it was disturbed, the silt turning the water into milk. The men squinted at their monitors, the ROV's lights casting fifteen or twenty feet into the murk. They didn't speak. Then they saw something alien waiting for them on the bottom of the cold ocean, a twisted mess of metal and cable and blade. If the men piloting the ROV hadn't known what they were looking for, they might not have guessed what they had found. But Chaulk knew almost immediately that the ROV had crept up on its target from behind, and now he was looking at the tail section of a Sikorsky S-92, at rest on its right side.
The ROV came around the tail and turned to scan the main section of the fuselage, which the men hoped would be intact enough for them to raise without fear of losing it. Their hearts sank. Even Chaulk's expert eyes weren't sure what they were taking in. It was as though he were looking at a puzzle not only in pieces but also turned inside out. He asked the men in that windowless container to toggle their displays from black-and-white to color. They hit the switch. That's when they began to learn. They saw blue-and-white aluminum, pairs of green rubber boots, and bright-orange survival suits, still wrapped around the men they were meant to save.
http://www.esquire.com/features/helicopter-crash-0909
This is the story of the investigation of the helicopter crash.
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