(Looks like I need to get up earlier.)

Guess who said the following:

If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I'd be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way , that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can't do to you. Says what the Federal government can't do to you, but doesn't say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn't shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.

If you guessed "B. Hussein Obama," then you, sir, are correct. It's from an interview he gave WBEZ, the Chicago NPR affiliate, in 2001. Go here for the MP3.

"Redistributive change?" "Economic justice?" That's Communism we can believe in.

Do you suppose this would be the new national anthem under an Obummer regime?

Update: (9:15 AM) Sounds like Rush Limbaugh is kicking off the day with this story. John McCain needs to run with this. America won't vote for a Communist.

(Cross-posted at*.)

Link: http://hillbuzz.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/weve-said-all-along-that-this-nomination-was-stolen-proof-others-know-so-too/

Linked by AoSHQ...check out how Obummer and his minions attempted to engineer a favorable outcome in an early caucus state (he still failed it). The following is an excerpt from a letter from the Hillary Clinton campaign (via its lawyers) to the head of the Nevada Democrat Party, asking for it to look into several improprieties. As I recall from local news reports at the time, the Clark County Democrat convention was also quite the fiasco:

Systematic Corruption of the Party's Caucus Procedures

The Committee received substantially similar reports of improprieties of such a number as to leave no conclusion but that the Obama campaign and its allies and supporters engaged in a planned effort to subvert the Party's caucus procedures to its advantage. For example:

• Preference cards were premarked for Obama.
• Clinton supporters were denied preference cards on the basis that none were left, while Obama supporters at the same caucus sites were given preference cards.
• Caucus chairs obviously supporting Obama:
  • Deliberately miscounted votes to favor Senator Obama.
  • Deliberately counted unregistered persons as Obama votes.
  • Deliberately counted young children as Obama votes.
  • Refused to accept preference cards from Clinton supporters who were at the caucus site by noon on the ground that the cards were not filled out fast enough.
  • Told Clinton supporters to leave prior to electing delegates.
• Clinton supporters who arrived late were turned away from the caucus, while late Obama supporters were admitted to the caucus.

Manipulation of the Voter Registration Process

Numerous reports received by the Committee demonstrate a concerted effort on the part of the Obama campaign and its supporters to prevent eligible voters supporting a candidate other than Senator Obama from caucusing. The Obama supporters complained of were acting in positions of authority at the caucus sites. Some of these reports are as follows:

• Obama supporters wrongly informed Clinton supporters that they were not allowed to participate in the caucus if their names were not on the voter rolls. However, Obama supporters whose names did not appear on the voter rolls were permitted to register at the caucus site.
• Obama supporters falsely informed Clinton supporters that no registration forms were available for them to register to vote at the caucus site.
• Obama supporters wrongly told Clinton supporters who were attempting to caucus at the wrong precinct that they could not caucus at that site, while simultaneously permitting Obama supporters at the wrong precinct to participate.
• Obama supporters were allowed to move to the front of the registration and sign-in line.

Voter Suppression and Intimidation

The Committee received a substantial number of disturbing reports from voters that they had been subject to harassment, intimidation or efforts to prevent them from voting. Some of the most egregious of these complaints are described below:

• Voters at at-large caucus sites were informed that those sites were for Obama supporters only.
• Clinton supporters at at-large caucus sites were told that their managers would be watching them while they caucused.
• Workers were informed that their supervisors kept lists of Clinton and Obama supporters, and were told that they could not caucus unless their name was on the list of Obama supporters.
• Many Clinton supporters were threatened with employment termination or other discipline if they caucused for Senator Clinton.
• Workers were required to sign a pledge card to support Obama if they wanted time off to participate in the caucus.
• Workers at one casino were offered a lavish lunch and permitted to attend and register to vote only if they agree to support Obama.

The complaints summarized above represent only a small sample of the complaints received by the Committee. With respect to each of these complaints and many more, the Committee has the names and phone numbers of those reporting these incidents and the specific precinct numbers where the incidents occurred. Upon request the Committee will share these with the Party with appropriate safeguards to protect these individuals from reprisal. On the whole, these reports show a troubling effort by the Obama campaign and its allies and supporters to advance their own campaign at the expense of the right of all Nevada Democrats to participate in the democratic process in a free, fair and open manner.

Chicago machine politics you can believe in. If he's willing to treat other Democrats like this, the rest of us don't stand a chance under an Obummer presidency.

(Cross-posted at *.)

I recently bought a used notebook. It runs well, but is a little slow, and only has 512mb of RAM. I decided to buy more.

After some googling, I found a good deal on 1 GB DDR stick for notebooks. Here's the site: MemorySuppliers.com The price was right, and shipping was free.

In addition, after ordering, I received an offer for a $15 refund for posting a short message to my blog or personal page. This is the closest I have to a blog, so here it is. If this goes through, I may go get myself another stick, since the notebook maxes at 2 GB.

I'll follow up in comments when I receive my memory.

(Crossposted from *.)

http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/10/13/cleveland-election-officials-launch-probe-acorn/

That's two jurisdictions where the rabble-rousers are now under investigation.

(For the first, go to Google, punch in "moar please," and click I'm Feeling Lucky. That was a nice surprise...now what's the syntax for linking an I'm Feeling Lucky result? :-) )

First time in about 4 years for this account

EDIT:
I just realized I never had MOD points for this account. It was created as a troll account...

Age does strange things to people.
I need to find out where my inner bastard went.

I've been asked to help out my sister's boss working on their store server. This is a little mom and pop place, but they try to handle their IT intelligently. Their last computer guru moved out of town, so this may lead to some extra cash for me on a semi-regular basis. I'm looking to do a good job.
          There are several things he's looking for, but the main request right now is to upgrade the hard drives. They have a Dell Poweredge server, with two 40 GB IDE drives in a RAID 0 configuration. They're running out of space, and they've bought two 80 GB drives to upgrade with.
          I haven't worked with RAID before. I understand RAID 0 (Oops. I meant RAID 1) is simple mirroring, and I see from their computer's specs that they have a hardware RAID controller. My initial thought was to open the case, pull one of the existing drives (just as if it had gone bad) and place the new drive in the old drive's place. After a rebuild, everything should be fine. Then, same process with the remaining old drive, and a new rebuild. At the end of this process, I expect to have everything working as before, but probably still at the 40 GB capacity. From reading some Dell docs online, I think I can then go in and expand the logical drives to take the full capacity.
          First question, does this sound like it will work? Am I missing something major?
          Second question: There is some reference to adding a hot swappable backup to the RAID 0 configuration. The one concern I have with the steps outlined above is that during the rebuild we don't have a full backup available. Of course, if the rebuild fails, and we haven't made any changes to the data, then we can just pop the old drive back in (I think). Still, if there's a way to alleviate the risk, I'd like to take it. What I'm thinking is putting in a new drive on a third channel, configured as the hot swap. Let it rebuild, then shut down and pull one of the old drives. Put the other new drive in, set as the new hot swap, and wait for the rebuild again. Finally, pull the last old drive, and set the two new drives up with no hot swap. Is this better or worse than my first thought? If better, am I missing anything on this end? I assume that I'd still have to expand the drives after the process to take advantage of the larger space.
          Third question: Am I just crazy, and there's a much simpler solution I've overlooked?

        Any help appreciated

It seems to me that the more I get involved in political discussions, both real-world and online, the more I notice that the only thing most people hate more than the "other side" is the extremists in their own party.

So I was just checking my email and saw this news story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080518/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq

This kid is an idiot for doing what he did, but to me this is just insanity. On our side we accidentally kill civilians by the dozens, kick in their doors and search their houses at all hours of the day/night, and not to mention our presence attracting outside terrorists into the country. This is not even to speak of the horrible things they would do if you gave them a star of david, a christian bible, or something similar.

Now I could sit here and talk about the terrible things I've seen both sides do, but that's not my point. My point is of all the crazy things going on, you're going to ruin someone's career (and as a result, their life for the next couple years) over the shooting of a book on a range. Wow. There are so many more worse things going on in a WAR than disrespecting a religious text (which in my experience are often found in trash or abandoned in the streets).

Since I've been in Iraq for the past 13 months, I haven't been given a lot of time to get online and post a JE to Slashdot. Things here seem a lot different from when I used to post back in college so I doubt anyone reads my journal, but oh well. A lot of people don't understand that my particular job in the Army (Infantry) means I'm rarely on the FOB (until the past couple weeks anyway) and for the past year I've probably had a total of 30 minutes a week to spend online. During that 30 minutes you can bet Slashdot was the last thing on my mind.
          Anyhow, I've seen more things than you could possibly imagine. Every horrible thing that you've heard about I've seen. I still support certain aspects of this war, but I've changed my opinion on various other aspects now that I've actually been here. I plan on posting on a lot of what I've seen - though some of it will be phrased hypothetically due to the... sensitive nature.
          We spent 4 months in Baghdad, and the rest all over the Diyala river valley. I have not been down south, but I've been to all the hot spots up here. For the first 3 months of my deployment I lived in an abandoned Church in Baghdad, and then the rest I've lived with Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police. About a month ago we moved onto a FOB. What I'm saying is, I've actually spent a lot of time with the people of this country - talked to them, eaten with them, and slept by them. Trust me, life here on the ground is so much different than anything on TV.
          Anyhow, I'll probably post soon. All is well right now. I'll be home in the somewhat-near-future.

In a post to comp.sys.apple2, Simon Williams announced that he has a website running on an Apple IIe. It's a 64K machine with a floppy drive, running a Contiki-based webserver. Instead of a serial card and a terminal server, it's directly connected to the network with an Uthernet card (basically, an Apple II slot adapter for an off-the-shelf embeddable Ethernet module). He says it's a bit fussy as to what will connect to it, but Firefox on both Windows and Linux works for me.

Via slashdot users RM6f9, Jeremiah Cornelius, Shadow Wrought, Captain Splendid, Fort Knox, OldHawk, Johndiiiiiiii, smitty_one_each,

Post a comment to this thread, and I will:

1. Tell you why I befriended you.
2. Associate you with something - fandom, a song, a color, a photo, etc..
3. Tell you something I like about you.
4. Tell you a memory I have of you.
5. Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.
7. In return, you must post this in your Journal/Blag/whatever.

This comes from Shadow Wrought, and others...

Post a comment to this thread, and I will:

1. Tell you why I befriended you.
2. Associate you with something - fandom, a song, a color, a photo, etc..
3. Tell you something I like about you.
4. Tell you a memory I have of you.
5. Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.
7. In return, you must post this in your Journal/Blag/whatever.

I don't know how many of you have checked your GMail this morning, but having pulled an all-nighter again, I got a rather strange notice in Thunderbird saying my account was not enabled for IMAP, or something to that nature. Upon logging into GMail's web-interface, I noticed in the Settings page "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" has reverted back to "Forwarding and POP" again. Is this permanent, or just a temporary change by Google?

Edit: Strangest one-off bug, signed out, then signed back in again, and the setting is back.

Wow, it's been almost a year since I've put any thoughts down in this journal. And, as usual, I'm never quite sure what to write.

I got a new job. Christmas was wonderful, with no familial drama whatsoever for a change. New years was at my place, and the party lasted three days, with a consensus that it was the best new years party many of them had ever attended. Of course, as host, I got new years kisses from every single lady there, much to the amusement of my wife, who collected most of them.

Another year, many changes but it's all the same in the end.

(Cross-posted to /. and *...I should probably do that more often.)

They've been making plenty of noise lately about the "torture" (really just coerced interrogation) methods that the CIA has used in recent years. They've been whining that use of these methods makes us no better than the Bad Guys, that we're supposed to be better than that, yada yada yada...

Turns out that they were briefed in on it way back in 2002. Said briefing even included the San Francisco Liberal Treat herself, Nancy Pelosi. I suspect that even the 11%ers won't like this:

Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002 (h/t: The Jawa Report)

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

Congressional leaders from both parties would later seize on waterboarding as a symbol of the worst excesses of the Bush administration's counterterrorism effort. The CIA last week admitted that videotape of an interrogation of one of the waterboarded detainees was destroyed in 2005 against the advice of Justice Department and White House officials, provoking allegations that its actions were illegal and the destruction was a coverup.

Yet long before "waterboarding" entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.

If these techniques are as heinous as you say they are, why didn't you do something about it five years ago? On the contrary, it appears the opposite happened. Once again, the Democrats have been exposed as the lying, opportunistic shitweasels that they are. They're willing to do anything—even endanger national security—that'll help them get and maintain political power.

They bleat that "dissent is the highest form of patriotism." They need to STFU...they are the last people to tell anyone what is or isn't patriotic or good for the country. I for one am sick and tired of their disingenous sanctimony. That the Republicans lately have been nearly as incompetent as the Democrats have been treacherous is the only reason Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the rest of that misbegotten bunch haven't yet ended up downrange of a firing squad.