To Nick Saban:
You can tell your team all you want that they "don't need a trophy to know they're the best" -- your team isn't the best. You got beat by a better team 42-35.

To the SEC Fans:
Your "the SEC is invincible" narrative, primary fed to you by the talking heads on ESPN (which owns the SEC Network), has been shattered. Your top teams all LOST. The so-called mini-NFL, the SEC West, was 2-5 in Bowl Season.

Ohio State beat Alabama, Wisconsin beat Auburn, TCU beat Ole Miss, Georgia Tech whipped Mississippi State, and NOTRE DAME beat LSU. That's right, LSU lost to Notre freaking Dame. You know, SEC, when your signature bowl win is against Louisville, you need to drink a nice, tall glass of warm STFU.

To Mark May of ESPN: Mark, I saw you on TV still not admitting that Ohio State deserved to be in the National Title tournament even after they handed Alabama their asses. Still think the 2014 National Champions didn't belong there?

And who was that asswipe on Fox Sports who stupidly claimed that if Ohio State played Alabama next week that OSU would lose? Butthurt much? Who's to say Alabama would even beat Wisconsin or Sparty next week much less the 2014 National Champions?

Besides, Alabama had their shot at Ohio State in the Sugar Bowl.

Ohio State 42, Alabama 35

To the fans of TCU, who thought they should have been in over Ohio State or Florida State: Dude, seriously? Win that piece of shit overrated conference you call the Big 12, then maybe we'll talk. Besides, the team that had a better argument (not a good argument, just a better one than yours) was your conference Champions, which leads me to...

To the Fans Baylor of who thought they should have been in over Ohio State or Florida State: You lost to Sparty at the Cotton Bowl, a stadium that's about 90 minutes from your home field. Any team that plays in a shitty conference that loses essentially at home TO MICHIGAN STATE has no business trying to claim that they deserve to be in the National Championship Tournament. Yeah, you were a 1 loss team who won a conference that was marginally better than the MAC this year. Big f'n deal. Seriously Baylor, the Toledo Rockets would give you all you wanted in a Bowl Game. The Big 12 completely sucked this year, and went 2-4 in bowl games thanks to TCU drumming an overrated SEC team and Oklahoma State beating Washington, a Pac-12 patsy team. Big Whoop.

Finally...

To the Big 10 Haters:
2014 National Champion Ohio State 42, Oregon 20
Ohio State 42, Alabama 35
Michigan State 42, Baylor 41
Wisconsin 34, Auburn 31

My prediction: Ohio State 35, Oregon 17

The reality: Ohio State 42, Oregon 20.

But the end result is the same -- the 2014 National Champions are THE Ohio State Buckeyes.

YES!!!

Urban Meyer is taking his 12 Gauge and going Duck Hunting.

My Prediction: Ohio State 35, Oregon 17

I never steal media, and I don't like to download media either. I want to own my content, including the shiny disc that it came on. I don't want my software phoning home someday and due to some issue, like the company going belly-up, I suddenly can't play my game that I fully paid for.

But I saw a deal on Steam that seemed too good to pass up. There was a Tropico 4 Collectors Bundle with about 12 different downloads, all for $9.99. I already have Tropico 4, bought and paid for at my local Best Buy. And I have played through all the scenarios, so the downloadable content would be a nice change of pace. This seemed a reasonable price for 12 packages, so I went through the hassle of creating a steam account, verifying my identity, typing in all my payment information, telling them not to save it, and then, here comes the final payment page. $39.99. Excuse me? You lure people in by saying it costs, $9.99, and then on the final page, you say $39.99, with a little asterisk saying (some items have changed price since place in your cart)? Well, that seems unconscionably underhanded and slimy.

When I go back to the main page, it now shows $39.99 for the bundle. How do they do this, I wonder? Do they record it by IP address and present the lower price to people who have not looked at it before? Or do they just offer it for the lower price and as soon as someone tries to buy it, they up the price for everybody? It seems to come up as $39.99 for all my devices now, but they are all on the same cable modem, so they may appear to the outside to be coming from the same address.

Well, I have learned my lesson. Never trust a downloadable software company. Always buy a physical disc installation media.

Finally got TFA working on my home system. Trying to SSH into the box will require the PIN and the password. This will only present a problem when I'm using an SSH client from my phone.

Does anyone have personal experiences with this sort of thing? (I have professional experience with it, but this is the first time I've done anything like this at home.)

Well, after spending thousands of dollars worth of my time last year in getting healthcare setup for my family, I was notified that my premium, which had gone up by 50% last year when I signed up for ObamaCare, has gone up by 50% again.
So I tried to login using my password from last year, but it wouldn't take it. Apparently they think it is a good idea to expire passwords every 90 days for a site that people will use once a year.
So I had them send me a link to create a new password. Well, I still can't get in. It says I didn't answer the security questions correctly that I set up when I started the account. Well, that would be because I didn't set up any security questions when I started the account, so naturally I woulnd't know the answers. Also, one of the questions is "name a significant date in your life?" Well, it won't take dates as input.
So off to another year of spending thousands of dollars worth of my time just to get into this site, where they will probably show me that my current option which is now three times what I paid 14 months ago, is probably the lowest cost option now. Strangely my salary has not risen by a factor of three to keep up with the increase of Obamacare premiums. Why can't we go back to the cheap coverage that I had before Obama started this fundraiser for the insurance companies?

It's a pretty standard trope, but one that libertarians do not seem to believe can possibly exist. And it is a blind spot in economic justice in the United States of America.
 
 

The Lion and his Fellow Hunters, By Aesop
Once, a lion, a fox, a jackal, and a wolf went hunting. They caught a stag and killed it, and quartered the meat. "This quarter," said the lion, "is for me, as I am the King of Beasts. And this quarter is mine as the arbiter of the spoils. The third quarter is mine because of my part in chasing down the stag. And as for the fourth â" well, I'd like to see any of you dare to put so much as a paw on it." The other three animals were bitterly disappointed, but they slunk away, unwilling or unable to fight for their share of the meat.

Just because you help a lion doesn't mean he'll share.

 
So remember boys and girls, just because you help a rich man to run his business, does not mean he'll share the profits with you. Which leads us right back to an entirely Different Leo and his successors.

It has been well over a year since I looked at Slashdot.

I see that some of my friends are still writing journal entries. Want them to know I'm still alive. :-)

So I'm seeing a bunch of wailing and caterwauling from the Left about how the riots hurt minority owned businesses...

Hey liberals -- why do you care? According to you: they didn't build that, someone else made that happen.

Told You So

And then I went further.

Now I'm going to tell you the rest:

The protests are nothing more than an attempt at a Reichstag fire, an effort to give Chairman Zero reason to declare martial law - for "social justice" (which of course, is not justice).

Any question of whether Chairman Zero was on the side of justice or mob rule was answered last night during his press conference. His body language and visible anger spoke volumes. He is on the side of the unruly howling mob (but, if you've been paying attention, you knew that already.)

Justice for Michael Brown?

He strongarm robbed a convenience store then assaulted a police officer. It's really a shame he wasn't able to survive his wounds, justice for him would have been 10 years in prison.

After 5 years of Obama, the labor force is decimated.

So much so, that you could, and should, call Obama's job killing policies the Obola Virus. Just as lethal as Ebola, only the Obola virus kills jobs.

2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014 AL Central Division Champs!

I was on my way to work today and saw a State Trooper's car on the side of the road. I knew it was a State Trooper not because of the distinctive two-tone blue that cruisers have (this one was black), but because it had several antennas and a radar gun on the driver's side.

It reminded me of the graphic that has gone around on Facebook with a picture of a police car in Europe (bright colors designed to attract attention) compared with an American undercover police car (designed to look like any other car and not stick out in traffic). It occurs to me that there are a few different reasons why American police departments (on the state and local levels) might employ cars with stealth-ish designs, one or more of which may apply:

• The police department may not be able to afford the number of officers required to patrol all parts of their jurisdiction. Having undercover cruisers means the people are going to be more careful about their habits in an attempt to not get ticketed.
• The police department is attempting to generate revenue for their {State|Community} by catching people off-guard.

In the first case, it would make sense, and it kinda works after a fashion. That isn't what bothers me.

In the second case, it's sneaky and underhanded. My train of thought (such as it is) went on to consider the fact that when people hunt, they have legal restrictions on what they are allowed to do to bag their prey. They cannot set certain traps or route their prey into certain areas for the purpose of killing them. If a hunter is found to have employed entrapment techniques, the Games Warden will likely take the kill and the hunter could lose his hunting license.

Why are police allowed to get away with the same sort of thing?

this guy is clearly NOT a mathematician, but if he was:
 
You have 4 wives on earth. Each one of those wives has 70 black eyed virgins for you in paradise. Each one of those black eyed virgins has 70 servant girls. That is 19,884 women for you to have sex with in paradise.
 
But it gets worse. Each one of those women has been given YOU by Allah for a term of 70 years. That means you will be having sex, nonstop, from the time you die for the first 1,391,880 years you are in paradise. You're going to need eternity from then on just to rest up from that.

Don't forget Benghazi, either.