I first noticed these last summer outside my house about 30 miles west of Washington, DC in the northern VA suburbs. For about a month, I would see one every couple of days hurling itself into the porch light at night. I initally thought it was a locust because of its size and impact sound. Only when it gave up and buzzed away did hear the menacing sound of its wings, which was nothing like the familar clatter of a locust/cicada. Then one night while working on my car in the garage, four of them came in -- fortunately not at the same time! Each time, one of them would come tearing in through the open garage door and attack each of the 6 overhead lights like mad. It would pause for about 10 seconds after each 3-minute light-bulb battle.

These fuckers are relentless. On the first one, I wasn't sure what I was dealing with, so I assumed I could easily dispatch it and be about my car repair. I grabbed my hornet spray and cautiously waited for it to land. As soon as I got within 10 feet of where it paused, the damned thing came after me dive-bomber style. Thanks to a violent fit of crouching, ducking, and infant-fall-reflex, I didn't get nailed. This happened at least 6 more times before I finally hit it with the spray...BUT THEN IT WAS JUST MAD. It went absolutely berzerk and did its pelting attack routine against everything in my garage. Again, I hit it after 3 minutes when it landed. It finally ended up on the ground, but was still trying to fly, so I emptied a quarter of the spray can, which finally got it.

After enjoying a brief sense of accomplishment from a 20-minute battle with mother nature, I got back to work....for 5 minutes...before another one came in. I HATE these things. I spent 90 minutes that night duking it out with them. I killed another one a week ago but I have no clue where the nest might be. And I don't want to know. I've warned my kids about them, but I know it's only a matter of time. I just hope it doesn't go badly.

I grew up in New Orleans where "French Bread" is a staple. I recall many years ago asking my mother why they call the meal French toast. She relayed what her grandmother told her years before -- that the French dish "lost bread" uses dipped, stale bread to salvage what would otherwise be wasted food. A fresh loaf of common bread will fall apart when you pull it out of the milk and eggs. However, New Orleans "French Bread" as a firm crust yet porous, sponge-like interior to both soak up the mix while hold together.

Is it possible that this announcement is merely a ploy to see who starts reaching for cookie jars in the organization? What better way to identify potentially disgruntled or idealogically-opposed employees than this exact type of provocation? Once a handful of individuals get caught behaving suspiciously, RIF them and say "just kidding about the 90%". It doesn't seem implausible to me.

"Who did you hear about this from? We've been getting a lot of calls about this."
--from a staffer in Frank Wolf's DC office, 10th district of Virginia around 5PM this evening

I asked the staffer if he was aware of the Rep. Wolf's position on the matter. He wasn't; I mentioned my concern and encouraged Wolf's support for the amendment that limits funding to the NSA's effort to broadly sweep up call data for domestic surveillance. When he asked who was driving this effort, I didn't say slashdot, but said the topic had been in the news with a big lawsuit being brought against the NSA by the EFF.

Apparently, all the IT folks up here in northern VA got the memo and called.

My guess is we're seeing the fruits of the hash-verification bug from this past June in MySQL/MariaDB.

http://www.informationweek.com/security/storage/mysql-database-flaw-leaves-passwords-vul/240001921

One of the seemingly non-sensitive tables dumped from a financial firm database was obviously populated from the website's contact form. However, one guy had sent his DOB and SSN in the body of the form submission. So this may be an outlier, but rather important if you're "that guy".

In all honesty, it's closer to :
O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

ps - My wife is an interpreter for the deaf

Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Displays

Sure, we could go to four displays next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, three worked out pretty well, and four is the next number after three. So let's play it safe. Let's make a brighter backlight and call it the Mach3SuperTurbo HUD. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why!

--James M. Kilts CEO and President, The Gillette Company

I 100% agree. I've had Comcast service for the last 2 years after moving out to the fringe. Last month, after three iterations of the "discount-expires / I-cancel / Comcast-reoffers-discount / I-reneg" charade, I cut the cord. The mental exercise of remembering the offer's expiration date and then rehashing that cycle totally overshadowed what was my already dwindling viewership. Aside from "Walking Dead", the only other channel I hit was Discovery -- and even then maybe twice a week. Netflix Instant Watch on the Roku / iPad coupled with DVD's for the kids give us plenty to watch.

However, the wife and I were talking just this morning about signing up for Hulu. The price and convenience of it are a no-brainer compared to traditional cable. But now that I hear about this, I think I'll reneg...and not feel shameful about this one.

Good luck, Hulu.

Here in the US, I believe we are seeing the result of not having an identifiable enemy in most people's recent memory -- or at least, not an enemy that poses an existential threat to the ordinary citizen. Generations before us had readily discernible targets in the Nazis/Communists/Fascists of the world. Today, we hear an echo of that from the right-side of political spectrum in regard to fundamentalist Islam. However, that's my premise: the vast majority of our "enemies" today are faceless ideologies.

I believe the instinctual pulls of self-preservation and tribalism have remained, but have been directed internally. For example, I live in a largely prosperous area. The first- and second-hand accounts I've experienced of someone threatening to "call CPS" for the purpose of dissuading another's behaviour are astounding. People are misdirecting their inherent aggressions at their neighbors. The relative comforts many people enjoy also means they have plenty of time to judge the actions of others. If someone's behaviour doesn't fit with their model, then they find a way to punish that individual.

The more laws, rules and regulations there are one the books, the easier it is to incriminate a person. That means these useless targets are easy prey.