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Censorship is obscene.
Patriotism is bigotry.
Slashdot is unusable without noscript.

I've had an Apple IPad foisted on me at my company. I wanted Android tablets, but all the C level positions have Apples. (There might be something about that; I wonder what the correlation between intelligence, Android and IOS is.) Anyway. I'm playing with this App called Siri. It's pretty good about recognizing NFL, MBA stuff. It is fairly atrocious though at pulling soccer information. It needs help distinguishing the Champions League, The FA Cup, The League Cup, etc. It's also pretty bad about International matches, world cup qualifiers.

It's also not good about patching together previous phrases. When it constructs a response, it should reference the previous phrase, if spoken within 30 seconds or so. That seems obvious, but I notice other chatterbots are not good about that either. I wonder if there's a patent issue.

Why doesn't "delete journal entry" work any more?

The Guardian has a very insightful and informative editorial called Mitt Romney and the myth of self-created millionaires.

Although I'm British, the US Presidential elections are 6 weeks away, and this man stands a good chance of soon becoming the Most Powerful Man in the World, which will affect us all.

This is the man who recently wrote off Democrat supporters (47% of Americans) as being feckless, lazy leeches on society.

There's been an issue over the last several years of banks improperly foreclosing people's houses. Some years ago, this process would not have been called mistaken foreclosure, but rather claim jumping. Claim jumping was not a phenomenon unique to the various mining rushes, but rather stems from one party or another using the law to force a rightful owner off property. Now of course claim jumping is a bad thing to do, and once upon a time, Americans knew how to deal with claim jumpers. The question is, what's the difference between using a far-away land office to steal someone's hard worked land, and using a far-away (and expensive) judge to repossess a home?

The answer, of course, there is no difference. Claim jumpers are miserable no-good wastes of human flesh and were run off. If they came back, they didn't leave. So what should we do with a bank that mistaken forecloses on someone's property?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QgG4hwKbH4 Pretty much like that.

http://youtu.be/ZHdsUICa7zY Eeh, not the best exit but in my defense it was the first one where I've been "on my own" at the exit. All previous times, someone's been holding on to me.

The second video is my 10th jump. I'm running out of levels to fail, though! I'm much rather take it slow and be sure I have it right than rush through the program.

This is pretty cool. Some "professional Lego builders" have made a half-size scale model of a Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 jet engine, and it goes round! It was inspired by a model made by a 5-year-old boy and his dad.

Allegedly, it's made from only standard Lego bricks. I'd love to take it apart to see how they did it.

The Trent 1000 powers the Boeing Dreamliner.

When I see an infinitive for my axe I reach.

I've been listening to wall of sound style songs / albums lately. They really sound good from my computer speakers. There are some decent songs, River Deep Mountain High, Waterloo, Be My Baby. Not heavy fair, but decent for a warm summer's day.

Anyway, it occurs to me that three quarters of the Beach Boy's popularity likely comes from how good they sound out of bad speakers. Pet Sounds, although a somewhat decent album, is nowhere near deserving the accolades it receives - until you consider how good it sounds from bad speakers. It's the perfect outdoor album.

I've been an AMD fan since 1999 when I bought a K6-2/400. I went 64-bit in 2007 with an Athlon 64 3200+. Then I went to and Athlon 64 X2 5200+ and a Phenom II 940 BE (quad core, 3GHz).

The 64-bit chips were installed in an ASUS M2N-SLi Delux motherboard with (initially 1GB DDR2 667) 4GB DDR2 800 RAM.

Each upgrade produced a very noticeable and exciting boost in performance, and having multiple cores to play with is cool. The Phenom II 940 BE is a 125W CPU, quite hot but the fan wasn't too noisy. The motherboard eventually gave up (the capacitors split open) so I replaced it with an ASUS M4A77D motherboard, which so far (after about 18 months) been very good.

I don't believe in spending vast sums of money on the absolute top-of-the-range CPUs but occasionally I like a new toy to play with. So I went looking for a Phenom II X6 to put in this motherboard, which supports most of them with a BIOS upgrade.

Unfortunately, I left it a bit late to buy a Phenom II X6, and the only one I could find at a reasonable price was a 1045T which "only" runs at 2.7GHs but it has turbo core (a kind of frequency scaling) which means that it can overclock one (or maybe 2?) of the cores by up to 500MHz if the others are not busy. The good thing is that this CPU is only 95W so it pumps out less heat and uses less electricity. As a rough estimate, the 10% lower clock frequency is compensated for by the extra two cores fairly well so that overall, on something like SETI@Home, it should be 45% faster.

I wrote a little program to do some very simple number crunching and timed it. It does seem to go a lot faster when none of the other cores are in use. This wasn't a very scientific test, so I'll have to investigate further.

My machine only runs Linux, so to flash the BIOS I used a utility called Flashrom which you run from Linux as root. I downloaded the source and compiled it (on Slackware64-13.37) and it Just Worked(TM). Even although the M4A77D isn't listed as being supported, using lspci I saw that the chips on the PCI bus corresponded to those on their supported list. I used it to read the BIOS from flash a couple of times, and compared the binaries by eye using hexdump -C (to see whether they looked sane) against the uncompressed BIOS file to be installed which I got from the ASUS website.

So I took a deep breath, wrote the new BIOS and rebooted...

It all worked, so I installed the new CPU and away it went!

It looks like ADP lost an HR related database. Again.

A targeted attack against ADP customers occurred yesterday.

I went into the barber today.

It requires government interference to turn a recession into a depression. That is to say, a government must interact with an economy, changing the fundamental landscape of that economy in a negative manner to cause a depression. The First Great Depression started because of land speculation. It turned into a depression when the various nation-states of the world enacted tariffs, reducing the complexities of the overall global economy. The Second Great Depression started because of housing speculation. It turned into a depression due to the high cost of education, drastically shrinking the overall adult population of the country capable of borrowing credit.

There's discussion about the necessity for new banking regulations in Congress today. Of course, all this would be easily resolved by the elimination of banking regulations. Specifically the 1999 Gramm Leach Bliley Act (GLBA). GLBA is the reason why Too Large to Fail Banks are making Too Stupid to Succeed Gambles. Companies and people will always act to maximize their benefit. When a bank (or any business, such as GM) is too large to fail, it leads to moral hazard. In the case of a bank, this moral hazard typically results in poor investments and misleading consumers. For an auto company, this might lead to poor union negotiations or mismanagement of long term production.

Gramm Leach Bliley overturned the 70 year old Glass Steagall Act of 1933. It was an effort to make the United States more competitive internationally, allowing the CitiBanks and the Lehman Brothers to form massive conglomerates, mixing Wall Street and Main Street banks. Of course, it was precisely this mixing that led to the 2007 Financial Meltdown, AKA Second Great Depression.

If Congress was serious about fixing the Second Great Depression, it would start by reworking and reinstating Glass-Steagall. It would heavily subsidize community and state universities. It would legalize marijuana. It would end the wars overseas, then shrink and make transparent the military. It would create a Service to Eliminate College Debt program. It would heavily restrict and pull back on the outrageous EPA and ADA. Until these things happen, the Second Great Depression will continue.

Fixing immigration would strongly help. This would be accomplished by streamlining legal immigration and punishing through creating an expensive path (either through service or through monetary fines) to legality.

Education pays enormous dividends. An educated populace is a productive populace. Although we as a nation require manufacturing jobs, these jobs can be filled by educated and productive engineers. Decrease the costs of engineering and science degrees.

Millions are needlessly in jail due to buying and selling marijuana. A plant that easily grows and harms little cannot be outlawed. For comparison, firearms are infinitely more complicated to create and maintain. But attempts to outlaw them have failed in all societies but one island nation, where even this only lasted due to borders closed ala North Korea. These is no need to waste money incarcerating for marijuana crimes, nor waste the incarcerated man's free market labor.

The people who have already contracted debt for a college education cannot have this debt forgiven. Under no circumstance should the US Government ever participate in a debt forgiveness program for debt voluntarily entered into. Instead, a not very onerous program should be created to substitute labor for debt relief. One weekend a month, two weeks a year, though this program should not involve carrying weapons.

The EPA and ADA have created so many regulations that creating and maintaining businesses is difficult. This is an anchor on the economy. Although most small businesses are poorly planned and poorly executed, these drags should not be there to exasperate a bad situation. The EPA and ADA are commendable goals, but have generally moved into extreme areas that they were never intended to be in. Most government programs will do this in an effort to justify growth. This tendency must curtailed by Congress whenever possible.

Most importantly, the financial backbone of this country must be fixed. To do this, a Glass-Steagall separation of different financial regulators must be implemented. The free market works with many small businesses competing with each other. As a country, the too big to fail banks are good when they provide commercial services to other banks. But these banks cannot also create mortgages, sell these mortgages, insure these mortgages, and place a value on these mortgages. Information disparity will necessary lead to corruption, both of the buyer and of the Congress itself through lobbying efforts.

These small steps will fix the financial disaster. Greece will be able to topple and other nations in Europe too. But by increasing the size and complexity of the global economy, the United States can insulate itself from the worst of the shocks and make itself stronger when she emerges.

If I have a boy child, and when he pops out and I decide I don't like him, I'll name him Skyler.