All you have to do is same anything critical about Google.

etc...

We demand the right not to be treated as lawyers, by laywers, subjugated under the will of a legal system run by lawyers. We've just had enough "legal fertilizer probably legally obtained from a possibly illegally owned cow's rear end" and "ignorance of the law is no excuse".

Well (Non-)Ignorance of the (Non-)Law (respectively subect to the existence of at least one Non) is equally No Excuse.

So hear our Non-Law and take your Law of Lawwers, by Lawyers, of Lawyers and for Lawyers back to you planet of Law and leave us in peace to explore the rest of the Universe.

Important Non-Legal point:

By adding to this document, you are declaring Your intention to lay down Your life if required to do so in the event that You are required to Die so that Your inconsistent addition may be removed for the sake of all others.

In trying to solve the world's energy problems on the back of a napkin (see blog), I think I figured this global warming thing out. Mind you, I don't believe in human-caused global warming; but this one's a little more generalized. Basically, the sun and the earth are the same; the earth's a lot dimmer, but it radiates thermal energy out into the universe, and has struck an equilibrium with input (from the sun) versus output. Plants store thermal energy; bacteria and animals eat plants and release thermal energy. Well, every machine running on electricity also releases thermal energy. Whether we burn biofuels or throw up solar panels, we're absorbing energy from the sun that's normally reflected wholesale back to space and/or releasing it faster into the ambient environment than useful (i.e. burning plants in 30 seconds, rather than letting them decay in 3 months). With all the extra absorbed and wholesale-released heat, the equilibrium point shifts upwards, and the earth maintains a higher temperature-- it gets hotter! It gets hotter with every man, animal, and machine that walks the surface of this damn planet!

This is the best summary of the great global warming fraud I've yet seen, and published in the most unlikely of places.

Although I feel Harold Ambler makes some good points, he misses what I've always felt was the most important. Given that the climate will change (as it always has), do we want it to be warmer, or colder? As glaciers covering Europe (the norm for the ice age we've been in for the past 100M years) seems to me far worse than rising sea levels, I've never understood why we'd want to fight warming in the first place.

I think the whole global warming fraud started by ignoring all of the available evidence and blindly asserting that the climate is naturally stable, so therefore if man did something to break that stability we'd be creating an otherwise-avoidable catastrophe. What BS. The only thing historically unprecedented is the inexplicable stability of the climate for the past 10K years. Change is unavoidable, with or without the actions of man.

Apparently, the webmasters at the Right-Wing website Redstate.org are blaming the fact that Scoop is made by members of the vast Left-wing conspiracy as the reason they're having web problems and can't seem to RTFM.

If we'd been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren't really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us. We kept crashing and were out of money. We had to close down or take drastic action.

C'mon, there must be a few coders out there who haven't been co-opted by the George Soros/islamoliberalcommienazi Illuminati and could help these poor boys. But it must be a little bit embarrassing for these strong self-reliant free-market conservatives to have to ask for a handout:

But we're convinced that America can afford even less to have us operating at anything less than our absolute peak potential during the coming presidential election season.

So we've decided to move ahead with our upgrades without delay, and despite not having the cash on hand - hoping and praying that RedState.com readers like you will help us make up the shortfall with a generous donation.

AMD has released their new CPUs. Other than the low clock speed they look great. They are very fast for the clock speed and have made some real big jumps in SSE performance. The really big win is in power use. They use no more power than the dual cores they replace.
Now the big question. What about the CPUs for notebooks. Quad cores are very exciting but the real truth is that very few people need a quad core CPU. If they can really get the low power version of these CPUs down to the 50 watt level then what can they do with a duel core version? Could we see a 30 watt dual core for notebooks? Maybe a 50 watt duel core with a GPU for notebooks and desktops?

These server chips are very interesting but I think that wee will see a lot more interesting stuff in the consumer area.

Apple will be coming out with new iPods very soon.
I will go out on a limb a make a wild guess about the future iPods.
I think we will see an iPod with 160 gigabyte drive and Wi-Fi and or bluetooth.
Why Wi-Fi and or bluetooth?
Simple, they will allow you to stream content to your iPhone!
You will get the big screen and good battery life of an iPhone with a massive amount of storage on your iPod.
You don't believe that Apple would want people to just buy an iPhone do you?

I admit it. I use adblock and I wish I didn't have too.
I do not have any problem with web ads. I don't block Google ads because they don't get in my way. Web ads are a good way for websites to make money. They are sometimes even useful. Ads are in themselves not evil. It just that some ads drive me to block whole domains.
Some ads are so distracting that they generate not interest but hate. Here are some tips on how not to be hated.
1. No Flash! Flash banners get blocked every time!
2. No animation! Why do I block Flash all the time? Because animated ads make me crazy. If you don't loop the animation then it isn't so bad but most in general animated ads are just too distracting. They create in me hatred and not interest.
3. No sound. I am reading I like quite. Again it generates hatred and not interest.
4. Don't stick them in the middle of the text of what I am reading! Put them at the top or off to one side.
5. Intellitxt ads. You have seen them on websites certain words in the story are links with big honking tool-tip when your cursor moves over them. HATE THEM they make reading the site next to impossible and are just annoying. BLOCKED always. Just put this in your adblocker *.intellitxt.com* you will thank me.
6. Make them small. Really nothing is worse than half the page being eaten up by ads.

Just finished installing Ubuntu Feisty Fawn x64. I had the typical 64 bit problems but I also had some that are really annoying and frankly just shouldn't be problems.
The first problem is that Ubuntu just couldn't detect my monitor. Now the thing that I find unacceptable is that OpenSuse's SAX2 can find and configure it. Opensuse isn't perfect but SAX2 seems to be the best X configuration tool around. It is also FOSS so here is the big question. Why doesn't Ubuntu use it?
The next problem is that I can get my WiFi on my notebook to work. The driver for my wifi card is in kernel and I can see my WAP but I can not connect to it! What is worse is I am not the only one. The Ubuntu Forum has a several threads about WiFi just not working.

So why is Feisty Fawn getting such rave reviews? Does Ubuntu have a reality distortion field that rivals Apples? Is the OSS community afraid of being critical? The thing is it is so close but frankly I feel OpenSuse is a better desktop then Feisty Fawn.

Well I am downloading the 32 bit version and see if that impresses me any more. And of course I am downloading the latest from OpenSuse for my notebook.

Well... Things haven't improved much since my last posting I see!

North Korea tested a nuke...kinda. I guess it misfired or something. Good thing they don't have weapons of mass destruction and are hell bent on destroying the world like Iraq was... oh wait. Oh their country doesn't have a strategic commoditity on it. I wonder what'll happen with Kim Jong-il chokes on a bon-bon and slinks off this mortal coil. Hopefully cooler heads will pervail, though I highly doubht that.

I suppose I have to talk about Iraq. I'm not sure what else to really say about it. Our government and by extension, us fucked up. That's right, we're to blame. Luckily in the last election those of us who voted explained in clear language we thought that Congress rolling over and not providing any oversight and giving the president a blank check was a mistake that they should lose their jobs. I could go on about this, but so much has been said and written that I think my musing about it would merely be a full repeat. However, go read "Fiasco" by Thomas Hicks. It's horrifyingly educating, but like anything else, realize that your seeing one side of the argument and keep that in mind.

There's something that a good freind of mine said and I'll repeat it here because I think it's really intelligent point of view on the overarching "War on Terrorism". I'm at best paraphrasing, but you'll get the jist.

After September 11th, George Bush had an opportunity to take this country in a different direction. He in that single moment in history could have stood up at the podium and said "Listen the people of America. Those who just attacked us, were funded by us. Everytime you fill your tank, you're funding terrorism. America will no longer be beholden to the oil barrens of the middle east. I propose by the end of this decade that America will cure itself of it's oil addiction. I know that this will be hard and America will have to sacrfice, but I know that our tenacious spirit and unparalled wisdom will prevail." He could have then gone on to explain how we were going to build massive wind farms and decommission all of our oil fired power plants. How we were going to build massive Thermal depolymerization plants that would turn our organic waste into usable oil. He could have mandated that the big three and any auto maker that wanted to sell cars in America would have to meet super strict emission and fuel economy standards.

And you know what, we would have gone along with it. We as a nation would have looked at the craters in NY and the blacked facade at the pentagon and said "Your right, we need to change course". We all know that oil is a dead end enterprise. That at some point we're going to have to get off that bandwagon. However, the future argument is always made. The idea that over the horizon is some super techology that's going to fix everything. Well, unless we start working now, that super technology might never come.

Tragically, instead we went down this path instead. Five years later and we're arguably in a more precarious security situation. Our military is streched to the limit. We're using use more oil then we've ever used.

Having a simple idea, I figured I'd write it into the journal as a first usage; and why not let them post it as a story too if they want? Anyway, the basic idea: users ranking stories, users accepting rankings. Why let armchair security experts and self-described IT experts rate your stories? Why not pick the users your think have a clue and only count their votes? Read on to see how this fleshes out in my mind.

The premise for this idea is that some Slashdot stories are good, some are bad, and some come from armchair experts who know nothing and can hype a good but inaccurate and relatively useless pile of FUD. The editors are not experts on everything either, and have let a few FUDs through in the past under the guise of breaking news. At the same time, we can't rely on armchair warriors to tell us whether or not stories are good.

The solution I've come up with is simple. Stories are rated by any user wishing to cast a rating. Users select other users they believe are knowledgeable, selecting which topics they believe the users are knowledgeable in. Each user then sees a story with a rating computed based on the opinions of users he's decided understand what they're talking about; other users are discarded.

At the simplest level, a user has other users he believes understand a topic. A more robust solution is also possible where users can go a certain depth into a web of trust. In order to accomplish this, the user sets whether or not he trusts those knowledgeable users to also recognize other knowledgeable users, and thus considers those users that the knowledgeable user considers knowledgeable as knowledgeable as well.

This trust model can be set to a specific depth, where this evaluation is followed down 1, 2, 5, or 10 steps deep. A full depth evaluation would also be possible; however it would require caching and triggering on modification of the full depth with loop detection, otherwise it would be very slow. Even with caching, a lack of loop detection will allow the system an easy route to an infinite loop. A mandatory maximum depth will prevent this, but will still bring the system to its knees for a short time.

Loop detection is important to avoid a DoS for anything more than even 1 step deep; 3000 users with all of each other trusted will otherwise cause the second step of evaluation to pass through 6,000,000 nodes, fully evaluating each node 3000 times. Simple loop detection will check if the node has been evaluated yet, and skip it if so.

Caching on changes may be the most CPU effective solution, where when any user changes his settings the changes are applied upwards through those users that depend on that setting, to avoid on-the-fly evaluation. On-the-fly evaluation may reach the 9000-node-evaluation problem at only a few steps, where users may trust 30 users who each trust 30 users, giving 9000 total users; building this list at each page view would be too expensive.

As a final measure, some users may just want to know what "the experts" think is hot. This is a low hanging fruit problem; users can simply allow the top 100 most popular, top 5%, or users accepted directly by over 1000 or 1% of Slashdot users in each topic. These selections would not be counted in these statistics; only users directly accepting individual users as knowledgeable would count. In this way, users can pull in ratings based on the users other users think are smart.

I believe this system would be useful in allowing users to weed out useless headlines and promote useful headlines because it would allow users control over who they are relying on to judge the articles. Those users not thought capable of making useful decisions are ignored in this system, giving every Slashdot user a personalized rating. Most appreciated Slashdot users are publicly known, allowing users to blanket accept the most knowledgeable users per topic. This should allow users to customize their Slashdot experience with high quality ratings of a personal value.

Well, time for my bi-annual journal update...

Since last post, I've quit my old job, worked freelance for 6 months, scored a new job, and just about gotten myself out of debt :)

I'm not working on a remote minesite, doing all sorts of geek stuff, ranging from wireless networking, to PABX configuration, to AD administration, to firewalling, to maintaining a large cisco spanning tree ethernet network, etc.

All good fun and a huge learning opportunity.

Looking to actually do some courses at some point in the near future, with a view to actually *learning* stuff i don't yet know, as opposed to just scoring paper certs for stuff I can do in my sleep.

Considering Java app development, as it seems to be fairly multipurpose, and well entrenched.

In my spare time, I've decided to get into club level motorsport - JDM spec Nissan 180sx with around 300hp at the rears, coilovers, sway bars, etc, etc...

And that's pretty much it.

Will try to update this more regularly :)

smash.

Yes we got our power back last night after 9 days. Once FPL sent the second truck and I showed them where the problem was it took all of 5 Minutes to get us back up! Yes the first truck came while I was at work and they "couldn't" find the problem so they left. FPL still sucks.

FPL sucks. They are the worst company in the world. Why? We got hit by a cat two hurricane! Guess what no power a week+ later! I have power at work but my house is dark and we have no water! After a week we are still bathing out of water I stored before the storm! No help from FEMA or the county government to speak of! If you have never been without power for a week you have no idea just how bad it is!
FPL needs to be account for this massive failure! This is Florida and hurricanes happen! A category 2 is not even considered a major hurricane. If peoples homes, cars, and most places of business can survive with little to know damage then why not the power grid?

"Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged." - Abraham Lincoln

"Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me.'" - George Orwell