We might be able to start a "Kevlar vs Kevlar" list soon, in the same way that others had made "McCain vs McCain lists" showing how the latter was flipping his positions in the breeze. Team Kevlar might need to get a press release out to clarify this issue before people stop paying attention to him:

Source: CNN's State of the Union interview with the Kevlar Kandidate

Notice his very humble interview, in the back of his Winnebago. Don't you usually give media interviews in your decked-out Winnebago? He's just like everyone else, of course...

http://romancescams.org/ Scroll down to the quiz. The Yes/No choices are not represented by radio buttons (or some other single-selection-only UI element), but by checkboxes. So WTF does it mean if I check both Yes and No to a pretty much binary question.

Kind of like the morons at my work that represent an action with a checkbox. A checkbox represents state, a pushbutton advertises an available action. So we have checkboxes that then visually (along with their label) signal a certain state, even when the application is no longer in that state.

When I brought this up, and said a pushbutton would be more appropriate, I was told that technically I have a point, but that they don't care.

I believe I have mentioned before that every bit of media I purchase I digitize and store the files on a central server. That includes over 300 movies and over 100 television episodes, plush a few hundred audio tracks. Everything is available anywhere in my home via wireless streaming, however I had been having problems with reliably streaming 1080p HD video over WiFi to my main television units.

My back end device is simply a Buffalo AirStation AC 1750 running DD-WRT build 27456. It is configured for WiFi AC-only in the 5.8 GHz band, and G/N/AC in the 2.4 GHz band to accommodate some older devices.

A Western Digital My Passport Ultra 2 Tb USB 3.0 drive is plugged into the back of the wireless router, which acts as a NAS and makes media available via SAMBA shares.

Over all I like this set-up, though after several months of use I can't really recommend the Buffalo AirStation for the simple reason that it doesn't have any external antennas. It really suffers in coverage area because of this. DD-WRT is great, as is the little 2 Tb WD drive, but I'll never again get a wireless gizmo that doesn't use an external antenna.

The front end to my televisions scattered throughout the house is a CuBox i4-Pro running OpenELEC. This is a fantastic combination that has been almost -- but not quite -- perfect for me. It is also easy to use for my non-technical wife and future geek 7-year old child.

The one issue has been reliably streaming 1080p HD videos to a CuBox. Even with the unit less than 10 meters away from the access point, with no obstructions, it would routinely have such a poor connection as to not be able to keep up with the playback. Watching the dashboard of DD-WRT showed me it had less than 30% signal strength and constantly would drop to 5.5 Mbps connection rates.

To eliminate interference I got up in the middle of the night and shut off everything that used wifi except the CuBox and it still performed poorly.

The short answer is the built-in wireless on the CuBox is abysmal. Again, no external antenna and 2.4 GHz only. Further investigation showed it would not work with channel bonding, thus not use 40 MHz channels in 802.11n. I don't know if it is a chipset limitation or a driver issue. Either way, it sucks.

My answer was to buy a USB wifi adapter with an external antenna. This one is tiny, totally plug-and-play, and absolutely does the trick. And for $12.99, including Prime shipping, a bargain. It is marketed towards the Raspberry Pi, which is what I bought it for. It uses the Realtek RT5370 chipset and is supported at the kernel level (no extra drivers needed) in Android, OpenELEC, Raspbian and lots of other Linux flavors.

It support 802.11n and bonded, 40 MHz channels and, more importantly, handles HD streams without breaking a sweat. I just ordered 2 more to outfit my 2 other CuBox devices so I can stream everything to the TVs in bedrooms without running wires.

(Note: I'm in a fairly low-population subdivision and not a lot of 2.4 GHz wireless around. I'm not stepping on any of my neighbors with my signal.)

Yeah, I said that.

Many, many moons ago, anyone that knows me that long might remember me asking about where to find a two-page advertisement that Sun Microsystems had put out some time around 1998. It had a picture of Sally Struthers and a caption that said something like "Thinking of running your critical apps on NT? Isn't there enough world suffering?"

Well, it's been found in the November 23, 1998 issue of InfoWorld, on pages 8 and 9.

Needless to say, I'm very happy. :)

Republican Doublethink on Mass Shootings: Scott Walker Edition

There is no shortage of popular conspiracies for Republicans to channel when looking to enrage their base against President Lawnchair. Barely a week in to his "official" campaign (which unofficially started at least a year ago), Scott "Kevlar" Walker reached for one of the most popular conspiracies in a recent appearance on Fox News:

He also is testing the popularity of a conservative bill from not-too-long ago:

Which segues into another popular tack for that side:

I'd like to ask the worms on here to defend that scumbag Chisholm, but such would require vertebrae.

I rarely feel genuine shame over my country, but this is an example of a source thereof.

According to slashdot, apparently not. I keep getting "You have failed to confirm you are a human"

(Who could be against something that's just part of health care?)

In "health care", "patients" sometimes want to "donate" "tissue" to scientific research...

I used to think the death panels in our future would be just about controlling costs. But now I see that there'll also be the "humanitarian undertaking" part of it.

p.s. I'm not an "anti-vaxxer", but if the government can require you to put things in your body it means they own your body more than you do. They can decide it's time for you to give up your organs, because "medical breakthroughs".

So in Panera tonite I noticed they have a new kind of bakery dessert they're promoting. It's a flip-flop cookie.

You're supposed to pick up this day-glo green item that looks like some dirty open footwear that someone's skunky sweaty feet have been wearing, and stick it in your mouth and tell yourself you're enjoying eating such a thing.

Maybe it actually tastes pretty good, but it's a horrendous metaphor for something that's supposed to be edible(/palatable). What next, a dirty underwear cookie? With a cute little crotch stain made of fudge. How whimsically delicious!

p.s. And if you thought this JE was a waste of time, eat my shorts.

Surprise! McConnell, GOP, In No Rush to Repeal Obamacare

My ancestors fought for the North, by the way.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7691145&cid=50112887

I happened to catch his announcement speech live on OANN yesterday. The Left will be invoking Cthulhu in most maniacal tones trying to call down some unfortunate demise on this Walker.

So is she just a hotter version of her?

At least, that is what the headline would read if this news article was spun the same way by the "mainstream news" as the one that generated the line that causes conservatives to cream their shorts endlessly about Obama suggesting "57 states":

Would the Kevlar Kandidate do better by only going after electoral votes from 30 states - particularly when 28 of them have worse average ACT scores than his? As I mentioned in a comment elsewhere, I don't expect him to last long regardless.

Yep, it's official, Kevlar for President. He already has had the ear of the Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelstein. He's been spending a lot of time in Iowa and New Hampshire, and he looks oh, so good on camera.

Though he did decide to go rogue - only slightly, as he would - by waiting a little later into the campaign cycle to formally declare candidacy than his friend Teflon Tim did back in 2011. Unlike the Teflon Candidate, though, The Kevlar Kandidate has much higher name recognition and could afford to come in a little later. Now the problem he has is in taking his name recognition and building it into something useful, as he is surrounded by other candidates who are proposing the same policies.