2011 archive
A Bridge Too Far Gone 0
It has crossed over.
New Castle Development spokesman Gary Bruce said Friday that he “couldn’t believe it when they told me it was gone.”
Facebook Frolics 0
I have long wondered why persons will believe stuff they read on the innerwebs when they wouldn’t believe the same thing if someone said it to them in person.
A. Dumbness 0
Q. What is the major cause of computer security problems?
A Picture Is Worth . . . 0
The suit said Felecia Anderson, 24, was living in the West End on Oct. 14, 2009, when she saw APD officers raiding her neighbor’s home. When she also saw officers kicking and dragging a man, she went home and got her camera.
As Anderson filmed the incident from the sidewalk, officers ordered her to stop, threatening to arrest her, the suit said. Anderson complied and began walking back to her house.
One of the officers came up behind Anderson and demanded that she turn over her camera, and he seized it when a startled Anderson dropped it on the ground, the lawsuit said.
They then deleted the pictures and arrested her for walking without a license. (Go read it yourself if you don’t believe me.)
Words Fail Me 0
I should just give up thinking that there are depths to which Republicans cannot sink:
So Rep. Ritch Workman, R-Melbourne, filed a bill this week to bring back “dwarf tossing,” the barbaric and dangerous barroom spectacle that was imported from Australia and thrived briefly in Florida before it was outlawed in 1989.
“I’m on a quest to seek and destroy unnecessary burdens on the freedom and liberties of people,” Workman said. “This is an example of Big Brother government.
“All that it does is prevent some dwarfs from getting jobs they would be happy to get,” Workman said. “In this economy, or any economy, why would we want to prevent people from getting gainful employment?”
Via Radio Free Oz.
Dustbiters 0
I was too involved in watching the Phillies go through their annual October ritual of forgetting how to hit a baseball to check the FDIC’s list of ex-banks for this week.
Here is this week’s list of responsible fiscals which, like the Phillies, are out of the game:
The difference between the Phillies and the banksters is that baseball is only a game (except perhaps in Boston). Bank fraud, on the other hand . . . .
QOTD 0
Sting, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
Men go crazy in congregation. They only get better one by one.
The Legacy of Voodoo Economics 0
Michael Shank, writing at the Guardian, sums it up:
Name a rich country and our inequality rates beat them by a long shot – though it’s hardly something to brag about. We also have the highest rates of homicide, infant mortality, teenage births, drug addiction, mental illness, incarceration, social immobility and illiteracy. Name the social ill and we excel at it.
Twits on Twitter 0
(snip)
An expert hired by patent attorney and inventor Dinesh Agarwal says Twitter owes him between $11 million and $41 million in royalties. Ten years ago, Agarwal invented an online interactive system for following famous people but never developed it commercially. He alleges Twitter used his idea to develop a similar interactive program on its website last year.
As much as I disdain Twitter and its tittering twits, I must say this is absurd.
The plaintiff fits the absolute definition of a patent troll and illustrates why software patents (which are patents on ideas, as opposed to a copyright on code, since code is a real thing) are a bad idea.
Droning On 0
Tom Engelhardt worries that unrestricted use of drone warfare, with the accompanying certainty of killing innocent persons, is nearing. A nugget:
As they definitionally twitch and turn, we can just begin to glimpse – like an old-fashioned photo developing in a tray of chemicals – the outlines of a new form of American imperial war emerging before our eyes. It involves guarding the empire on the cheap, as well as on the sly, via the CIA, which has, in recent years, developed into a full-scale, drone-heavy paramilitary outfit, via a growing secret army of special operations forces that has been incubating inside the military these last years, and of course, via those missile- and bomb-armed robotic assassins of the sky. The appeal is obvious: the cost (in US lives) is low; in the case of the drones, non-existent. There is no need for large counterinsurgency armies of occupation of the sort that have bogged down on the mainland of the Greater Middle East these last years.
In an increasingly cash-strapped and anxious Washington, it must look like a literal godsend. How could it go wrong?
Of course, that’s a thought you can only hang onto as long as you’re looking down on a planet filled with potential targets scurrying below you. The minute you look up, the minute you leave your joystick and screen behind and begin to imagine yourself on the ground, it’s obvious how things could go so very, very wrong – how, in fact, in Pakistan, to take but one example, they are going so very, very wrong.