2013 archive
Mandela (Updated) 0
When I was growing up in Jim Crow Virginia during the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, many white Southerners thought of apartheid South Africa as their only friend, the only other country that truly truly understood.
Nelson Mandela helped rip that dream from them.
Be skeptical today of bigots bearing his praises.
They are saying what they think have to say, nothing more.
Addendum:
Then there are the folks who don’t care what others think.
Poll Axes 0
The Booman has the right idea about opinion polls.
Droning On, Drone Wars Dept. 4
I should have known that it was too good a target for a talented cracker to overlook.
Back to the droning board.
Via LQ.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
News of the polite (stats at the link):
Courtesy comes a-calling for Christmas.
“Birds in the Air” 0
Budget Cycles 0
Stephen M. skewers Republican calls to “simplify the tax code.”
And the budget will be busted yet again, as it usually is under tax-cutting GOP presidents. And it will be up to the next Democratic president after that to clean up the debt and deficit mess — and to get blamed for it.
More at the link.
Mr. Fredericks of Redmond 0
No good can come from this.
er, yeah.
More at the link.
One thing is certain: the boys at the NSA will find a way to listen in.
Itching Powder 2
This has been building for some time.
[RANT MODE ON]
What most annoys me about my fellow lefties are the purists–the folks who, if you don’t fight to the death for every jot and tittle of whatever their pet causes may be, turn their backs on you and desert the fight. These are the folks who vote for glibertarians as “protest votes,” because “the two parties are ‘indistinguishable.'”
They are, ultimately, deserters with temper-tantrums.
Do they still think that, if Al Gore had won in 2000, nothing would have been different?
Are they really so clueless?
Purists don’t get stuff done, even as they equate failure with virtue. They remind me of the “student radicals” of my youth, who used to fantasize about American “workers and peasants” uniting, without realizing that the workers hated them (remember the “hard hats“?) and the peasants did not think of themselves as “peasants.”
Purists need to realize that there is a real world–an untidy, un-pretty, sloppy real world–and live in it.
I’m probably about as leftie as you can get and, were I a purist, I would not vote for most of the candidates that I have voted for the past few years. But, honest to Pete, I live in Virginia. I have to take what I can get. And I do so quite happily, because I try to live in the real world.
Pwned 0
This did not affect my Linux world, but you might want to change a bunchload of passwords.
The massive data breach was a result of keylogging software maliciously installed on an untold number of computers around the world, researchers at cybersecurity firm Trustwave said. . . .
On Nov. 24, Trustwave researchers tracked that server, located in the Netherlands. They discovered compromised credentials for 93,000 websites, including:
- 318,000 Facebook accounts
- 70,000 Gmail, Google+ and YouTube accounts
- 60,000 Yahoo accounts
- 22,000 Twitter accounts
- 9,000 Odnoklassniki accounts (a Russian social network)
- 8,000 ADP. accounts
- 8,000 LinkedIn accounts
. . .
Facebook and Twitter told CNNMoney they have since reset passwords for all of its compromised users. Google, Yahoo, ADP and LinkedIn did not provide immediate responses for comment.
None of my passwords have been reset, and I did actually log into Facebook and Twitter yesterday because I maintain feeds for a group of which I’m a member. Windows viruses and Trojans don’t work here, just as automobiles don’t float and speedboats don’t run at Indy–two different worlds.
One of the nice things about using Linux is not worrying about viruses.
Oh, I do take precautions–I run an AV, though many experienced Linux users don’t think it’s necessary, and my firewall is locked down tight. I also don’t have to defrag, as Linux file systems handle fragmentation on their own, and I don’t have to “clean” the registry, as there is no registry–that is an affliction peculiar to Windows.
Linux is not hard (it used to be, when it was young, but that was then), it’s just different.
News, Ripped from the Ticker 0
A. P. Ticker throws in the towels.
