2015 archive
Drug Crimes 0
This caught my eye because we’ve recently been seeing commercials for this drug promising that it does everything but clean the carpets.
Droning On 0
Parade Magazine* interviews Mark Hamill:
Are you allowed to tell us anything about The Force Awakens?
In a word, no. They’re trying to preserve the surprise and the secrets instead of having it all come out on the Internet. I’ve never been on a movie where you have to go from your trailer to the set in a big robe with a hood on. I’m like, “Why is this necessary?” And they said, “Drones.”
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*It comes with the Sunday paper, okay?
Gadget Overload 0
Mark W. Anderson is fed up.
Calmer reflection later made me remember what E.B. White wrote in the New Yorker magazine in 1948. “Like radio, television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all things may lose whatever rarity values they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear everything, will be especially interested in almost nothing.”
The Man Who Would Be King 0
Michael D’Antonio tries to understand Donald Trump’s megalomania.
Among the Ammosexuals 0
Alex Steed meditates on life in a land of ammosexuals (emphasis added).
I very literally am scared of the possibility that my child could be killed by an NRA-coddled homegrown terrorist.
Do you have a similar fear? Welcome to the NRA’s America. The America in which the satirical Onion headline “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” feels more real than the actual news.
Stupid Is a Powerful Thing 0
Trading in secrets:
Unlike most such cases, however, officials with Atlantic Marine Construction Company aren’t arguing the employee stole their proposal sheets and other records before he was fired. Rather, the company claims Christopher McGrath, formerly of Virginia Beach, stole them after he was terminated via a widely available computer program he secretly installed on a work computer.
The nefarious software that McGrath used to steal these “trade secrets” was a fairly straightforward VNC program called Google Chrome Remote Desktop.
My friend uses VNC software to work from home almost every day. I use X11vnc myself to connect to my server remotely, because Klaatu recommends X11vnc.
As someone quoted later in the story points out, McGrath’s employer was too stupid to wipe his computer or, at the least, disconnect it from the company’s network or maybe even just turn it off. (The person in the story was a bit more tactful.)
Having worked in corporate America, I can attest that stupid is a powerful force in organizational dynamics.
Afterthought:
How secret are these “trade secrets”? How many secrets can a “construction company” have? Do they give away the con? Inquiring minds want to know.
Afterthought X2:
Computers are a tool. They are not magickal mystickal boxes of binary voodoo. As with any other tool, from a hammer to a circular saw to a CNC machine, if you want to use them, learn how to use them safely. If you don’t care to learn how to use them safely, don’t blame others when things go wrong.
Chris-Crossed, Profiles in Discourage Dept. 0
Alfred P. Doblin notes how Chris Christie stood for truth copped out (emphasis added).
Governor Christie would, to borrow an analogy from Jimmy Fallon, “Hulk out.” Certainly, Christie, who has demonized union officials, critics and the little people who occasionally made their way to the microphones of his faux town hall meetings in New Jersey, would give it to Trump good. Instead he said Trump was factually incorrect and left it at that. He is avoiding a head-to-head, Predator vs. Alien showdown.
The man who says, if elected president, he would stand up to Vladimir Putin couldn’t take on a billionaire developer and television personality who disparaged the reputation of thousands of Muslims living in New Jersey.
Read the rest.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Show politeness at the politeness show.
Decorated 0
For persons who care, that’s Fluxbox running on Slackware –Current. Santa and the snowflakes are courtesy of Xsnow.
I tricked out my laptop, which is currently running Mint 17.1 LTS, in a similar fashion. The persons at Thurday’s TWUUG meeting got a nice chuckle from my interface when I made my little presentation about Qmmp (that’s Qmmp playing Cleek of Scotland Yard in the upper left). “Okay,” I said, “so I decorated for Christmas.”
And, no, you can’t do this in Windows, at least, not anywhere nearly so easily.
Legacy, Tricky Dicky Style 2
At The Nation, Max Berger analyzes how Nixon’s and the Republican Party’s odious Southern Strategy has finally reached to the point of backfiring upon its creators and of threatening to backfire upon the United States. (My two or three regular readers will know that the long-term effect of Nixon’s decision to appeal to racism and bigotry for short-term electoral support has long been a recurring theme in these electrons.)
Here’s a bit; do read the whole thing.
(snip)
The emergence of fascism has always depended upon democracy’s failure. The growing proto-fascist, white-supremacist movement in the Republican Party is preying upon non-rich white people who are literally dying of despair, turning to drugs and suicide to deal with a reality they can’t bear, and a society they believe doesn’t care for them. Over the past 15 years, the death rate for white men has actually increased?—?an unprecedented rise in modern times that’s comparable to the emergence of the AIDS epidemic. White people are right that they are under attack?—?they’re just pointing to the wrong culprits. For the wealthy elite who fund the political operatives and media companies that tell white people who to blame for their plight, the race war is a very useful substitute for the class war.
What’s new in this moment is the Republican establishment’s losing control of the grassroots for the first time in the post–civil rights era.
Droning On 2
Say “Hi!” to the eye in the sky.
. . . and you can bet it’s just going to get worse.
Afterthought:
If I ever become a Peeping Tom, I think I’ll call myself an “anti-prostitution activist.” It sounds ever so much more civilized.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Concealed carry is living up to its hype and spreading politeness throughout the land, isn’t it?