acpizza

Below are a few recent journal entries

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Sunday, 21-Jun-2009
06/21/2009 11:37	"The young and the elderly" I'm so tired of seeing that crap in print. Its biased, and usually, it's a lie. Instead, they should say "formula-fed infants and the elderly". A whole lot of breastfed infants just don't easily get sick, don't catch colds, etc. You know, like healthy adults. (6 comments | Reply)
Wednesday, 17-Jun-2009
06/17/2009 13:15	Booze? In its review of homeopathy, the AP also found that: • Active homeopathic ingredients are typically diluted down to 1 part per million or less, but some are present in much higher concentrations. The active ingredient in Zicam is 2 parts per 100. • The FDA has set strict limits for alcohol in medicine, especially for small children, but they don't apply to homeopathic remedies. The American Academy of Pediatrics has said no medicine should carry more than 5 percent alcohol. The FDA has acknowledged that some homeopathic syrups far surpass 10 percent alcohol. - http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090617/ap_on_he_me/us_med_unproven_remedies_homeopathy How has the market overlooked the opportunity to sell "grape extracts, diluted to 1 part in 100, in 10% ethanol" to those in the age group 18-20? (Reply)
06/17/2009 12:42	A mistake in the length of state-permitted short days means students at two elementary schools must stay in school till July 31, or the district will lose $7 million in state funds. LOL, yeah fucking right. Frankly, I'd be surprised if *anyone* showed up except the kids who's neglectful parents were just looking for free daycare. Is that even legal, to spontaneously extend the length of the grade-school year out to July 31st? What about the nerds who already planned expensive advanced studies in summer? and just how the hell to they plan to con the JD's into sitting in a typical non-air-conditioned California classroom in the middle of July? I think the simply summary is the district will lose $7 million in undeserved state funds because they decided to cut costs by letting kids go home early. Clerical error? Yeah right - as if its even possible. Sure, its easy to overlook a number on a page - but its not so easy to overlook a bunch of children going home far too early far too often. What happened here was that a bunch of typical California grade-school teachers just decided to "let sleeping dogs lie" because it made their lives easier. Then, it caught up to them. They can try all they want, I used to live in California as a kid; there's no way in hell I would spend the majority of the only months the weather approaches half-decent indoors. (Reply)
Tuesday, 16-Jun-2009
06/16/2009 13:26	Mass Transit Sucks - even in New York! New York drivers named most aggressive, angry in U.S. You know why? Because in New York, the roads suck. They blow all their infrastructure money on mass transit systems that are known worldwide for crime and loitering. That would piss me off too. What New York really needs is a decent freeway system. That would go a long way towards making New York drivers much happier. (Reply)
Sunday, 14-Jun-2009
06/14/2009 14:46	Electrion Fraud - and massive violent protest - in Iran Wow - sure is a stark contrast to what went down with the theft of the election in here 2004, where everyone was pretty much complacent and the Bush Crime Family ruled the US for another undeserved 4 years, just about (we aren't sure yet) bankrupting the country in the process. The ironic implication is that Iranians - tho they may seem fucking nuts in many other areas - apparently have a much greater passion for democracy than Americans these days. Of course, democracy without a bill of rights ends as tyranny of the masses anyways. Weird. (Reply)
Monday, 08-Jun-2009
06/08/2009 18:10	.docx - not just incompatible, also, a total waste of space I had no idea it was this bad: The worst part is that these are text-only files of a SINGLE PAGE with no special formatting. Just one font, only modifications to the type are bold, and underline, only formatting in the document is centering the title, and setting up the tabs. 36k is an atrocity for a single page of text with no images, but 144k is outright rape. Just to give an idea how INSANELY STUPID WASTEFUL this is, I printed the page to a 300 DPI file, cropped it to 7.5 by 10 inches to eliminate the margins, and saved the resulting file as a black and white .GIF image. Guess what? 146,470 bytes Word Documents created in Microsoft Office 2008 waste as much space as they would if they'd just been saved as pictures! (7 comments | Reply)
Sunday, 31-May-2009
05/31/2009 14:18	Burning sugar in rocks If one dissolves a maximum of sugar in water then let it soak into rocks, the color of the decomposition product of the sugar is different depending upon what rock the sugar was allowed to soak into. I've gotten oranges, purples, and reds of this maybe-toxic-caramel so far with various rocks that I've tried. I don't know what types of rocks I'm using, LOL, just whatever is laying around, I am not eating this stuff heh, so its alright to just try this using typical placed yard rocks for a central Arizona residential complex. I may have to try some simplified column chromatography and see just how many pigments are being made. -- Also, I took a chance on a white chalky looking rock and coated it with DOTS candy that had been disolved in a minimum of hot water, then microwaved them until boil, and let sit. Then I let the rock and the mix sit in the fridge overnight. In the morning I took the rock out and noticed a bunch of stuff around it sluff off, so I added a small amount of alcohol and put the mix (without the rock) in the freezer. By afternoon, I had two layers, a white layer on bottom, and a colored layer on top, which I scraped off and threw away. I took the white layer out (in pieces that formed back into icy ball clumps) and squeezed them, discarding the liquid that came out, presumably more color and anything at the edges my hands thawed out. (hey its just rocks, dots, and alcohol, at 0C, so I stuck my hands in it briefly. Probably not a bright idea but what the hell..) then whatever the hell that was, I stuck it back in the jar alone, put them in the microwave and boiled. Here's where it gets weird - whatever that stuff is, when it boils it smells a little like popcorn butter, the fake crap made of acetoin or diacetyl. I guess thats not a totally bad guess considering the reason I wanted to stick the dots in there in the first place is that I wanted to see what would happen when the malic acid in them reacted with the rock ... but I wouldn't figure that this little rock would have been capable of reducing the malic acid, so who knows. Maybe the presence of some decomposing sweeteners that remained enabled it? (6 comments | Reply)
Sunday, 17-May-2009
05/17/2009 18:57	You know that old joke about NASA developing a million-dollar ink pen that even works in zero-gravity, and then at the end of the joke, some cosmonaut says "In Russia we use pencil!" I was kind of reminded of that by this: When several tries with different expensive tools couldn't remove the stripped-out bolt, Mission Control in Houston told Massimino to go for the less precise yank. At Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, engineers twice tested that pull on a mock-up before Massimino was told to use his muscles. "You hope you don't get to the point where you just close your eyes and pull and hope nothing (bad) happens," said James Cooper, the Goddard mechanical systems manager for the repair mission. "But we had run out of other options." I wish I had a better picture of what happened here; it sounds like finally gave up on the electric socket set and used a breaker bar of some sort. you know, the way you'd start in the first place on the ground, when dealing with a bolt that hadn't been moved in several years, even tho down here metal ages the way we expect it to and oil doesn't spontaneously evaporate.. Astronauts were careful to tape pieces so they wouldn't fly away and become potential missiles. "This is like tying branches together in Boy Scouts," Good said. [...or like tying a support onto a brake caliper and pads before removing the brake rotor...] Massimino's run of bad luck continued. While trying to install a special plate to remove 111 tiny screws that held the instrument cover in place, a tool's battery died. It took more than half an hour for him to go back to the shuttle, swap out batteries and recharge his oxygen supply. By the time Massimino replaced the internal electronics power supply card in the spectrograph, it was just about the originally scheduled time for the end of the spacewalk. And more than 90 minutes of clean-up and close-out work remained. So spacewalk coordinators on the ground decided that the second part of Sunday's task, the insulation, had to be put off ... Its cool guys, I'm sure Americans on the ground understand. Lots of shade-tree mechanics don't bother to put the underbody back on until the next day either - shit might still happen, and then you'd just have to take it back off again. It must take an amazing amount of patience to resist the urge to just unscrew the damn bolt by hand for two hours while trapped in an EVA spacesuit. The coolest thing about astronauts is that they have to know a vast amount of highly technical knowledge, yet at the same time, they have to do the actual work in the field too. (Reply)
Thursday, 14-May-2009
05/14/2009 14:38	Contamination is Asia brandname! http://pics.livejournal.com/acpizza/pic/00010afs ---GALLERY OF SHAME--- from "Opening its eyes", By Yu Tianyu, China daily" Retrieved 15-MAY-2009 In the desulfurization tower, sulfur dioxide in the gas reacts with quicklime, forming calcium sulfate or calcium sulfite. ... Shenhai Thermal power plant produces about 1,000 tons of coal ash a day, which causes serious pollution, says Li. They used to mix coal ash with water and transfer the sludge to a reservoir located at Hui Mountain scenic resort. But after the sludge dried, ash blew all around on windy days. Now the company is selling the stored ash to construction material producers and battery and brick factories and the ash has also been used in road construction and Shenhai is planning to turn the former reservoir into an artificial lake. from http://yuanpei.cn/wikischool/wp/a/Acid_rain.htm Retrieved 15-MAY-2009 from Google Cache dated 19-APRIL-2009 (site is now unresponsive, but there was no mention of sulfite that would doubtless be produced.) "A wet scrubber is basically a reaction tower equipped with a fan that extracts hot smoke stack gases from a power plant into the tower. Lime or limestone in slurry form is also injected into the tower to mix with the stack gases and combine with the sulfur dioxide present. The calcium carbonate of the limestone produces pH-neutral calcium sulfate that is physically removed from the scrubber. That is, the scrubber turns sulfur pollution into industrial sulfates." Mood: amused (1 comment | Reply)
Monday, 11-May-2009
05/11/2009 22:41	Former Catholic head of Milwaukee admits he likes older men too NEW YORK – A Roman Catholic archbishop who resigned in 2002 over a financial scandal describes his struggles with also being attracted to males of legal age in an upcoming memoir about his decades serving the church. Archbishop Rembert Weakland, former head of the Milwaukee archdiocese, said in an interview Monday that he wrote about his sexual attraction to ''older'' males because he wanted to be candid about "how this came to life in my own self, how I suppressed it, how it resurfaced again anyways." Called "A Pervert in a Pervert's church: Memoirs of a Catholic Archbishop," the book is set to be released in June. "I was very careful and concerned that the book not degenerate into a lurid tale to satisfy people's prurient curiosity or anything of this sort," Weakland told The Associated Press. "At the same time, I tried to be as honest as I can." Weakland stepped down soon after Paul Marcoux, a former Marquette University theology student, revealed in May 2002 that he was paid $450,000 to settle a sexual assault claim he made against the archbishop more than two decades earlier. The money came from the archdiocese, who did not learn until later that the student was quite a bit older than the so-called 'age of reason'. "We were so caught up at the time just paying over and over to cover up the usual shenanigans, we just didn't think to even question the legitimacy of the payout", his successor said. Marcoux went public at the height of anger over the clergy sex abuse crisis, when Catholics and others were demanding that dioceses reveal the extent of molestation by clergy and how much had been confidentially spent to settle claims. The archbishop, now 82, said he seriously considered the potential pain for the archdiocese of renewing attention to the scandal and thought about waiting "until I was dead" to have it published. But he decided to move ahead with the project at the urging of his partner, whom he hopes to wed in a Massachusetts church later this year, for the purpose of sharing health insurance. "I try to deal with this, I hope in an honest way, admitting my weaknesses in not being able to see this earlier, but at the same time doing what I could confront it. There just isn't a lot of understanding in the church for clergy who are attracted to adults of the same sex." Advocates for child abuse victims said that Weakland's cover-up of his own sexual activity wild older males was part of a pattern of secrecy that included concealing the criminal behavior of child molesters. "They might have a point; I'm not sure. All of us were just so used to hiding everything we did, I never even stopped to consider that the activities I was engaged in are even legal in many states." Weakland said he wrote in the memoir that he was unprepared for "how lonely it is" to be a bishop and how difficult it can be to get the "feedback and support you need, when all your fellow clergy are distracted by a bunch of little rug rats." (11 comments | Reply)
Saturday, 09-May-2009
05/09/2009 15:51	Chinese Drywall (ASIA CALCIUM SULFATE = CALCIUM SULFITE. Yes, Literally!) Then China decided they'd make it out of gunk extracted from coal flue gases by scrubbers instead of mined gypsum - now, "Chinese drywall" is in people's homes and it rots everything cause they made CALCIUM SULFITE instead. Reason Why? The words for CaSO4 (硫酸鈣) and CaSO3(亞硫酸鈣) differ only by one symbol (亞), which translates as "ASIA" (source: translate.google.com) Since it was for export, screwing it up was inevitable... The Chinese should just learn to use letters like everyone else, that way they can avoid fuckups like this in the future. "Desulfurization process, calcium hydroxide and sulphur dioxide generated Asia calcium sulfate" Source: http://www.tonke.cn/company-en-hhxixo.html LOL, I think I just discovered the cause of Chinese Drywall... (P.S. If anyone gets respiratory irritation from living in a home with Chinese Drywall, the condition ought to be called "Chinese Flue") (2 comments | Reply)
Friday, 08-May-2009
05/08/2009 14:56	Have you been receiving harassing phone calls about a car warranty? Guess who runs this Car Warranty scam from the top? Lucre "Innovations in Telecommunications". These are the pricks behind the whole thing. Their website says "Lucre's goal is to provide the products and solutions that will increase the value of our customer's products and services, control costs, and support the growing need of diverse products in the telecommunication industry with the newest in technologies." In plain English, this means SPAM-DIAL THE LIVING HELL OUT OF EVERYONE'S PHONE AT ALL HOURS. Guess what? I just got done bitching out a human being at this sleazebag corporation. Seems they need to answer the phone when a client wants them to harass the general public for pay, right? So... to reach a human being at Lucre, just dial 616-361-0128 - and give those pricks a piece of your mind! Also, while your at it, if you have a fax machine feel free to send a roll of toilet paper to 616-361-5717 More information (from other people looking into this) ( I think its about time we harass everyone this shithead knows in real life, too! ) Also, I'm posting this to /b/ for the lulz (12 comments | Reply)
Thursday, 07-May-2009
05/07/2009 19:28	15 month old David learns to work a screwdriver! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz_6WFtF3cw I decided to tape David playing with one of my screwdrivers he grabbed as I was fixing the air conditioner (a few days earlier we picked one out for him at Checker but that one is bright red). Anyways, instead of just lining it up with the hole in his toy musical electronic keyboard, this time **he actually managed to free up a screw (starts at about 1:58 in the video) and loosen it quite a bit! I guess after seeing me rotate all the hex bolts and screws in the sheet metal of the air conditioner he knew it was a tool for twisting too. Anyways, he really surprised me learning to do that, he's a great little guy! So anyways, thats one for the child development books, right? "By 15 months of age, your baby hacker may begin to use a screwdriver to loosen screws". LOL (1 comment | Reply)
Tuesday, 05-May-2009
05/05/2009 23:27	Heywood Jablome Listing distribution for "Heywood Jablome": http://names.whitepages.com/map/Heywood.Jablome.US.gif Also, they still have a listing for Jodie Kidd in Arizona - that was my fault over ten years ago, I did it for the lulz on a second phone line. ..So the system definitely picks up fake listings, it would seem... (Reply)
Monday, 04-May-2009
05/04/2009 08:00	Yesterday - Happy and Sad Yesterday David and I went for another walk in the evening, we've been doing that a lot lately cause he really enjoys walking around outside. He stopped in the middle of a dirt alley we were walking down (because of where it was, it was away from cars, unlike a sidewalk). He'd found a rock that he decided to keep, one he offered me to hold. It had a lot of green spots on it, it's really pretty looking round rock, about an inch and a half across. Not like a show rock or anything, but probably just about as good looking as a rock can get without having any transparent or translucent spots or being a crystal of a single structure. It just has a lot of really tiny details in it. We took it home together. Also, last night I found out that touched_by_fire killed herself a few nights ago, which is sad. (2 comments | Reply)
Friday, 01-May-2009
05/01/2009 23:09	Hancock I think the first half of the movie "Hancock" is probably the closest thing I have ever seen to a "contemporary Christian film". Immortal dude with a good heart, saving lives and drinking wine, not too popular with the locals or authority figures. Sounds a lot like Jesus to me. (Reply)
05/01/2009 12:07	Happy May Day! (8 comments | Reply)
Wednesday, 15-Apr-2009
04/15/2009 19:46	Delorazepam Delorazepam. A benzodiazepine analogue ... Likely Side Effects: Dreams about traveling back in time to meet your parents before they got old. ... (Reply)
04/15/2009 16:47	Tea Parties? Wow, just because we got the moron Bush out of the White House doesn't mean there aren't still plenty of complete idiots in the "good ole USA". Its not true revolutionaries of any type however. Its more of a bunch of spoiled, entitled adult brats who don't want to pay any taxes. They drive home on state and federally funded roads and highways (or worse, use mass transit), then blog on a networking system originated with federal funding about how they shouldn't have to pay any more income tax than someone who makes minimum wage. They just want a free ride, thats all, but are incapable of realizing that this simply cannot be. There used to be a saying that went something like "If you think its bad now, wait until government is in charge." That is probably true for comparisons between family owned businesses dealing on friendly terms with people, and the DMV. But I think there is an even better variant "If you think its bad now, wait until a government sized corporation is in control". I get a real kick of out asking the conservaswine making noise on campus how much stock they've ever owned. Most haven't ever owned any. You know, if they think capitalism is such a great idea, shouldn't they be investing in it? (3 comments | Reply)
Monday, 06-Apr-2009
04/06/2009 21:40	HOLY SHIT: 1 in 5 4 year olds is obese?!? A striking new study says almost 1 in 5 American 4-year-olds is obese source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090407/ap_on_he_me/med_obese_preschoolers Wait - How the fuck is that even possible? Its not like 4 year olds have charge cards and driver's licenses, ya know. Kindergarten doesn't even start until age 5, where the fuck are they getting all the food? Abusive, neglectful parents, maybe? Probably the same assholes who "bottle-prop" their infants just hand them a doughnut whenever they have a problem in later in life. Its disgusting. Obesity as an eventual cause of death ranks right behind cigarettes. I wouldn't let a 4 year old smoke, either. The stigma to the parents of an obese 4 year old should be the same as a 4 year old who smokes. (7 comments | Reply)
Sunday, 05-Apr-2009
04/05/2009 10:33	TWO! David has gotten ahold of the idea of "Two". He's not so much interested in the numbers one or three, but he also repeats those for the matching finger expression after a while of counting together, without being told first every time. He will hold onto two similar items and say "two!" out of nowhere tho, for a variety of items, completely on his own. He doesn't do this when he's holding onto one item or three or more items either. I'm pretty sure he's not using "two" as a way of saying "same" because he will hold two obviously different items, like a pencil and a pen, and still say "two". He was sitting in my lap and we were working on counting, and he was holding a blue eraser stick in one hand and two black ones in his other hand. I said "You have two black erasers in one hand and a blue eraser in the other hand... ... how many erasers do you have total?" He thought about it for a while and said finally "Lots" (it came out as "loss"), which I thought was pretty hilarious cause really, he did. Mood: cheerful (Reply)
Tuesday, 24-Mar-2009
03/24/2009 07:09	$20 gets you six months worth of what? Tuberculosis is treatable with a 6-month course of antibiotics that costs roughly 20 U.S. dollars. Incomplete or improper treatment can create drug-resistant strains, such as extensively-drug resistant TB (XDR-TB), a virtually untreatable form of the disease that has been confirmed in all regions of the world. text from http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/stoptb/index.html (by the way, please visit and support this cause anyways, tho perhaps not thru Google?) Where the hell are they getting those facts from? You can't get 6 months worth of anything prescription for $20USD in the United States anymore, with or without a prescription. Either they've added up six months worth of copays, or they're giving the bulk cost data - you know, the actual cost of the stuff before Corporate America adds an arm and a leg worth of overhead ... (2 comments | Reply)
Monday, 23-Mar-2009
03/23/2009 11:25	Wow, McAfee Antivirus *really* sucks! In September of 2008, I found the following code on a computer, and reported it to various companies who do antivirus shit: Ironically enough, it doesn't run properly. It crashes if you insert a USB drive with a non-writable partition. ( nobody wants to read source-code on their friends page ) I saved it into a text file, along with the other relevant information (nar.vbs) in a format that COULD NOT BE EXECUTED. Today, the McAfee installation in the campus computers *finally* noticed it. Not that it ever should have, mind you. But, it did - and it deleted it without any warning or option to not do so. Basically, it just raped it (I think I have it backed up) without my permission. First of all, that's just plain fucking rude. I hope someday McAfee accidentally erases their entire fucking corporate network, because their antivirus system found viruses in the lab department. Hell, I bet they have some unreleased ones, the founder of that vile company used to write the damn things himself. Second of all, its been... about half a year since the incident was reported. What the fuck are these jackoffs doing at McAfee, anyways? I'd wager that the major antivirus vendors have a waiting period ... Waiting for the problem to stay serious enough that their extremely bloated, overpriced software continues to have a market among users who aren't able to properly operate their own computers without a digital hand-holder double checking their every move. Oh well. UPDATE: Found this: 11/24/2008: Pentagon Bans Use of Flash Drives External computer flash drives have been banned, at least temporarily, at the Pentagon. The ban comes after officials detected a threat, described by Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman as being a "global virus" on the Defense Department networks. Whitman gave no details of the virus but described the situation, saying "this is not solely a department problem, this is not solely a government problem." Defense officials wouldn't publicly confirm the ban but department workers were notified. One message distributed to employees said that all flash drives, whether purchased or provided by the department to workers, would be confiscated. It is currently unknown if workers will get the flash devices back or when the ban will end. Man, those jackoffs at McAfee are really slow to defend their customers from this threat. Probably mostly because they are absolutely in love with the idea that the threat still exists in the first place. I mean seriously, there *is* a reason that the anti-virus vendors actually threatened legal action in order to make it possible to disable the security features of Windows Vista, and it was most definitely *not* with the good of the user in mind! (4 comments | Reply)
Tuesday, 10-Mar-2009
03/10/2009 17:00	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ughOb_foRjY When exposed to certain chemicals or a temperature greater than 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius)—about the temperature of a human with a moderate-to-high fever—a polymer in the joints softens and makes the fingers spring shut. .. Now the "ultimate vision [is] a small machine that can be swallowed or injected that can perform the same function and reduce the invasiveness, so you don't have to cut," said study author David Gracias, a chemical and biomolecular engineer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. But Gracias and others caution that such medical advances are still many years down the road. -from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/01/090126-microgrippers-surgery.html (Note: The national geographic page hosts its video on a spam-server "edgeboss.net" (I have absolutely no idea why - I've already blocked it, but they're probably trying to screw people into viewing ads... so don't bother hitting play. Just play the YouTube directly.) ... This material could be used directly fairly soon not as a grabber, but as a releasing tool. With a little reshaping, the same polymer action could trigger a different "tiny dust size" to cause a contained area to open. With a little reworking, the non-polymer portions could be made into something that could be eventually eliminated as bodily waste. What could this other idea be used for? Delivery of chemotherapy agents to the site of a tumor.. released by localized microwave-based warming. (Reply)
Thursday, 05-Mar-2009
03/05/2009 22:01	Baby David loves Salsa! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_lNcCKGIHg (2 comments | Reply)
Sunday, 01-Mar-2009
03/01/2009 20:20	Electrolysed salt water makes LA Times.. scam, or bad article? Wow, I know times have been rough for newspapers but can't they afford to pay anyone to screen what they allow to be published under their name? The stuff is a simple mixture of table salt and tap water whose ions have been scrambled with an electric current. Researchers have dubbed it electrolyzed water -- hardly as catchy as Mr. Clean. But at the Sheraton Delfina in Santa Monica, some hotel workers are calling it el liquido milagroso -- the miracle liquid. That's as good a name as any for a substance that scientists say is powerful enough to kill anthrax spores without harming people or the environment. Wait, hold on... exactly who says its any safer than super-diluted bleach in salt water, and do they say why, and how that was tested? Why doesn't the LA times put any of this type of stuff in the article? Management figures the payback time for the $10,000 electrolysis machine will be less than a year. Whoa, that's a pretty hefty markup on that machine. Is management going to be kicking themselves in the ass once they find out what they actually bought, or is there something more in there than some membranes and a couple electrodes? Say, I wonder what sort of contaminants the electrodes introduce into the water as they break down? Not to mention the fact that the stuff is going to change the nature of any existing pollution in the tap water, perhaps to make it safer, perhaps to make it more dangerous, depending entirely on what the water where its used has in it. The LA times article does make it seem like a ripoff scheme when read with any degree of skepticism at all. Unless they were prevented by trade secret law, they really should have tried to explain why this thing is actually worth $10,000... If its a real deal to make hypochlorous acid on site, maybe part of the $10,000 includes a nice RO system for the incoming tap water in addition to, say, some really expensive gold electrodes or something? Probably need a pretty secure case to hold the damn things too, to prevent some rouge plumber from ripping them off in 15 minutes, right? Article needs more details! (Reply)
03/01/2009 10:11	spamcached Sometimes loading a blocked domain on name in Google Cache has funny results... (6 comments | Reply)
Tuesday, 24-Feb-2009
02/24/2009 12:30	TROLLED!! Say, I wonder if any of the parka-clad band of environment ministers from more than a dozen nations visiting the Troll Research Station in Antarctica got to watch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory monitoring atmospheric CO2 levels burn and crash* into the ocean nearby. * Burn and crash seems so wrong-worded, even tho thats exactly what happens if it falls from high enough, into enough water. ...by the way, H2O is the leading greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere. CO2 comes in 2nd place. Besides ... isn't the fact that tuna fish is typically now so poisoned with mercury that pregnant women and small children must seriously limit their intake of it a much, much better reason to seriously curb the use of coal-fired generating stations than a few degrees celsius, let alone a fraction of a degree, that might be a problem in the distant future? All this talk about global warming someday is just causing people to ignore the real environmental problems that are hurting people right now. (Reply)
Tuesday, 17-Feb-2009
02/17/2009 07:33	Huge chimp shot dead after mauling woman in Conn. "There was no provocation that we know of. One thing that we're looking into is that we understand the chimpanzee has Lyme disease and has been ill from that, so maybe from the medications he was out of sorts. We really don't know," Conklin said. ... Conklin told reporters the chimp was acting so agitated earlier that afternoon that Herold gave him the anti-anxiety drug Xanax in some tea. Conklin also suggested the animal may have attacked Nash because she was wearing her hair differently and perhaps wasn't recognized. -http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090217/ap_on_re_us/chimpanzee_attack Stupid, stupid, stupid... removing the natural inhibitions (aka 'anxiety') of an animal that has only just barely acclimated itself to the limitations of human society, when it's already sick and feeling it. What the hell did they think was going to happen? (Reply)
Thursday, 29-Jan-2009
01/29/2009 17:18	Housing vs. Stocks "This all began as a housing crisis, and clearly, the housing crisis continues," said Nathan Rowader, director of investments at Forward Management. "Bad housing numbers are not going to encourage anyone to be buying stock." The first part of what he said is mostly right - although the truth is that it began as a banking crisis directly related to hideous loan practices, like encouraging people to take loans they had absolutely no hope of ever, ever paying off just because they happened to have had a good credit rating so far, on the stupid assumption that real estate would somehow magically *always* go up in value. Thats a bad idea even in a time when real estate is legitimately going up. Consider: all it takes is a little toxic waste, or some other local problem, and suddenly the entire value of the so-called "collateral" is totally wiped out. Anyways, considering the real estate market is almost universally shit right now, it stands to reason that someone with a little extra capital might want to invest it in a company they thought had a chance of doing well, or at least better than it had in the past. The real reason that isn't actually happening is that these days, there aren't nearly as many people who have a little extra capital around that they feel like investing in something, regardless of if its real estate, stocks, bonds, or anything else. But if the so-called "housing crisis" were "fixed" and prices were once again skyrocketing, capitalists would be investing their money in property that in all likelyhood would simply sit empty while it "gained value". Thats a bullshit way to run a country, because nothing gets done on land of no use, and it discourages investment in companies that actually make a product, build factories, etc etc etc... Lastly, as a person who doesn't yet own a home of my own, I think its absolutely fantastic that real-estate prices continue to slide, since I've long thought they were outrageously high and will eventually become a homeowner. Since I intend to someday buy a house to live in, not to sell, it doesn't matter at all if home prices keep on sliding for the rest of my life - even if mine devalues and I have to move, theoretically all the rest of them devalue too, hopefully about the same amount. There can't be an answer to the "housing crisis" anyways, because there is, and is going to be a trickle of used homes into the market for a long, long time as aging baby boomers attempt to sell their now mostly-empty large family homes in exchange for smaller ones.... or even retirement villages, nursing homes, and graveyards. This will last for a very long time... This problem is typically studied as the number of workers to support an aging Social Security population, but we're seeing it right now as "the number of established families around to buy the homes of elderly couples who don't need them anymore.": Long story short: Fuck getting rich off of the housing market, its a lost cause for anyone wanting a quick buck, for a very long time. (2 comments | Reply)
Monday, 12-Jan-2009
01/12/2009 20:32	Can we use Google to change the weather? (LOL) Google claims that a single search has a carbon footprint of .2g of CO2. (Some dude at Harvard supposedly says its closer to 7g!!!) So ... a mere 14,300,000 random (non-cached) google searches has the same CO2 footprint as burning 1,000kg of coal - at least? It seems strange - all that from a little increased drive and CPU activity? Obviously denial-of-service is going to happen before true climate change from several million searches from several million computers, but isn't that still a problem for Google as a company? (2 comments | Reply)
Sunday, 11-Jan-2009
01/11/2009 11:49	King Nut doesn't supply the ingredients for their peanut butter? King Nut took this action as soon as it was informed that salmonella had been found in an open five-pound tub of King Nut peanut butter. King Nut distributes peanut butter only through food service accounts. It is not sold directly to consumers. King Nut does not supply any of the ingredients for the peanut butter distributed under its label. All other King Nut products are safe and not included in this voluntary recall. - http://www.kingnut.com/site.cfm/news.cfm Wait, let me get this straight - NONE of the ingredients? Does the crap even have any actual peanuts in it? Peanut butter only has two ingredients: Roasted peanuts, and salt. If there is anything else in your "peanut butter", chances are some chemist somewhere decided it would help the product "stay fresh" longer, so it could sit in a warehouse, and on the shelf, far longer. The neat thing about real, uncontaminated food is that when it spoils, it does so quickly, which means its very unlikely that you will find it still tastes good enough to eat if it has gone bad. Food with a bunch of extra crap added to "keep it fresh", on the other hand, spoils very slowly. This means it is quite likely that this good can be a little bit spoiled, but still taste fine. The very thing intended to prevent food spoilage turns out to make that spoilage far, far more dangerous when it does occur. Gee, No wonder so many kids are getting food allergies these days; between all the garbage in the supply chain people feed to their kids and the serious lack of exclusive breastfeeding for 6 months in this country (which results in a weakened digestive tract), its little wonder that kids immune systems are being provoked (by traces of food poisoning) and then learning to recognize the wrong ingredients as the invaders (the peanut proteins rather than the salmonella or whatever else spoiled the food.) (Reply)
Saturday, 10-Jan-2009
01/10/2009 20:39	Corporate Branding Quiz How well have you memorized your "Corporate Alphabet"? http://www.sporcle.com/games/corplogos.php ( LOL @ the least recognized company on the list ) (1 comment | Reply)
01/10/2009 14:02	More stupid unit mistakes at Google Calculator... Ya know, the Fahrenheit system is *also* based on the freezing point and boiling points of water. When he invented it, he made exactly 180 degrees between freezing and boiling, with freezing and boiling on the opposite side of the circular dial. Then, since it gets really, really cold in Deutschland, he twisted it 32 more degrees, in hopes that this would be "enough" so that negative temperatures simply wouldn't happen. Suffice to say he wasn't too concerned about the temperature elsewhere. There is no such thing as a 'degree' celsius because there is no such thing as a 200 degree circle. For some reason tho, I hear a lot of Americans say "degrees celsius" - do they make that mistake in Europe too? (6 comments | Reply)
Wednesday, 31-Dec-2008
12/31/2008 13:20	Stair climbing baby! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkDfj-i8UpI Mood: cheerful (Reply)
Thursday, 25-Dec-2008
12/25/2008 00:32	Baby Update - Runs, Climbs Stairs! He can climb stairs now! Also, he's running around faster than ever - he runs about as fast as an adult might power walk - pretty fast for almost 11 months old! But, he's not really learning how to hold up a bottle. He never really mastered that whole bottle thing because we didn't neglect him enough for that do-or-die survival instinct to kick in - Taryn stays home with him and he's had every last drop of Mom's Milk that he deserves. Now, when presented with a bottle of water, he shuns it if it has a nipple even if he's thirsty, but he's learning how to work the sippy cups slowly. Probably only after Mom and I decided we'd drink out of them just often enough that he decided it wasn't something we were making him do just cause he was a baby. So, we have a running, stair climbing child who frequently needs help working the water bottle, just cause thats the new thing with him (came with increase in solids, really). Most peoples kids these days are little bottle experts, but they're helpless to bring a bottle anywhere anyways because they need their hands to crawl! David can run the sippy bottle from one end of the room to another, but has a bit of hard time aiming it at his mouth. LOL! Oh, by the way ... Its COLD COLD COLD in Illinois!!! But, there's beautiful snow outside, and everyone is happy and warm outside, so... MERRY CHRISTMAS 2008 EVERYONE! (1 comment | Reply)
Saturday, 13-Dec-2008
12/13/2008 01:01	Climbing Baby! David now climbs up boxes nearly effortlessly - he just has to orient himself to the task, then does it. They were the ones that we'd been using as little blockades to steer him clear of the kitchen - same type of box business people store papers in. He has no problem now running over to the box, putting a leg up on it, then rolling himself to a crouched position, then standing on top of the box. He will be 1 year old at the end of January.When I started using the boxes as blockades instead of going to get those fence things they use for kids and pets, I thought I'd get away with if for a little bit longer. :-) (Reply)
Friday, 28-Nov-2008
11/28/2008 23:34	Fun with capitalism I bought a couple hundred shares of GM just for shits and grins earlier. I think it was about $3.50 a hit at the time. The way I figure, either I'm gonna make a bunch of money, or GM will go bankrupt, which would be a totally historic way to lose about three quarters of a grand. (5 comments | Reply)
Saturday, 08-Nov-2008
11/08/2008 20:51	O/b/ama 2008 Yes, /b/ can! (1 comment | Reply)
Thursday, 30-Oct-2008
10/30/2008 22:37	Whats up with Google's holiday thinger? I thought they'd decided to only recognize weird shit recently when, on Columbus Day, they instead had a logo featuring something about Paddington Bear, of all things. WTF? But, today's Halloween, and they have a Halloween-themed thingy up. Why not, say, Scooby Doo or something instead? So... Why disrespect Columbus? All the guy wanted to do was find a safe way to get to India and China after a bunch of Islamic nutcases made the land passage unsafe in the 1450s - with the founding of the Ottoman Empire, one of the earliest islamofascisms, even had the symbol of their moon-god on it's flag.. Over 500 years later, and its still not safe to try to travel that route by land - because of islamofascism. At least Columbus had the common sense to leave the damned Arabs alone - its never safe to engage an army of madmen. He may not have been the first human being to get here, he may not have even been the first human being from a complex civilization to reach the Americas, but the fact of the matter is, when Columbus discovered these lands, he got the job done, and it finally stayed discovered. Of what use is a discovery, if nobody remembers it because there's no written record, or because it loses popularity? Fact of the matter is, the viking settlements never amounted to much, and the first immigrants to walk here via the Alaska-Siberian land-bridge didn't even realize they'd changed continents, so there's no way that counts either. Its Columbus, or nothing, and no amount of "politically-correct" revisionist bullshit from a bunch of pseudo-liberal rich white fucks on the California gold coast with a seriously guilty conscience will ever change that. (8 comments | Reply)
Saturday, 25-Oct-2008
10/25/2008 22:06	Awesomest baby evar. David just pressed a button on the little keyboard I bought for him earlier in the week that made it play a drum beat. Then, he stood up and started dancing! He's been dancing on all fours or with us for a while but he only learned how to stand up from just the floor with no hands a few days ago - about a day after he first walked a few steps. He also walked the furthest I've seen so far today, about a meter or so of distance. He's just great, he totally makes everyone he comes into contact with absolutely happy. (2 comments | Reply)
Sunday, 12-Oct-2008
10/12/2008 13:57	SOYUZ! (Reply)
Friday, 10-Oct-2008
10/10/2008 18:37	...and tonight were gonna party like its 1929! (Reply)
Tuesday, 23-Sep-2008
09/23/2008 06:05	Funny anti-Russian propaganda This was in the US news. No shit. An Interior Ministry Officer stands behind what Georgia says is a Russian made reconnaissance drone in Tbilisi September 23, 2008. (David Mdzinarishvili/Reuters) Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Tbilisi-September-23/photo//080923/photos_ts/2008_09_23t085451_450x330_us_georgia_ossetia_drone2//s:/nm/20080923/ts_nm/us_georgia_ossetia_drone2 OK, here's the funny part. Check out the photo: What, am I not supposed to notice the two 9V batteries that are used to charge this toy's internal capacitor so that it can make its 5 to 10 minute flight from one end of a football field to the other? The Georgians insult our intelligence! At least FOX News gives us special effects with its lies; why does Georgia give us only a $20 kids toy airplane photographed with a desk mounted webcam? EtA:If they flew in exactly that, but with a simple bug on it, hoping some officer would discover the toy and take it inside as a newfound personal possession to repair on his free time, does that still count as a recon drone? (Reply)
Friday, 19-Sep-2008
09/19/2008 22:55	Mass recall of Chinese milks Story Jacked from Internet News Shop shelves in China and elsewhere are being cleared of popular dairy products after tests found contamination in regular milk as well as baby formula. Inspectors found that 10% of liquid milk from three of China's dairies was tainted with melamine. Singapore banned the import and sale of all Chinese milk products after some were removed from stores in Hong Kong. The scandal first came to light in milk powder that killed four infants and sickened more than 6,000 others. Suppliers are suspected of diluting milk to cut costs, then adding melamine to make it appear higher in protein. Chinese inspectors enter a milk powdering facility Melamine is an industrial chemical normally used in plastics, and is banned from food stuffs. It is manufactured from coal, water and nitrogen from air, by using goal gasification technology and a series of other reactions. China's quality watchdog, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, tested ordinary milk from three dairies. Its website said 10% of the milk from the country's two largest - Mengniu Dairy Group and Yili Industrial Group - contained up to 8.4 milligrams of melamine per kg. Products from Shanghai-based Bright Dairy were also contaminated, it said. Although Chinese officials sought to allay panic by insisting most milk was safe to drink, reaction to the news was swift. In Singapore, the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority banned the import and sale of milk and all milk products after local tests discovered melamine in products from two Chinese-manufactured brands. Two Hong Kong supermarkets, Wellcome and Park'n Shop, on Friday cleared their shelves of Mengniu brands. A day earlier, the Hong Kong government recalled Yili products, after tests found milk, ice-cream and yoghurt to be contaminated with melamine. The Chinese subsidiary of Starbucks stressed none of its staff or customers had fallen ill from the milk used in its products. The EU and the US said they wanted to know how the scandal was allowed to develop - in order to ensure future overseas confidence in Chinese exports. Meanwhile, foreign firms which import milk powder to China have pledged not to take advantage of the scandal by raising prices, Reuters news agency reports. (4 comments | Reply)
09/19/2008 20:02	Corporate Welfare WASHINGTON - Struggling to stave off financial catastrophe, the Bush administration on Friday laid out a radical bailout plan with a jawdropping price tag — a takeover of a half-trillion dollars or more in worthless mortgages and other bad debt held by tottering institutions. Funny how the Republicans suddenly are willing to spend an absolute shitload of taxpayer dollars on giveaways to worthless bums and criminals - corporations that in many cases produced absolutely nothing of positive value, all the while lying and stealing any time they could get away with it. Here's a better idea: THROW OUT THE MONEY CHANGERS Save the welfare handouts for actual human beings who may actually need it. (Reply)
Monday, 15-Sep-2008
09/15/2008 15:58	Raped by Service Pack 3 Yeah, OK so apparently some jackass at Microsoft made that change in the last few years. Whatever. But its not just RIAA-backdoors on Audio CDs. The SanDisk Cruzer's AUTORUN.INF is also executed, regardless of the fact that it is most definitely not an audio CD. So, you don't even need to burn an Audio CD full of trojans and viruses to ruin some poor Windows computer, it would seem that autorun is being shoved down the user's throat in many other cases, regardless of group policy settings. http://www.dougknox.com/xp/tips/cd_autoplay_pro.htm seems pretty widely referenced as a method of preventing the hideous problems associated with autio CD's containing back doors. It says: To Disable CD autoplay, completely, in Windows XP Pro 1) Click Start, Run and enter GPEDIT.MSC 2) Go to Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, System. 3) Locate the entry for Turn autoplay off and modify it as you desire. This page last updated 11/25/2005 21:16 All material © 2003 Doug Knox Sorry Doug, that apparently doesn't work anymore. Your work has been copied here for the purpose of fair use reporting - namely, to mention the fact that it doesn't work. NOTE: Yes, I am aware the JPG doesn't show "Computer Configuration". The section for "Computer Configuration" and "User Configuration" are identical in this respect, and neither of them disables autoplay on audio CDs according to Microsoft's own documentation. Doesn't seem to disable autoplay on USB drives either :( It appears that what one has to do to is mark the USB filesystem where you have the disable-proof autoplay stored as being CDFS rather than, say, FAT32. Then, Windows gleefully assumes its dealing not with USB Flash, but rather a CDROM hooked up over USB. Basically, because of the DMCA and Microsoft's willingness to allow "turn off autoplay" to be labeled as "copy protection circumvention", every windows box with an unsecured USB port is now apparently open for complete rape. I'd never had a problem with AUTORUN - not since I started turning it off back in 1996 - until today, and I put service pack 3 on yesterday. I have a feeling I got screwed into accepting some update I had previously declined. Fucking piece of shit. But this will help: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=CC4FB38C-579B-40F7-89C4-1721D7B8DAA5&displaylang=en Its apparently needed for SP2 *and* SP3, so yeah, SP3 was the cause of this problem I'd probably already corrected some other way over 3 years ago. You need l3codecp.lcm to be able to make the 128kbit MP3's with built-in Windows programs like SNDREC32. It also makes using FlasK a whole lot easier. -- Also, Service Pack 3 - once again - decided it would be just peachy to install l3codeca.lcm all over again. I've gotten rid of l3codeca.lcm so many fucking times now. Every goddamned major Windows XP update as well as about half of the Media Player updates install that horrible piece of shit "l3codeca.lcm" over the top of my l3codecp.lcm. When this happens, Windows suddenly forgets how to make an MP3 file any better than 64kbps @ 22KHz. In other words, any file you make will sound like a telephone call, but in stereo, if you use it. The worst part is I got the copy of l3codecp.lcm legitimately from Microsoft with part of a media kit they offered. About ten years ago or so. They've been trying to steal it back ever since, so I have lots of backups of it. (3 comments | Reply)
Sunday, 07-Sep-2008
09/07/2008 20:45	Airline Security? (Reply)
Wednesday, 13-Aug-2008
08/13/2008 14:18	Baby’s first DEFCON We got back from getting married yesterday. The entire family had a great time! I think my son might be a little anal retentive - he didn't take a shit the entire time we were in Las Vegas. Saved it all up for right when we got home - an entire week! David was the youngest DEFCON 16 attendee who actually went to a full presentation, near as I can tell anyways. Also, he got in for free. We saw the BSOD-omizer presentation - the VGA adapter that can produce a "fake" BSOD or show other graphics as a prank. The EFF presentation made the baby pissed off. He briefly did a good job of articulating what was probably the feelings of all the pissed off, angry people around him. Some douchebag judge in Boston has apparently shit all over freedom of speech once again. I didn't see much of that one - we rapidly left for happier places. If anyone remembers me, it's probably as "The tall dude who was wearing a baby". (6 comments | Reply)
Sunday, 10-Aug-2008
08/10/2008 22:37	ZOMG Isaac Hayes is clear of all engrams and thetans!!! A word of congratulations is definitely in order to Isaac Hayes, who has finally cast off his last Thetan, leaving his body free of all negative influences that might lead him to have a less than positive thought. Enjoy your newly found state of purity. (1 comment | Reply)