California court posting personal data
In Riverside County. It appears to be because they're doofuses (doofi?) rather than because they mean to. So hopefully they'll get it sorted out before too many people have their identities hacked.

UK Set to Criminalize "Extreme Pornography"
The really weird thing about this one is that the new law will criminalize possession of porn depicting acts that are not themselves illegal. You can do it; you just can't take pictures of it.

And just in case you think your Windows computer security will protect you from such unreasonable searches...

Microsoft Device Helps Police Bypass Windows Security
Our friends in Redmond are selling plug-in boxes to the police that go right past Windows security. Another reason I'm glad I'm running Linux these days.

see more crazy cat pics

But got one anyway. It wasn't as painful as I've heard it was, but it was still not anyway I'd like to spend 2 hours. Slept most of the afternoon. About to do it some more.

Current Mood: sore

Our refrigerator now houses a small jar labeled (and here precision compels me to language that I would else avoid)...FUCKIN'-HOT-NOT-FRUIT-JELLY. Capitalized just like that, on a piece of card attached with duct tape.

It seems housepet missed the small habenero seeds floating at the top of the jar, like emergency buoys trapped in amber, and mistook it for apple.

gramina is henceforth barred from canning anything without a labelmaker ready to hand.

These are interesting devices. If you haven't seen one (and unless you're a weightlifting geek you probably haven't), there's a photo here. Think of an old-fashioned wooden "Indian club," or a bowling pin, or maybe a baseball bat, made of steel and covered in plastic. They come in a range of weights, from 5 lb up to 45 lb. But only mutants with superpowers go higher than 25 lbs because their weight is deceptive: it's all loaded toward the tip. The handle is just a lever arm. Even a little 5-pounder feels a lot heavier than that.

Clubbells are used with sweeping, rhythmic movements. One interesting thing is that once you get into the flow of these things it doesn't feel as though you're using much weight at all. But then you notice your heart rate shooting up and sweat starting to form. And when you finish your muscles threaten lawsuits and great bodily harm.

I think these may be the most fun you can have lifting heavy objects.

I can feel Linux raising my Geek Quotient. I'm to the point now that I found this very amusing (and thanks to monomania for the link):



I'm thoroughly converted myself, to the point that almost the only reason I haven't formatted my Windows XP partition is it would be too much trouble to port the data over (especially since Ubuntu can read and write to Windows volumes.

Seriously though, I am finding that Linux is a state of mind. I wondered for a while why Linux (which seems so obviously superior to me) hasn't made more inroads against Windows. gramina and housepet suggest that people are intimidated by Linux's reputation, but I think that's only on a tangent to the truth.

Linux does have a reputation for being geeky and difficult. It's not difficult - especially not modern versions like Ubuntu that have a well-developed GUI. The user interface works likes Windows or Macintosh, only better in most cases. But Linux is indeed very geeky. It was designed by tech people for tech people. The whole community that supports it (which is the Linux equivalent of tech support, only more friendly) is made up of geeks. Linux is what would happen if thousands of techies all over the world put their heads together and said "What would we put into an operating system that did exactly what WE want an OS to do?" In fact, that's pretty much exactly what did happen.

Mostly this shows up in small ways - like the Linux add-on for Firefox that simplifies accessing information from bioinformatic databases. But it shows in larger ways as well. For example in Linux before you install ANY executable code to your system you have to enter your account password to verify that you're authorized to do that. Linux won't run an executable that hasn't explicitly been given permission to run by the user. To me, that password prompt is like a little reminder - "It's a dangerous net out there," but I think it would just annoy most regular Windows users.

And that's not even getting into the enormous customizability of Linux, and the power it gives the user through the command line. It all adds up to a different mindset. I think the weird folks like me who actively like Linux just look at computers in different ways than most other users do.

Back in the days before cars got smart, there were a lot of people (mostly men) who liked fiddling around under the hood just for fun - to tweak the performance of their cars just a little more toward whatever they thought of as optimal. It was like a weekend hobby. But then there were a lot of other folks who just wanted to get in, turn the key, and drive to work. All they wanted was a car that would get them from point A to point B. These were just different ways of thinking and different sets of expectations, but each of these groups tended to favor different kinds of cars and different ways of using them.

Linux is for people who like to play around under the hoods of their computers, swapping out spark plugs and fiddling with the timing belt. Windows is for the regular suburban drivers. Macs...not sure yet where Mac falls on the car analogy spectrum.

I'm now coming to you via the wonder that is Ubuntu Linux (Version 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon).  I've set up a dual-boot system on my laptop.  It was surprisingly easy - non-trivial (I had to defragment and repartition my hard drive), but not especially difficult.  And Linux (I'm finding) is just vastly cool.  I'd take it just for the independence from Microsoft, but it has a lot of other advantages both aesthetic (I love having multiple workspaces on my desktop) and practical (virus resistance, and it seems to run faster than WInXP). 

I expect to migrate as much stuff as possible out of WIndows and into Ubuntu as time goes on.  Right now I'm still exploring the bells and whistles.

The government is absolutely the last entity that should be allowed to play fast and loose with the law. Conservatives need to understand this if no one else does.

In the balance between America's government and her citizens, government holds almost all of the real, tangible power. The Second Amendment is important, but let's face it: it's not what it used to be. And even if rigorous enforcement of the Second resumes tomorrow America's citizens will never again be able to match the raw firepower of the modern military.

The power of the citizenry is almost entirely symbolic: it rests in the absolute respect for our Constitutional protections and other legal limits on the power of government. Those limits must be preserved. If ever disrespect for those principles gains a foothold in the minds of our "leaders" there will damn-all we can do about it, so we can't let it get it to that point. Citizens have to enforce their expectations of that respect without compromise, because they are literally all that stands between us and tyranny.

We have this idea in the US that our Constitutional protections are some kind of iron wall restraining our government. But in fact all they are is ideas, upheld by nothing more than respect for tradition. Lose that, and you will never get it back.

I discovered this remarkable graphic novel series almost 30 years ago.  A friend of a friend had 2 years of back issues, and I stayed up literally through the night reading them.  The writers are now putting the whole series online for free.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

I learned something recently.  The first terrestrial creature to achieve earth orbit was a small dog nicknamed Laika, in a Soviet capsule.  She was picked up as a Moscow stray and reached low earth orbit on Nov. 3, 1957.  Her real name was Kudrayvka ("Litte Curly"), but the USSR felt most non-Russians would have trouble pronouncing that name.

That much I'd known, but I did not know that Laika's trip was intentionally one-way.  The technology for soft re-entry did not yet exist.  Soviet engineers had intended to euthanize her a few days into her trip with a poisoned ration of food.  However one of the environmental systems on her capsule failed during launch, and the capsule's internal temperature stabilized at 104 degrees Fahrenheit.  Biotelemetry from Laika ceased about 5 hours after she reached orbit.