Month: October 2007

Rush and those phony soldiers

Like many others, I heard about Rush and the phony soldiers comment. My response was approximately “Meh…”

Really – this is what Rush does. He says offensive things, trying to get a specific message across (in this case – soldiers opposed to the war are phony) while usually speaking carefully enough that if too many people get too upset, he can back pedal and truthfully say that he didn’t actually say what he is accused of saying. It lets his listeners and viewers feel comforted with the insults of those they dislike while leaving wiggle room for Rush to pretend he didn’t mean whatever gets him in trouble.

I would suggest to my (still above average and incredibly good-looking) readers that many well-known political commentators do this same thing in some manner, and most of their listeners eat it up the same with the ditto-heads do.

Yet for some reason, this particular comment really has riled up the Democrats. I am actually surprised at how upset many people have gotten over this. I heard his comment and promptly ignored it, thinking that the blowhard effect should push this away where it can be forgotten like so many other irrelevant comments. I suppose not everyone recognized meaningless hot air for what it is, and now we get wasted Congress-critter time so the liberals can finally play tough against someone in the whole war debate.

Thankfully, there is at least one source of commentary that took the proper action and made fun of the entire non-event to highlight how meaningless it really is.

Just hours after Sen. Harry Reid, D-NV, took the senate floor to call on radio talkshow host Rush Limbaugh to apologize for using the term “phony soldiers” during his Friday broadcast, a newly-formed, grassroots veterans organization endorsed the senate majority leader’s efforts.

Sadly, I think the source of the story will cause it to be ignored in favor of more sites supporting this silly uprising to condemn a talking head for, well, talking out of somewhere else.

[tags]Rush, Blowhard, Hot Air, Phony Vets[/tags]

Men – hide your stash of pr0n better than this guy

Pr0n! One of the driving factors in the growth of the intarpipes, I am certain. Fantasy get-away for many men. For one man, however, it was only a sure-fire method to peeve the old-lady and suffer a serious hurting.

A Chicago woman who became enraged after discovering her longtime boyfriend’s stash of pornography shot and killed him in their South Side home over the weekend, prosecutors said.

. . .

Strowder and Martin had lived together in the 5300 block of South Shields Avenue for the last two years, prosecutors said at a hearing Tuesday at which Strowder was ordered held in lieu of $600,000 bail. On Sunday night, Strowder found CDs inside the home containing images of nude women and lost control, authorities said.

Ding-dang-diggity! That’s some freaky scary stuff, right men?

[tags]Pr0n for disaster[/tags]

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DIY – build your own portable MP3 player

If mp3-stick-complete.jpg you have some real talent with hardware project building, you might be interested in this article about building your own portable mp3 player. Just be aware that it is not for the meek.

Project description – This is not a beginner project!

mp3-stick-partial.jpg

The MP3stick is a simple and small portable MP3 player. A microcontroller Atmel AVR ATmega128 is the heart of the circuit. MP3 decoding is done by an VLSI VS1011b decoder IC. A MMC/SD card works as memory medium for MP3 files, playlist files and skin files. The player is designed to draw his power from a LiIo/LiPo battery with 3.6V. a charger cicuit, based on MAX1811, is included. All information will be shown on a Nokia color LCD with 128×128 pixel and 256 colors. The player will work in text-only mode and if a skin file is available, also with nice graphic skins. A docking port allows outside connectivity for serial control signals, audio signals and charger voltage input.

All the necessary hardware is detailed in the guide following the introduction. A number of pictures are included to see various phases in the build. Firmware information is given. Even finaly build size (22x39x64mm) and approximate battery life guidelines are included. The work on this is impressive, and if you have the talent to build, this looks like a great project to get involved with.

[tags]mp3, DIY, MP3 player, Hardware project[/tags]

Denied! – Bush executive order to stop release of Presidential papers as the public documents they are

In 2001, President Bush signed an executive order which would allow a President to disallow the publication of Presidential papers as long as he/she wished, even extending that write to descendants.  Since these documents are public records except in the case of classified information, this has never been done before.  Formerly, all Presidential documents (again, excluding classified materials) were released as the public records they are after a set time past the end of a President’s administration.  With the Bush executive order, researchers had to prove a need for the records before they would be released if any relative wished to hold them as non-public records.  And that’s pretty hard to prove, when you don’t know what the records hold.

Recently, a judge upheld the public’s right to access to these records and blocked the portion of the executive order which would stop the release of papers.

A federal judge on Monday tossed out part of a 2001 order by President George W. Bush that lets former presidents keep some of their presidential papers secret indefinitely.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that the U.S. Archivist’s reliance on the executive order to delay release of the papers of former presidents is “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and not in accordance with law.”

You might remember Kollar-Kotelly for her work on the Microsoft case.  While some of her work in the past has been criticized, I like her for the fact that she has ordered Bush administration officials to speak on the illegal domestic surveillance in the post-9/11 era.

[tags]President Bush, Executive order, Presidential papers, Public documents, Kollar-Kotelly[/tags]

Freaky news of the day – surrogate births her own twin grandchildren

So when the woman who carried you 9 months in the womb and birthed you is also your grandmother, would you call her Mom or Grandma? That’s the question these Brazilian twins will have to figure out when they are old enough to talk.

Rosinete Palmeira Serrao, a government health worker, gave birth to twin boys by Caesarean section on Thursday at the Santa Joana Hospital in the city of Recife, the hospital said in a statement on its Web site.

. . .

Serrao decided to serve as a surrogate mother after four years of failed attempts at pregnancy by her 27-year-old daughter, Claudia Michelle de Brito.

Kudos for going above and beyond normal parental responsibilities in helping your child have children of her own, but man if those kids were American, I could foresee them needing counseling as teens. I’m sure it shouldn’t seem weird, but yet I think it is weird. It’s no Ray Stevens’ tune, but it’s pretty close.

[tags]Mom is my grandma, Grandma is my mom, Brazilian woman gives birth to own grandchildren[/tags]

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Nintendo Wii supply will still be insufficient this holiday season

The Nintendo Wii gaming console started selling late last year. It has been almost perpetually scarce, as skyrocketing demand, far better pricing than the more capable yet more traditional Sony and Microsoft systems, and limited production capacity have given Nintendo the enviable problem of being able to sell every console they can make and still have gamers looking for more. As nice as it would be for this problem to finally be resolved as we head toward the 2nd holiday season of Wii availability, Nintendo of America big-dog Reggie Fils-Amie says we still will have to look harder to find the Wii than competitors’ systems.

As yet unbeaten in the console sales charts since it debuted in the US last November, Nintendo’s Wii has consistently outsold its competitors by healthy margins. However, far from reaching its saturation point, the Mario Factory has yet to meet demand for its console. According to Nintendo of America president and CEO Reggie Fils-Amie, that situation isn’t going to change as the already-booming gaming industry heads into its busiest time of the year.

I want one, but haven’t been able to convince the wifey-person to get one. And I’m not willing to face the hell I’d suffer were I to just buy one – I already spend enough on computer hardware and software to know better than to push my luck.

[tags]Nintendo Wii, Gaming, Consoles, Wii, Game consoles[/tags]

Applying game theory to anti-terrorism

In what I would say is a smart play to making things more difficult for terrorists, Los Angeles airport security officials are using randomized security checkpoints to make pre-attack scouting work more risky.

…Anxious to thwart future terror attacks in the early stages while plotters are casing the airport, LAX security patrols have begun using a new software program called ARMOR, NEWSWEEK has learned, to make the placement of security checkpoints completely unpredictable. Now all airport security officials have to do is press a button labeled “Randomize,” and they can throw a sort of digital cloak of invisibility over where they place the cops’ antiterror checkpoints on any given day.

. . .

The ARMOR software is the real-world product of an idea that began as an academic question in game theory. USC doctoral student Praveen Paruchuri sought to find a way for one “agent” (or robot or company) to react to an adversary who has perfect information about the agent’s decisions. Using artificial intelligence and game theory, Paruchuri wrote a new, fast set of algorithms to randomize the actions of the first agent. But when he took the paper to prestigious AI conferences, nobody would publish the work. The basic reaction: great math, but so what? “They said, ‘We don’t see a practical use for it’,” says Milind Tambe, the USC engineering professor who led the ARMOR team. “It was very disappointing.”

I had a math professor in college who preferred to live in the world of theoretical math – it was cleaner, and not constrained by looking to make something out of the ideas studied. It sounds like Purachuri ran in to mostly theoretical mathematicians who didn’t like real-world products messing up their precious Gedankenexperiment work. Fortunately, LAX officials didn’t view the work the same as the academics at the conferences did. They wanted to talk more to the ARMOR product creators. Now, the project has been put to work for the airport.

It’s a smart premise, and if used more frequently than once a day, I could see this helping. Have the bog-standard set security screening points that we all know and love, add in sets of relocated daily mobile screening points, and throw randomly mobilized light-duty screening officers on top of it. It can be a hassle for the security officials, but should lead to less overall intrusion for standard travellers and more security visibility to potential terrorists or attackers. It sounds like it will make for better security, and as my regular (and exceptionally brillaint) readers know, I am all for security that leads to less intrusiveness for regular travellers, which ARMOR sounds like it will do. (via /.)

[tags]ARMOR software security tool, Randomized security checkpoints, Game theory, Mobile random screening[/tags]

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RandomLi – a briefer blog

Last year, I registered the domain randomlinkage.net, but never did anything with it.  Finally I decided to quit being a slug and start using the domain.  I present to you now RandomLi – a blog of briefness.

Think of it as an ongoing post of asides.  I’ll still be posting here, and putting the occasional brief news snip in the right column Asides category.  But at RandomLi, I’ll be putting one to three posts a day, each with several very short descriptions of news items and links out to those news-bits.  I’m building it to let me post the things I want to point out to others but don’t want to write much about otherwise.

There will be some overlap on the Blahg with RandomLi, just because sometimes I’ll post something there and later decide that I do want to write up more about it for posting on the Blahg.  As with this site, comments are open on RandomLi as long as I don’t find comment spam unmanageable, so feel free to reply there to anything that catches your eye.

[tags]RandomLi, Random Linkage, Another site from me, A briefer blog[/tags]

The Blahg – breaking 1 million!

Now some folks might see that and think I am announcing a million hits to the site, or some other improbable event. While looking around at all the new things I could discover on the web today, I found a cool web site grading tool and decided to see how the Blahg ranked for SEO.

From that site, I thought I’d manually verify the rankings and statistics the reporting tool gave me. That’s how I found that the Blahg is ranked 810,958 in the world for web traffic. So I’ve broken the top million. I figure if I can knock out another 801,000 sites, I can be proud of my results. Of course, the question is do I knock them off the net, or just try to exceed their traffic levels?

[tags]The Blahg, Blahg tops a million, Alexa, Traffic stats, Web site grader[/tags]

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