The most valuable supply of worthlessness on the web
Anything that catches my fancy as a topic I want to cover. Truly random crap.
This is a project promising quite a throwback. The TA Spring project is basically an open source remake of Total Annihilation, brought up to modern system standards. If you having been gaming long enough to know what that means, you’ll appreciate the joy this can bring.
[tags]Open-source Total Annihilation remake, The TA Spring project[/tags]
Just got back from a week-end at my mother’s doing cleaning and home improvement work for her. I got the pleasure of finding some tripped breakers in the electrical box outside, 2 dead computers, a dead cable modem, a non-working internet connection once I got a working cable modem (yes, I have multiple cable modems), and poor cable signal to the television. So I’m not exactly in the best mood now. I have to spend tomorrow figuring out what, if anything, can be done to get the computers working again. I think we took a lightning strike that blasted some electronics, but I’m not sure.
On the other hand, I help my mother get some work done around her house, got my wife’s van clean, spent some time with my entire family, and had dinner with a beautiful woman. She’s a long time friend of mine that I’ve gotten to see little of this past decade, so it was really fun to catch up with what’s going on with her. That made my week-end good, which made for the return to all the house problems extra frustrating.
Look for some updates tomorrow as I catch up on geeky news, and maybe make a comment or two about Imus (briefly – he’s done worse, why get fired now?).
Now this is just damn ducky. A couple of years ago, the Congressional Business Office (CBO) released a report on the impact on the US economy of legalizing same-gender marriages. This wasn’t a question of morality, fair treatment of citizens, biblical imperative, or anything like that. The report is pretty much a straight-up study of how the US economy would be helped or hurt by allowing same-gender marriages (also available in PDF format if you prefer.
The federal government does not recognize “marriages” of same-sex couples either for receipt of federal benefits or for tax purposes. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (Public Law 104-199) provides that the federal government will honor only marriages between one man and one woman. It also stipulates that no state, territory, or possession of the United States or Indian tribe can be required to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in any other jurisdiction.
The potential effects on the federal budget of recognizing same-sex marriages are numerous. Marriage can affect a person’s eligibility for federal benefits such as Social Security. Married couples may incur higher or lower federal tax liabilities than they would as single individuals. In all, the General Accounting Office has counted 1,138 statutory provisions–ranging from the obvious cases just mentioned to the obscure (landowners’ eligibility to negotiate a surface-mine lease with the Secretary of Labor)–in which marital status is a factor in determining or receiving “benefits, rights, and privileges.”(1) In some cases, recognizing same-sex marriages would increase outlays and revenues; in other cases, it would have the opposite effect. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that on net, those impacts would improve the budget’s bottom line to a small extent: by less than $1 billion in each of the next 10 years (CBO’s usual estimating period). That result assumes that same-sex marriages are legalized in all 50 states and recognized by the federal government.
Continue reading “The economic impact of same-sex marriage on the US economy”
I periodically read about Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, and keep thinking how cool it would be if someone in the open source community came up with a good OCR package. While prices are far better than they were about 10 years ago when I first looked in to OCR software, it can still be expensive to get going with OCR. Now, Google has announced work on an open source OCR system. There is a technology preview available, with a 3rd quarter alpha release targetted. The code page points out that no real training of the character recognition engine has taken place yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see a sister project get going to use distributed tools for training, letting thousands of open source fans get involved on the project if they aren’t capable of contributing on the code side.
The OCRopus engine is based on two research projects: a high-performance handwriting recognizer developed in the mid-90’s and deployed by the US Census bureau, and novel high-performance layout analysis methods.
OCRopus is development is sponsored by Google and is initially intended for high-throughput, high-volume document conversion efforts. We expect that it will also be an excellent OCR system for many other applications.
I’ll watch this project. It could be another highly significant open source tool in the near future.
[tags]Google working on open source OCR software, Open source Optical Character Recognition package from Google[/tags]
Apparently this is not a new comic, having a pretty substantial archive, but I just found the DM of the Rings comic (link goes to the first epidose). DMotR combines the D20 gaming system with the recent Lord of the Rings movie to generate some pretty good geek humor.
[tags]DM of the Ring, Web comic[/tags]
I posted the following article on Sunday via my remote posting setup. I didn’t realize until last night that the article didn’t go up on the site on Sunday. I almost skipped it, but since everyone seems to be talking about Imus more now than when I posted, I figured I could still get away with it. Following is the original post I made Sunday afternoon, unedited. I put it here just so I can look in a week or two and see if Al Sharpton is still expressing his outrage or not. Then I can point back and say “See, I told you so.” or “Guess I was wrong” when we know what he’ll do.
This might not be quite as funny if you aren’t a computer geek, but I’m sure at least a few of these will be recognizable to even non-techies. The Programming Blog has a long list of things computer in movies can do that computers in real life just can’t seem to manage.
4. All monitors display inch-high letters.
5. High-tech computers, such as those used by NASA, the CIA or some such governmental institution, will have easy to understand graphical interfaces.
6. Those that don’t have graphical interfaces will have incredibly powerful text-based command shells that can correctly understand and execute commands typed in plain English.
27. Searches on the internet will always return what you are looking for no matter how vague your keywords are. (See “Mission Impossible”, Tom Cruise searches with keywords like “file” and “computer” and 3 results are returned.)
Some of the things in the movie can be done by real computers, but that breaks part of the list if you consider that. They also left off the Wargames computer feature of the computer being able to talk to the user no matter what computer the user is on.
[tags]Things computers in movies can do[/tags]
Scared of being caught for not completing your work on time? Well, it seems at least one person out there thought that setting a small fire in the office would be the best way to hide failure. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out how she planned.
A licensed vocational nurse remained behind bars today with combined bonds set at $330,000 after she was accused of setting a March 28 fire in a North Loop office building that killed three people.
Misty Ann Weaver, 33, was charged with three counts of murder and one count of felony arson in the fatal four-alarm fire at 9343 North Loop East that also injured six people. Her bond was based on $100,000 for each murder charge and $30,000 for arson.
Weaver, an employee of cosmetic surgeon Dr. Robert Capriotti, has confessed to starting the four-alarm fire at 9343 North Loop East, according to officials with the Houston Fire Department and U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
HFD Chief Arson Investigator Roy Paul said Weaver wanted to cover up the fact that she had failed to complete paperwork for an important audit for Capriotti. The audit had to do with the doctor’s state accreditation or recertification, Paul said.
Details of the damage done in the full story. I get not wanting to be caught failing to complete work. Setting a fire to deflect from this just isn’t a smart cover though.
[tags]Nurse sets fire to hide failure to complete paperwork[/tags]
Another eye candy post that’s really just for me. I don’t know many folks who have the hots for Ms. Ricci, but I’ve had a thing for her for so many years it’s absurd.
[tags]Eye Candy, Christina Ricci[/tags]
I like reading The Register. Sometimes, the humor stuff is as worth reading as the real stuff.
If surgery was like Wikipedia: Surgipedia.
Several surgipedians have gathered in an operation theater. On the table lies an unconscious man whos left leg looks dark. Surgipedian #1 grabs a sheet prepared by the patient’s doctor that details the problem.
Surgipedian #1: “Whoa, he’s been lying here for 26 hours, we sure got a backlog again. It also says on this that he has a ‘claudication’ and a ‘chronic venous insufficiency’ in the left leg”, looks at right leg, “and we are asked to do a ‘leg segmental arterial doppler ultrasound exam’. Whatever that is. His leg looks pretty good to me”.
Surgipedian #2: “You looked at the wrong leg. It says the left one”.
Surgipedian #1: “I looked at the left and it’s looking totally normal!”
Surgipedian #2: “The left from his point of view! Do you know where your left leg is?”
And more, as it goes on for a little while. I love Wikipedia, but this made me chuckle anyway.
[tags]If surgery was like Wikipedia[/tags]
I still believe that the damage George Bush has done to Americans’ rights and freedoms far exceeds any good he’s done in protection Americans from further attacks. In part, that’s because I don’t believe there was a great chance of additional attacks on Americans in America – at least not for a long time after the 9/11 attacks and not many attacks nor much likelihood of success. In part I believe it’s because President Bush has caused harm to many more Americans by creating this war in Iraq and sending insufficient troops in with insufficient planning based on questionable intelligence (and that particular sentence is something that needs its own space for further discussion). Because I believe President Bush has harmed America more than served and protected America, I’ve been calling for impeachment for a long time, on this site and in my regular life when talking with others.
The whole federal prosecutors fiasco is causing more folks to talk about this, and some even have even written up why they believe this latest executive abuse will lead to impeachment in the near future. I’m not convinced it will happen – things still look to me like President Bush will complete his term in office – but I do like seeing more talk about this. Of course, the linked article is from a very liberal viewpoint, and a bit of the glee and edge could be removed to make the write-up better for me to point to, but I still think the view of this writer is at least worth reading, even if you disagree that President Bush should be impeached. I’m not sure I agree with everything said, but I think it does cover some important abuses, and I do believe more moderate or conservative politicians are going to start thinking about these same things.
About a year from now, pundits and instant historians will point back at the firing of the federal prosecutors and say, “That’s where the impeachment began.”
. . .
The attorney general takes an oath to uphold the constitution and execute the law. When controversial matters come up, his role, traditionally, is often to be the guy who says, “We can’t do that, it’s against the law.”
Gonzales took a different approach. He brought the ethics of a corporate lawyer to his office. He took it to be his job to find, or invent, a theory that would allow the administration to go forward. If the theory wouldn’t hold up in court, or made little sense, that didn’t matter. They could still maintain, with straight faces, that they believed what they were doing, on the advice of the attorney general, was legal and constitutional. If worst came to worst, they’d back off and move on, so long as the profit outweighed the penalty.
The most flagrant example is when Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld decided they wanted to torture people.
The article is a bit long, but if you’ve spent much time reading my stuff, you should have no issues getting through the article’s length.
[tags]Blog talk on impeachment, Why impeachment will finally happen[/tags]
I’m 
generally not a big believer in conspiracy theories. I actually believe JFK was assassinated by a non-governmental wacko without prompting from government representatives who wanted the President gone. I believe that we Americans were actually surprised by the attack on Pearl Harbor, and that it wasn’t some Presidential plot to get the US into war. I don’t think President Clinton had all those folks assassinated to cover up crimes committed by him and Hillary. And I most certainly don’t believe that President Bush knew in advance about the 9/11 attacks, nor that the government or some all-powerful private entities somehow planned, orchestrated, or covered up facets of the attack and let the attack proceed in order to (among other ridiculous claims) destroy the World Trade Center. However, there are plenty of people who believe those conspiracy theories, and a lot of them especially believe that last one.
Rosie used to just be funny, in my opinion. I remember watching her stand-up stuff around 20 years ago and enjoying it. Now, she’s gotten too wacky for me to listen to her. She’s free to spout her views. I’m free to look elsewhere for something to occupy my time. The above link ties back to a boycott-The-View-because-of-Rosie’s-nonsense bit, which is where the Rosie tie-in comes from in my posting here.
[tags]More 9/11 conspiracy theorists show their silliness, Calls to boycott The View because of Rosie’s zany political spews[/tags]