July 1, 2012

Wooo! Severe Thunderstorm warning here with possible 70mph winds. (I'm baaa-aaaaack! 8pm)

NE South Carolina

Well that was fun. The power went out, and the wind blowed and blowed. That was some nasty shite.
I have no idea about damage.
My cats decided this was the perfect time to practice posing and draped themselves all over me.

I pretended I was a sloooow baking potato. I'm glad I only got through the rare stage.
😱⚡⚡💦💦💦💦 👀

July 1, 2012

Joan Rivers comments on the Gay Pride Oreo controversy: (LOL)

@Joan_Rivers:
Any moron offended by the gay pride rainbow Oreo cookie would die if they knew what the Keebler elves were doing inside the Hollow Tree.

Heh!

July 1, 2012

Western wildfires are getting worse. Why?

<snip>
This raises a question: Are wildfires in the Western United States getting bigger and more severe? There’s a fair bit of evidence that yes, they have been. And, ecologists and fire experts say, that’s not a fluke. Thanks to both climate change and shifting forestry practices, humans may bear some responsibility here.
First, the numbers: A 2009 report (pdf) from the U.S. Global Change Research Program describes how “both the frequency of large wildfires and the length of the fire season have increased substantially in recent decades.” Here’s a chart showing the sharp uptick since the 1980s:


1) Global warming. Huge wildfires are, of course, more likely during droughts, when the forests are dried out and filled with kindling. And many parts of the West are facing “severe” or “extreme” droughts right now. But, Allen notes, data from tree-ring studies suggest that there have often been large droughts in the West. “What’s different today,” he says, “is that it’s also getting warmer, which can amplify the fire severity in the West.”
<snip>
2) Sprawl has pushed more people into forest areas, increasing the odds of fires. Many forest fires are caused by lightning. But others are caused by human activities. And as more and more people push deep into forested regions, that increases the risk of accidents. “More smokers, more ignition from motorized vehicles… even more arson,” says Allen. He offers up one salient example: The record-setting Las Conchas fire in New Mexico last year, which consumed 40,000 acres, began when an aspen tree toppled onto a power line that was serving just six homes in a remote area.
3) Changing forestry practices have made wildfires more destructive. Any look at tree-ring data shows that the Southwest has seen massive fires going back for centuries. But, in the past, many of these fires were low-intensity “surface” fires that mostly cleared out underbrush and prevented forests from building up too thickly.
<snip>
More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/06/30/western-wildfires-are-getting-worse-why-is-that/

The Francis Marion National Forest in SC is going to up in a huge fire at some point. I'm surprised it's lasted this long. Hurricane Hugo and then pine beetles ruined a lot of it. The debris on the forest floor just keeps building up.

I remember my relatives doing controlled burns in some areas. They weren't huge, but they cleared the crap out of forested land near the houses that were off the beaten path.

July 1, 2012

Researchers use spoofing to 'hack' into a flying drone

American researchers took control of a flying drone by "hacking" into its GPS system - acting on a $1,000 (£640) dare from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

A University of Texas at Austin team used "spoofing" - a technique where the drone mistakes the signal from hackers for the one sent from GPS satellites.

The same method may have been used to bring down a US drone in Iran in 2011.

Analysts say that the demo shows the potential danger of using drones.
<snip>
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18643134

What could possibly go wrong they said?
I feel soooo reassured.

July 1, 2012

Tea Party t-shirt for July 4th:

Items with this slogan could become a major seller in certain places.

July 1, 2012

David Jones: Joe Paterno fans must accept that he was flawed

(the author covered Paterno for 21 yers)
<snip>
Today, we begin to deal with the man’s dark side. As it was the time then to extol some of Paterno’s virtues, now it is time to examine his liabilities.

We all have both. Our culture seems more and more addicted to the concept of white hats and black hats, to taking sides, to painting the world and its inhabitants as either “good” or “evil.” It’s an infantile way to look at life and people, in my opinion.

And there is a certain sizable segment of the populace in this region who seems desperate to cling to the belief that Paterno was this saintly grandfather of all that’s noble and good about not only college athletics but higher education. That he could not possibly have been involved in the cover-up of a pedophile’s hideous deeds.

Those people will never believe what I have to say here because they are zealots in need of a hero, even if it’s someone they never knew.
<snip>
How many times do we instill intrinsic goodness in those we don’t even know? Have the Roman Catholic priest scandals in Boston and Philadelphia taught us nothing?

It does not have to be a lesson of bitter disillusionment, only one of caution. Trust those few you personally know.

The vast majority of you have never known these men at Penn State. You only knew of their station atop your chosen club buttressed by the trappings of their fame.

The most famous of them all was the head football coach. His fame did not make him a saint.
Read the entire piece:
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2012/06/david_jones_joe_paterno_fans_m.html

There are no saints.
You really don't know anybody 100%. You know little about those you view and hear from afar. You know their image. That's why it's so important to watch what people do. Even then, some actions can still fool us because the reason behind them may hide a negative actin.

June 30, 2012

In 1791, Robert Burns laid a magnificent smackdown on a critic of his poetry:

In 1791, riled by a recent review that criticised a supposed abundance of "obscure language" and "imperfect grammar" in his poetry, celebrated Scottish poet Robert Burns channelled his anger and wrote the following magnificent letter to the critic responsible.

It really is a thing of beauty.

(Source: The Works of Robert Burns, Volume 4; Image: Robert Burns, courtesy of the BBC.)

Ellisland, 1791.

Dear Sir:

Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar; thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded; thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom; thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.

R.B.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/thou-eunuch-of-language.html

Now that is a verbal whomping.
What an elegant way to say 'Eff you!'

June 30, 2012

Emails show Paterno talked to PSU officials & they nixed going to the authorities about abuse

A CNN report aired Friday night detailed how former Penn State officials responded to then-graduate assistant Mike McQueary's 2001 account of Jerry Sandusky's abuse of a boy in the Nittany Lion locker room with an exchange of e-mails and, eventually, a failure to report the incident to state authorities.

According to CNN sources, e-mails show that vice president Gary Schultz, athletic director Tim Curley, and president Graham Spanier had initially settled on a plan in which they would speak with "the subject" -- Sandusky -- as well as his Second Mile charity and the Department of Welfare.

Those emails took place 16 days after McQueary offered his account. But Curley backed out of that plan in a second e-mail exchange.

"After giving it more thought and talking it over with Joe [Paterno] yesterday," CNN quoted Curley from an obtained e-mail, "I am uncomfortable with what we agreed were the next steps. I am having trouble with going to everyone, but the person involved."

Curley later emailed that if the athletic department could "work with" Sandusky and get him "professional help," they could avoid going to either Second Mile or the Department of Welfare. In an e-mail CNN reports was sent two hours later, Spanier agreed with that plan.

“I am supportive,” Spanier was quoted as writing. “The only downside for us if the message isn't heard and acted upon, and then we become vulnerable for not having reported it.”
<snip>
more here:
http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/blog/eye-on-college-football/19449273

Paterno can rot wherever he is.
As for the rest, Hang 'Em High!

That entire athletic department should be cleaned out because there are still many people who have been working there for a long time. I'll bet a lot of them knew something. They deserve the SMU treatment until it's scrubbed. This is worse.

To those who say that SMU was different because they gained a competitive advantage, PSU gained years to operate without the scandal that finally ensued.

June 30, 2012

SWAT team throws flashbangs, raids wrong home due to open WiFi network

The long-standing, heavily documented militarization of even small-town American police forces was always going to create problems when it met anonymous Internet threats. And so it has, again—this time in Evansville, Indiana, where officers acted on some Topix postings threatening violence against local police. They then sent an entire SWAT unit to execute a search warrant on a local house, one in which the front door was open and an 18-year old woman sat inside watching TV.

The cops brought along TV cameras, inviting a local reporter to film the glorious operation. In the resulting video, you can watch the SWAT team, decked out in black bulletproof vests and helmets and carrying window and door smashers, creep slowly up to the house. At some point, they apparently "knock" and announce their presence—though not with the goal of getting anyone to come to the door. As the local police chief admitted later to the Evansville Courier & Press, the process is really just “designed to distract." (SWAT does not need to wait for a response.)

Officers break the screen door and a window, tossing a flashbang into the house—which you can see explode in the video. A second flashbang gets tossed in for good measure a moment later. SWAT enters the house. On the news that night, the reporter ends his piece by talking about how this is "an investigation that hits home for many of these brave officers."

But the family in the home was released without any charges as police realized their mistake. Turns out the home had an open WiFi router, and the threats had been made by someone outside the house. Whoops.

So the cops did some more investigation and decided that the threats had come from a house on the same street. This time, apparently recognizing they had gone a little nuts on the first raid, the police department didn't send a SWAT team at all. Despite believing that they now had the right location and that a threat-making bomber lurked within, they just sent officers up to the door.
<snip>
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/06/swat-team-throws-flashbangs-raids-wrong-home-due-to-open-wifi-network/

Idiots! With more surveillance and investigation BEFORE the raid, this could have been avoided.

The article also points out that the open router problem has come up in some child porn cases. That's scary. Once you get tagged with that charge, it can stick for a long time. A retraction or admission of a mistake doesn't get nearly enough attention.

June 30, 2012

This should be the symbol for MSNBC:

They lean forward and then rock back 24/7.
Somebody is going to turn this over one day.