2004116

Had to disable all comment posting on archived entries because of the blogspammers. One good thing came out of it though...the URLs they were posting are going to be added to wide-spread anti-spam software. Posted by Greg @ 08:03 PM PST [Link]

2004111

Copied from BoingBoing. This is pretty stupid...human error and human lack of common-sense attempt to put a woman on the CAPPS list for having an expired license, then screw up and put on her 6 year-old instead. Why can't Homeland Security tell the difference between Al Quaeda and my six-year-old daughter? My six-year-old daughter is on the CAPPS (Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening) list as a security risk. Here's what happened. We went to visit my parents in Colorado for the holidays. When we got to the Burbank Airport, the skycap asked for our IDs. He noticed that my wife driver's license had expired. He excused himself and came back about five minutes later, and said we could fly, but that Carla would have to undergo "secondary screening," which meant she had to take her shoes off and have all her carry-on luggage searched. It was a hassle, especially since we had a lot of carry-on stuff for our six-year-old and infant daughter, but at least they let us fly to Denver. A week later, we got to the Denver Airport to go home. Carla showed the agent her ID, and the woman didn't say anything about it being expired. I thought we had gotten lucky. But when we got to the security screening area, the woman working there looked at our tickets and said "Who is Sarina?" I pointed to my six-year-old. "She's been marked for secondary screening," she said. "She has to go over there. One of you can go with her." Carla went with Sarina and I went through the normal line with Jane. While Carla was escorting Sarina through the extra security check, she asked for an explanation. A man working there told her Sarina was on a list that required the extra search, and that he couldn't tell her anything more about it. My daughter was scared and shaken up by the ordeal and told us that she "hated it." At least the security people were polite to her. But they were like polite robots, unable to laugh at the fact that someone had mistakenly pegged a little girl as a potential terrorist. No, they insisted that she had to take off her shoes and get patted down and have a wand passed over her body and have her Hello Kitty suitcase opened and examined with a fine toothed comb. When we got to the gate, I looked at one of the monitors, and I saw Sarina's name on the list, along with one other person's name. The list was titled "CAPPS." My guess is that somebody decided to put Carla on the CAPPS list for showing up with an expired driver's license, and then screwed up by entering Sarina's name instead. I'm not too mad or upset about this, but after reading how this kind of thing has happened more than once, I have lost what little faith I had in the Department of Homeland Security to do its job. I wonder if we are going to have to go through this every time we fly? I also wonder if we can get Sarina's name taken off the list? If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Posted by Greg @ 12:19 PM PST [Link]

200415

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage." --Lord Alexander Tytler (1748 - 1813) on the fall of the Athenian republic Posted by Greg @ 11:11 PM PST [Link]

Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told. The other alternative would be that you independently considered every question and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered acceptable. That seems unlikely, because you'd also have to make the same mistakes. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mistake, that's very convincing evidence. Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakes probably didn't do it by accident. It would be like someone claiming they had independently decided in 1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea. If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s-- or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have. Back in the era of terms like "well-adjusted," the idea seemed to be that there was something wrong with you if you thought things you didn't dare say out loud. This seems backward. Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don't think things you don't dare say out loud. Article here thanks to Slashdot. Posted by Greg @ 12:32 AM PST [Link]

200413

Problem was on a system: MB: Gigabyte KT400 RAM: 512MB CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2000+ running at 1674.480Mhz SOUND: VT8233 AC97 Audio Controller VIDEO: nVidia RIVA TNT2 Model 64 (32mb) 'lsmod' shows that the nvidia kernel module is installed. The problem was that OpenGL was extremely chunky and slow after installing the NVidia drivers. Mouse movements happened every 15-30 seconds and sound was repetitive and annoying. Celticess, a friend of mine, found the solution. Make sure the following are in your /etc/modules.conf (Redhat, Debian, others) or an 'nvidia' file in /etc/modules.d (Gentoo): alias char-major-195 nvidia alias /dev/nvidiactl char-major-195 options nvidia NVreg_EnableAGPSBA=1 NVreg_EnableAGPFW=1 In XF86Config, make sure that the following exist: Load "glx" Driver "nvidia" She also uses 'Option "NvAGP" "1"' in XF86Config, but my installation really didn't care for that. X wouldn't run while it was in place. Just for the search engines, on this topic, so people find it, since I couldn't: opengl sound return to castle wolfenstein enemy territory sound chunky slow video frame frames nvidia driver glx. Posted by Greg @ 12:36 PM PST [Link]

200412

In what hopefully will be an annual tradition...my predictions for the year to come: Osama bin Laden will not be captured alive. I think it's unlikely that he will be captured at all. If he IS found, he will be dead, and it will be just before the next election No terrorist attacks in the 50 states in 2004 A bright new communications technology will appear that will supplant instant messaging completely within 3 years after its release Finally, a drop in the number of new AIDS cases in Africa Bush to win a very, very close election in the US against Howard Dean More voting irregularities appear as the result of the above Computer servants make a rise (software on your computer that helps you with common tasks intelligently and with some ability to learn...Clippy is reborn with a brain!) Much more public debate on the possibility that the environmentalist are wrong about global warming, leading to a more protests as leaders pull back from items like the Kyoto Protocol Posted by Greg @ 08:23 PM PST [Link]

Dear Laura, Roses are red, violets are blue oh my lump in the bed, how I've missed you. Roses are redder, bluer am I seeing you kissed by that charming French guy. The dogs and the cat they miss you too, Barney's still mad you dropped him, he ate your shoe. The distance my dear has been such a barrier, next time you want an adventure, just land on a carrier. Nope, wrong! It turns out Mrs. Bush is a liar, and Dubya gets someone else to write horrid love poems for his wife. And that's called 'spin', Ladies and Gentlemen. Posted by Greg @ 04:44 PM PST [Link]

French flight cancellation caused by a 5 year old child, an elderly Chinese woman and a Welsh insurance agent having similar sounding names to terrorist suspects listed by the FBI...source Posted by Greg @ 04:42 PM PST [Link]

LINKS and STUFF

Aspectus - This is Illiad's (of Userfriendly fame) other project, which is like Slashdot in some ways and like a personal blog in some ways, but cooler than either. Needs more content, and more visitors, but that'll come.

RED MEAT - Oh my. I imagine there is a FBI file on the artist. I never, ever want to meet him. But I will glory in his comic strip. Brilliance and intelligence wrapped up in the tattooed skin of a circus freak and tied with a bow made of blown O-rings.

Imparte.com - Rich's site. Not going to talk about it until he says I can. But go visit anyway.