furtive explorations

I wanna leave you with something before I hop on the road so here are the links I forgot to post last night. Most of these are from RobotWisdom but I want 'em in my blog for future reference.

• Jewish History is a rather naked look at some of the less appetizing aspects of having 6000 years of history. This is a controversial piece and one a lot of morons out there in the world use to further their "zionistic world star-chamber conspiracy" crap. Worthy of a serious read.
• Clueless and Keyless are the people in Bremerton when for a second time many of the remote keyless entry systems for cars all stopped working at once. Suspiciously, they all stopped in each case as a huge Navy ship was docked. This wobbles between sympathetic reactivity and fairly possible. Wouldn't suprise me either way. I'd be looking into harmonics of low frequency radio that may be getting magnified by the harbor-bay if I were them. OTOH, as Dodd can tell you, they Navy doesn't just roll over and admit fault on things like this, nor do they bother revealing what they might be doing that would cause such disruption.
• Man-portable, almost potable fuel cells! Very cool, a fuel cell style battery that runs on methanol and weighs only a few pounds. Hello LAPTOP!
• Simpsons article is pretty good reading too. If you are at all a fan you will like what you hear. "A spin-off is in the planning stages. Who would it include? 'Everybody,' Groening said, 'including the Simpsons themselves. It would include them but not as the core characters. (The stories) would revolve around the other characters already in the series.'"
• NSA books that need buying and reading. An inside(ish) look at the NSA and what they really do! *gasp* They have a website now!

If you do much SQL work, you may be interested to read a bit about its origins. This paper is certainly the thing to read to find out a more about all the warts that SQL and ODBC and such grew around. And the rest... would be the meat of the discussion for the insider's view of how all these companies wound up using these technologies.

My roommate is trying to work out a plan to take the local college into the 20th century with a digital broadcast system. I kinda need to know what level of machine is required to encode the stream and what levels of machine can handle what number of streams. How much bandwidth this all uses might be nice too.

More importantly, are there better or should-be-avoided codecs and helper software chunks that a good system admin should know about in advance? And since this a student thing, bang-for-the-buck is all-important. Thanks! (p.s. I've read Be a DJ already. =)

• Boy on a Stick and Slither has a nice ring to it.
• Paradigm had some fine recommendations so I'm gonna watch it close.
• Graphite Stage is worth checking back in on later. The sense of humor needed to spot this and scan it for posterity shows great promise in my book.
• Eat the Roses is notable just for the name. And the site design. I like what she has done with tables and such. Hopefully, I'll eventually get to see some of the art if the keenspot server it is under doesn't just keep dying like it has been all day. Grr.

Now, I can't speak for anyone else, but I am getting severely sick of this kind of legislation and federal intrusiveness. Why is the government in the game of protecting stupid people from themselves? That is what this all comes down to...stupid parents don't secure their children...child of stupid parents gets mangled or dies...now the intelligent people are subject to federal laws because of the stupid parents.

I have news for the government...stupid people will always find a way to out-stupid your stupidity-protectionist laws! You can put law after law on the books, and ultimately all you are doing is cluttering the legal landscape and cramming the entire nation into cookie-cutter lives because some stupid people hurts themselves.

Fsck the stupid people! If they are too stupid to survive, they shouldn't be a part of the gene pool. Stop trying to legistate us into safety...the intelligent people will, more often than not, lead a safe-minded existence. Educate us, don't legislate us! Let the stupidity die.

Of course, that's just my not so fscking humble opinion...

Even better, stand up and look around your office or workspace or school building. What percentage of your companions can you see once you peek out the door or over the cube wall? Can you find a spot in the office where you could see even 50% of the people's desks? Would a giant chandelier cluster-fuck of mirrors look good in that spot? Wouldn't it be great if every time someone moved a cubicle two inches over to get that lost quarter your net connection died? Pbbbt sez Mr. Smarty-Pants.

While stupid ideas are on your mind, remember back in 1980 when you first heard about the idea of Electric Comic Books? Didn't it seem really cool back then? Now that you've seen real future technology, doesn't it seem really lame to have two flat-panel displays hinged in the middle like a book that you could read from, just like a book? Comics were cheap because there was a glut of really low-grade paper and in the later years easy 4-color process inking. In the future, comics will be cheap BECAUSE YOU ALREADY HAVE A COOL DIGITAL GRAPHICS "READER" FOR COMICS THAT YOU ARE USING TO READ THIS STUPID BLOG! Why spend more money on a "reader" for comics when you own a computer. Why spend real money on a fancy display system and shitty interface and processor when you can buy a fucking computer?

Like almost any polarizing political puffery (hey that was a good bit) the real answer is to do a bit of both. Low power initiatives need to be phased in, preferably with a soft touch like easing taxes on products that meet certain goals rather than the regularly-failing innovation-thru-regulation where the government tries to force new ideas to magically appear by outlawing existing products in "x" years' time. "How are all the cool zero-emission cars out there in California doing?" Ouch, not one single maker has been able to meet the requirements, last I heard.

The cool thing about all this is that Bush's big-ass-foot-in-the-crap move of dropping Kyoto over Carbon Dioxide starts to look hella better once you find out the lowest, most stable priced fuel for power is coal. And the regions with the least power worries? Coal and nuclear powered areas! Wood is dead as a power source, Oil is mostly relegated to the home/business markets for heating rather than general power, and hydro/geo/wind power are all proving to be a bit more variable or expensive than people thought. Every time a wind farm goes up I think, "How many generators? How many moving parts? How high up? How often do they break?" I still think we should pursue them as alternatives, moreso than we do, in fact. I'd much rather my taxes be spent on power research and other real science that benefits society as a whole than be spent on a complete fiasco like the "war on drugs". I just think we shouldn't turn our back on stuff we aren't done with yet.

Most amusing: should you go digging in the bugzilla bug database you will find bugs like get hyatt to give ben $50 and quite a few others that are just as amusing. Nothing shows the spirit behind a project like people submitting bugs that insist on useless easter-egg features because they are fun to do...

Seriously, this is worth it in coolness factor alone to me...I'd be willing to lose some throughput if it let me see the lasers shooting across the room in some sort of 80's-WierdScience effect.

Bonus link, Amazombie.com may someday be something other than a place holder. I wish I'd thought of it, first...

• Video Games' Armeggedon will be lawyers and people who know exactly how they want your kids to grow up.
• Fluble makes me laugh and I'm always glad to see aliens in comics...
• Drunken Partygoer Mistaken for Sleeping Bear screams the headline. "Closer inspection revealed that the sleeper was a drunken human in a bear suit, who said he had drunk 15 liters of beer at a party in Engelen and decided to walk home afterwards." Booyah! You only wish your life was so cool. Or sodden with shitty beer...
• Neon Umbra sounds familiar but I'm not sure I've mentioned it before... Interesting...

I still need to do that comics page update and fix the sidebar, dangit. I'll try and get some of that laters after I visit a friend for her birthday. (The sixth friend or relative to have a B-day this month and finishing off a row of three including my sister and my roommate!)

• Supercavitating actully sounds cooler than "underwater warp drive".
• Mil's homepage. Yesterday we mentioned his TMGAIHAA page, today we point out that this page has brothers and sisters that are also funny.