Mine just died after 9 months. No response from Palit.
KXJM (Jammin 95.5) Portland Feb 4, 2003 – Wed 4:45PM
I don’t normally listen to the radio, but I’m getting tired of my music collection. Today I tuned into Jammin 95.5 out of Portland on the way home from work. They were in the middle of a phone-in session about a teacher in California that wrote a story for the school newspaper about sex, who apparently made some sarcastic remarks that the school should have “sex rooms.” This, according to the DJ’s, was done sarcastically to make the point that excessive displays of effection weren’t appropriate for school. I noticed two things during their phone-in:
The DJs appeared to intentionally cut people off on the phone who expressed views against the DJ’s, and they gave more time to people that agreed. The phone-in session concluded with basically “sex in schools is bad, only abstinence should be taught”. OK, that’s fine. If they want to do that/say that that’s their business.
But that alone isn’t what I thought was blog-worthy. The funny thing is, their last caller was an 8th-grader who called in to say that she didn’t believe the teacher was right to talk about sex in the school newspaper and that it “might send kids the wrong message.”
They IMMEDIATELY followed this up with a comment from the DJ, “damn straight, schools should only teach abstinence” and then played a song by Ludicris where (I’ll leave the lyrics to your imagination) the content of the song is pretty much about gettin drunk and having sex with women with big behinds. 😉
Hmmm. So… school’s should teach abstinence and radio stations should teach sex and hypocracy? 🙂
“You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume. You cannot start your computer from this volume.”
The hard drive in my old Powerbook G3 is dying, so I decided to replace it. Since I’m in the process of replacing it, I thought I’d go ahead and put 10.3 on it, and that was the error I got when I tried installing it on the new disk, after several formats. A search on google returned zero results.
Well, rebooting fixed it. I was thinking for a minute Apple had some bizarre restriction on what kind of hard drives you can install OS X on. 🙂
Presedential candidate Wesley Clark has a blog
…and this isn’t just dished out PR either, this is a real blog, edited pretty much daily. Impressive. But what does this do to sway potential voters? I guess we’ll see.
Bruce Schneier on terrorist threat level alerts, from his most recent Cryptogram newsletter…
The color-coded threat alerts
issued by the Department of Homeland Security are useless today, but
may become useful in the future. The U.S. military has a similar
system; DEFCON 1-5 corresponds to the five threat alerts levels: Green,
Blue, Yellow, Orange, and Red. The difference is that the DEFCON
system is tied to particular procedures; military units have specific
actions they need to perform every time the DEFCON level goes up or
down. The color-alert system, on the other hand, is not tied to any
specific actions. People are left to worry, or are given nonsensical
instructions to buy plastic sheeting and duct tape. Even local police
departments and government organizations largely have no idea what to
do when the threat level changes. The threat levels actually do more
harm than good, by needlessly creating fear and confusion (which is an
objective of terrorists) and anesthetizing people to future alerts and
warnings. If the color-alert system became something better defined,
so that people know exactly what caused the levels to change, what the
change means, and what actions they need to take in the event of a
change, then it could be useful. But even then, the real measure of
effectiveness is in the implementation. Terrorist attacks are rare,
and if the color-threat level changes willy-nilly with no obvious cause
or effect, then people will simply stop paying attention. And the
threat levels are publicly known, so any terrorist with a lick of sense
will simply wait until the threat level goes down.”
Living under Orange reinforces this. It didn’t mean anything. Tom
Ridge’s admonition that Americans “be alert, but go about their
business” reinforces this; it’s nonsensical advice. I saw little that
could be considered a good security trade-off, and a lot of draconian
security measures and security theater.
I think the threat levels are largely motivated by politics. There are
two possble reasons for the alert.
Reason 1: CYA. Governments are naturally risk averse, and issuing
vague threat warnings makes sense from that perspective. Imagine if a
terrorist attack actually did occur. If they didn’t raise the threat
level, they would be criticized for not anticipating the attack. As
long as they raised the threat level they could always say “We told you
it was Orange,” even though the warning didn’t come with any practical
advice for people.
Reason 2: To gain Republican votes. The Republicans spent decades
running on the “Democrats are soft on Communism” platform. They’ve
just discovered the “Democrats are soft on terrorism” platform. Voters
who are constantly reminded to be fearful are more likely to vote
Republican, or so the theory goes, because the Republicans are viewed
as the party that is more likely to protect us.
(These reasons may sound cynical, but I believe that the Administration
has not been acting in good faith regarding the terrorist threat, and
their pronouncements in the press have to be viewed under that light.)
I can’t think of any real security reasons for alerting the entire
nation, and any putative terrorist plotters, that the Administration
believes there is a credible threat.
Vector Blaster goes on sale this monday
Blast through obstacles and overcome insurmountable odds as you, Vector Blaster, fight to save your home planet Zydar from the most evil criminal mastermind of the 32nd Century: Ghotran!
My first game is going on sale this Monday, I’m pretty excited. It’s being published by pretty much the top Pocket PC / SmartPhone game publisher, Digital Concepts who are renowned for [literally] groundbreaking PDA titles like Motocross Stunt Racer and Rocket Elite. It really is an honor to have my game placed among these ranks. 🙂
Tech companies defend outsourcing jobs overseas
no comment. :-/
Record Industry May Not Subpoena Providers
Obviously, this is a huge win for everyone out there that pirates music, it will make it a lot more difficult for the RIAA to get your name and home address.
More importantly, this is a huge win for ISPs. It restores the security ISPs had been given previously in the 80s from the Communications Act–immunity from their customers. The Communications Act was pushed through Congress by the Bells to make sure they couldn’t be sued if someone was using their phone service to do something illegal. Just like the USPS isn’t responsible if you use the mail to commit a crime, the phone company shouldn’t be responsible if you use the phone to commit a crime. This trial restored the protection ISPs had previously assumed.
ISPs shouldn’t be responsible to do jack if you use your Internet connection to commit copyright infringement–without a warrant.
NEVER try to install eVC++ 3.0 and eVC++ 4.0 on the same system
BIG mistake. My workstation is terribly messed up, I can’t build any of my code anymore… I never should have tried to get both of these tools on my system simultaneously. They won’t even uninstall cleanly either…
To fix the problem I had to completely remove all PocketPC and SmartPhone SDKs, search the registry for all references to them, then re-install them again one-by-one. Geeze MS, when are you ever gonna get this right? The PPC developer tools are even worse than the Platform development tools…
What the President is taking to London
Among the equipment they will bring will be:
• Two identical personal Boeing 747-200s and a third chartered jumbo.
• One personal US Marine Corps Sikorsky Sea King helicopter and a second A VH-60N, a VIP version of the Black Hawk helicopter.
• Two identical motorcades each made up of 20 mostly armoured vehicles, including the President’s converted Cadillac Deville.
• The “football”, a briefcase carried by a military aide which contains the launch codes for America’s nuclear arsenal.