For the last two days, my cable modem has been wigging the fuck out. It’s really awesome when it does it, because a reset takes care of it immediately. Well, tonight, the reset didn’t work. It does make me feel a helluva lot better for getting a bluetooth phone, though, because three clicks and my Mac is back on. Never have I found a system so mindnumbingly easy to pair.
Keep in mind that late last year I had CableOne repair techs at my house THREE FUCKING TIMES and they did not fix the problem. I had to fix it myself. This would be absolutely unacceptable in my job. But since they are a fucking ISP, they don’t fucking care. Go figure. If I had a PE SC420, I’d have a system exchange.
Guess I’ll call the cocksuckers tomorrow and see what the fuck is up. I bet the answer is “We’ll have to send out a technician” for the third or fourth time in less than a year. How pathetic is that.
Somebody’s been trying to spam my comments. I say “trying” because only two successfully showed up before I caught them. Some spammer had registered an account on my blog so they could post ads. Fucks. User creation is now disabled until I can get the software upgraded and probably a captcha of some kind installed. I hate the fucking things, but I’m not sure what else to do. In the interim if you are absolutely dying to call me an idiot on my own blog you are going to have to use the contact form to ask me nicely for an account so you can cuss at me.
Oh, the email address used for registration was otonia@hotmail.com, if anybody feels like mailbombing the shitfuck out of it.
Also, spam would cease to exist if people weren’t dumb enough to click on it. Discuss.
So I was visiting Prof. Ed Felten’s blog today (as everyone should) and he and a colleague have authored a brief article about a report posted over at BlackBoxVoting (pdf, sorry.) It seems the author of this report, Harri Hurst, describes some very scary security flawas that these Diebold voting machines have. Basically, it’s like every Slashdotter’s worst nightmare come true. It’s possible to install a software package on these systems that takes over all the machine’s basic functions. Once that’s done, it would be easy to fake votes or crash systems or pretty much anything else.
I know it’s been said over and over, but I’m saying it anyway: Voting machines are our most important physical connection to our government and they should be completely open - hardware design, code, everything. There’s simply no reason to be otherwise.
Here’s your question of the day.
Can serious A-list director Michael Mann (Collateral, Ali, The Insider, Heat, Last of the Mohicans) take an 80’s series and turn it into a movie? I’ve never seen a bad Michael Mann film. On the other hand, I can’t recall ever seeing a good film with Colin Farrell, and the only thing I can think of that Jamie Foxx was really good in was Any Given Sunday.
Mike had better not let us down. Deniro might have to go take his ass out.
In a rare burst of sanity, Catholic astronomer Guy Consolmagno decreed that creationism is not science - and more than that, that it is dangerous to confuse the two.
Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism - it’s turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do.
Check out this Guardian story about Consolmagno’s history. He seems like a very intelligent, interesting man that the world needs many more of.
Countdown until (Pat Robertson|Jerry Fallwell|James Dobson) come out and say that this guy’s an idiot and Darwin is a blasphemer: 24 hours. Bet me.
Tiller dragged me to Mission: Impossible 3 Saturday night.
It was good.
(You heard me.)
It was good in spite of Tom Cruise. He’s had his moments (notably, Collateral) but in most of his movies he’s just boring, wooden, like Keanu Reeves. The differences is that Neo buys motorbikes for his stuntpeople, works really hard, and generally treats people like decent human beings (if the press is to be believed.) Cruise, on the other hand, is the national spokesperson for the worst religious organization in the United States and is responsible for the defiling of Katie Holmes.
In spite of Cruise’s rampant mood swings between wooden and manic, the movie proves to be a success. Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of my favorite actors, pulls off a villain in a way that can only be described as fucking amazing. Michelle Monaghan is hot, and a decent actress in her own right, and even though she isn’t quite as good here (in either acting prowess or boobage) as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, she still steals almost every scene she’s in.
In addition, the whole mess is directed by JJ Abrams (Mr. LOST) and I’d like to give him a hearty FUCK YOU both for his incessant use of the handheld camera shots (”shakycam”) and also for inventing LOST, the Crack Cocaine of network television. I’d love to kick him in the nuts, but I’d have to stop watching LOST long enough to do it. Fucker.
In addition, the plot is very much non-ludicrous (or at least, no more ludicrous than True Lies) and the action sequences are really fucking awesome. So basically, it’s two hours and change of people upstaging Tom Cruise and JJ Abrams’ really interesting direction. A win all around.
Yesterday, Lowtax was threatened with legal action for posting a LINK to an Apple service manual in SH/SC. Apple Legal has been dragging Apple as a whole down since the fucking Apple vs. MS clusterfuck so many years ago.
And seriously, what the fuck is the point of all of this shit? It’s already been plainly proven by SA forum members and many others that the primary source of the heat problem in the MBP is because of a shitty application of thermal grease. (I’d love to link a thread on Apple Discussions, but as per usual, any threads that even remotely hint Apple might be responsible for this are dropping like fucking flies. Corporate twats.) Seriously, .3 CC of fucking thermal grease? That’d cover half a dozen processors. It’s like these fuckers can’t even read the goddamn Arctic Silver instructions.
The only thing Apple needs to do to establish themselves as head and shoulders above all other computer companies, including my own employer, is stop suing people for stupid fucking reasons, and take responsibility for their own product. You’d think this would be easy.
Anybody who believes in business ethics is that sucker P.T. Barnum was talking about. And at this point, if Mac OS X wasn’t so fucking amazing, I’d drop Apple like a hot rock.
No pun intended.
If you haven’t seen Layer Cake yet, you might want to. It’s a good Guy Ritchie-esque movie and it stars this dude I’d never heard of named Daniel Craig. And as you may have now heard, he is the new James Bond. I ws a bit nervous about this, until I saw the trailers that are appearing on the Internet (youtube link, can’t go there at work 
)
It looks decidedly old-school, which will make you real happy if you, like me, think that Sean Connery was the best Bond ever. Hopefully it won’t feature any car chases through ice sculptures. Also, I’m hoping for at least 100% less Madonna.
