Why I'm glad I didn't vote for Bush..

A little story I recently received in my email:

THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER

OLD VERSION:

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his
house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's
a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the

ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he
dies out in the cold.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible


MODERN VERSION:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his
house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's
a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the

shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why
the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold
and starving.

CBS, NBC, ABC & CNN show up to provide pictures of the shivering

grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a
table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can
this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is

allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody
cries when they sing, "It's Not Easy Being Green."

Jesse Jackson stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where

the news stations film the group singing, "We shall overcome." Jesse then
has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's sake.

Ted Kennedy & John Kerry exclaim in an interview with Dan Rather that

the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call
for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his "fair share.

Finally, the EEOC drafts the "Economic Equity and Anti-Grasshopper Act,"

retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing
to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to
pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government.


Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a
defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of
federal judges that Bill appointed from a list of single-parent welfare

recipients. The ant loses the case.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of
the ant's food while the government house he is in, which just happens to
be the ant's old house, crumbles around him because he doesn't maintain

it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. The grasshopper is found dead in a
drug related incident and the house,now abandoned, is taken over by a gang
of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.


MORAL OF THE STORY: Vote Republican


Pretty standard ignorant, uncaring Republican bs. Especially in the light of recent events.

So I wrote back:
A nice story.. but in reality, the GOP leadership is full of scheming criminals who are bankrupting this country financially and morally.
The current administration's involvement in Iraq has
led to far more civilian deaths than Saddam Hussein's ever did.

WASHINGTON -- A new study asserts that roughly 600,000 Iraqis have
died
from violence since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, a figure many
times higher than any previous estimate. Human Rights Watch has
estimated Saddam Hussein's regime killed 250,000 to 290,000 people over
20 years.

Thats about half the population in Idaho dying violently in three
years. So I guess that the people who voted for Bush would rather have
that than the evil dems who might support education or welfare or
abortion or something really wicked like that. (By the way, I've been
out of the loop for a while, when did God remove "thou shalt not kill"
from the 10 commandments? Or did he just append "unless they are brown
people" to the end?)

Heck, Bush has even cutting spending (by billions of dollars) for veterans (a group one might associate with the "ants" and
not the grasshoppers?) So I think your little story is pretty much
bunk.. but if you want the blood of 600,000 civilians (many women and
children) on your hands.. then by all means, support these criminals.

Sweet bulk ink feeder for epson r200 inkjet printer! I got it in March off of ebay for $54 shipped from a seller called vtechplace. So far it has worked pretty well. More photos below. 

The first half of the ink seems to go fairly fast. I think it basically filled up the cartridges. The whole pack cost me like $30 off of ebay. The seller was enough nice enough to send me a replacement magenta when the first one's chip didn't work. 

I think if I had it to do over, I'd just get cartridges though, and the bottles of ink that can be used to refil them. Keeping the big cable out of the way is a little tricky, and I worry that it'll break some day. 

If I let the printer sit for long periods of time, I have to run a nozzel clean or two before it prints again... but now I don't worry quite so much when the ink drops by 15% on a single clean ;) 

9/11 the true version of V is for Vendetta?

Apparently there is pretty good evidence to support the argument that crashing jets into the WTC buildings didn't cause them to collapse. In fact, the evidence seems almost overwhelming. But, as Lavar Burton used to say.. don't take my word for it. A professor at BYU recently released a paper, and has a detailed web page about the subject. Some of the responses to his page are quite interesting. I haven't made it through all of them yet, but none seem to argue against what he says on a technical basis. A few are fairly threatening however. This page also offers quite detailed coverage of many aspects of the builds' collapse. And on the political front, a group is organizing to support further investigation and political action.

Gi Joe, an American Hero

  

Facebook.. more evil than I thought?

I haven't done any extensive research on this, but this guy is claiming that Facebook got most of it's startup money (13+ million) from groups interested in spying on, and collecting data about US citizens. (People related to DARPA and the CIA...)
Between this, the latest information coming out about Bush circumventing the legal processes for spying on US citizens, and the information about people being held and tortured in various secret US prisons around the world, our human rights record is starting to look about like China's. It's too bad we can't move in positive directions like some South American countries.

Secrets in the code....

self.parent.removeChild()
Javascript is obviously pro choice.

Faith Based Games

With all this ruckus about Grand Theft Auto leading children in the land of inequity, and a cry issuing forth from the faithful for Faith Based video games, one would think that I might be feeling a bit alarmed about the future of gaming. This could not be further from the truth. The fact of the matter is, that a nice mix of Faith Based video games, and a good Literal Interpretation of the Bible will make for some real serious entertainment.
The next video game I want to see Rockstar Games put together should be a real retro piece, about ancient Jerusalem. Basically, you start out as a youth, torn between the allure of the big city, and following the word of God. The city is a rampant hot-bed of sin of course, and then there are all the enemies of God just waiting to be slain. Basically this game has sort of a Jedi Knight approach. If you follow the path of the Lord, you become sort of David like. If you choose the wicked path, you are left to fend for yourself.
David's path is a holy one, killing sinners, maybe even with some competition thrown in to keep things fun; sort of a mini-game approach. Of course, God's servants need to do more than just kill sinners to gain his favor. One fun level could be made up of an armed assault against the Philistines, where the player has kill 200 uncircumcised men, then lop off their foreskins in order to buy a wife. To really appease the Christian right, we are going for a straight up literal interpretation here, so the graphics and viscera need to be real good. Of utmost concern, is the collection of foreskins, which should be as realistic as possible.
Even the very faithful get bored of killing and foreskin collection from time to time, so perhaps we could mix things up a bit with a few Sim type levels. Using the spoils of holy war, one could buy land, and slaves to work on it. Balancing a kingdom and all of the financial details of being a land/slave owner can get tricky at times, so maybe some occasional beating would be necessary to keep the slaves in line. The Bible provides guidance on how handle slaves, including how to beat them to death if need be.
Another thing that a budding new leader needs to consider is progeny. David was certainly serious about his. Points would be rewarded based on the number of wives one accumulated, and at higher levels, the option of using one's kingly powers to send soldiers off to their deaths in order to steal their wives would certainly be available. The point system in this part of the game might be a bit difficult, but with a little ingenuity something could be fleshed out.
The successful leader and follower of God would be need to balance war, finances, and procreation with a firm and righteous hand. This would certain provide a challenge to todays young gamers.
Taking the path of wickedness provides a much more complicated situation for the game designer. The Bible provides a straight and narrow path for believers, but sinners and heathens seem to be cut loose to pursue whatever ends they desire. Perhaps those who chose not to follow God could become merchants, or even join up with the enemies of the city, and try to defend the women and children of their villages from the rath of the righteous. Getting captured and sold as a slave would certainly be a concern, as would death by stoning. In fact, choosing the path of wickedness might lead to more of a survival and escape sort of game. Obviously all the details haven't been worked out, but come on Rock Star, get to work!

Gigabit!

Gigabit used to be an expensive, and far away dream. Newegg.com now has gigabit cards for $10 (vs the $60-$100 they used to be) and gigabit switches for $50 (vs $200+ previously!). Suddenly gigabit is fairly cheap! I did some research on the cheaper cards Newegg offers, and decided on the GE1000-AXP from GigaFast because Linux supports them fairly well. Three of these little cards arrived arived Monday, and today I got a few minutes to test them out. The GE1000-AXP installed on Mandrake 10.2 without ANY user intervention. I didn't want it using DHCP however, so I did have to assign it a static IP (about 10 seconds and 5 mouse clicks... Linux is just SOOO difficult I'm exhausted).
Normally one would expect about this much performance from the different speed ratings:
(eqn: (10mb * 1,000,000)/(8*1024*1024) or 10 million bits with 8 bits per byte, 1024 bytes per Kilobyte, and 1024 Kilobytes per Megabyte)
10mb = 1.2 megs per second (10.2 minutes per full CD)
100mb = 11.9 megs per second (1.03 minutes per full CD)
1000mb = 119.2 megs per second (6.2 seconds per full CD)

In real life, these speeds are not actually attained. The 100mb interface on my main windows system can do about 8 megs per second, and the 1000mb interface on my Linux workstation can do about 20 megs per second. This is about half as fast as some of the results obtained in this benchmark. I don't know if this is because of the cheapness of the card, switch, or network cable. I am using genica cat 5 (maybe e?) cable, with ends I put on myself, and an eight port Netgear GS608 gigabit switch. Apparently there is also a bottleneck in the PCI bus which limits speeds to well below true gigabit, but some things I've read suggest that this is in the 400mb range. None the less, 20 megs per second is pretty dang fast, and twice as fast as my old network. Interestingly, if I copy files from the server with two systems at the same time, the total bandwidth is about 26 megabytes per second... hmmm.

Petrol

Abo pointed me towards this page the other day.

From the page:

* If we raise fuel efficiency standards in American cars by one mile per gallon, in one year, we would save twice the amount of oil that could be obtained from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

* Raising it by 2.7 mpg would save enough to eliminate all the oil imports from Iraq and Kuwait combined

* Raising it by 7.6 mpg would save enough to eliminate 100% of our gulf oil imports into this country


So.. why don't we just make cars more freaking efficient? Wouldn't that be a lot less painful that going to war with Iraq, drilling in various reserves, and furthering global warming? (Oh, I guess it wouldn't make as much money for the administration..)
(Note, a 1992 honda civic gets about 45mpg on the freeway... we haven't come very far in fuel efficiency.)

The fox is guarding the hen house...(again)

The other day, I was driving through the beautiful green fields of Northern Idaho, and listening to a very disturbing report on NPR about the high levels of mercury used to keep vaccines free of bacteria and mold. What was especially alarming about this report was that, it has a huge impact on a very large group of people including me, and most everyone I know. Basically, if you have had a vaccine since 1931, you have probably been exposed to some level of mercury. Apparently some data and studies strongly suggest a link between these early doses of mercury and some of the odd neurological dissorders such as autism, hyperactivity, learning dissabilities etc which are causing a lot of trouble in schools these days. The mercury is part of thimerosal which is a preservative. It comes in the form of ethylmercury which one can read about here in the PAN Pesticides Database which says that it is a fungacide which acts as a developmental or reproductive toxin in humans. On this page there is a list of things which also contain ethylmercury. And on this page you can calculate how much mercury you have been exposed to from vaccines.
A good article covering the political aspects of this situation can be found here on Salon.com. If you don't have a Salon membership, you have to view an add to get access to the article. But, the article is WELL worth it. One of the more disturbing things it points out is that the CDC, FDA, and various pharmaceutical companies have known about this for a long time, but have made a pretty major effort to cover it up. This coverup was probably made possible by the serious conflict of interest on the part of CDC and FDA officials who are also heavily involved with pharmaceutical companies. This whole deal seems strangly reminiscent of the oil men and arms dealers running a war in Iraq. When will we learn that letting the fox guard the hen house isn't the smartest idea?

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fireworks