cap008

Stuxnet worm found in several western nation power plants.

They need to realize two things.

1. That this will no doubt be construed as an act of war
2. Its only a matter of time before they are positively identified

God help us all.

.

And oh ya

"The worm exploits a vulnerability in several versions of Microsoft Windows. On Monday, Microsoft released an update to address the problem."

FFS when will Windows finally attain "threat to national security status"... PPPlease?  What's the hold up?

So there's a guy here with the same initials as mine.
I'm told that the initial musings herein are worthy of public consumption.
Please consider this a draft...
Still trying to decide how much additional context is needed.

Comparison of guys with initials CAP:

CAP: grows goatee to hide chin from cold winter breezes`
CAP: grows goatee to hide food for strategic retreival during flight
facility meetings

CAP: Grew up in New Hampshire
CAP: Lives in New Hampshire, still growing

CAP: Played football in High School
CAP: Working towards an honorary membership to the Steelers coaching staff

CAP: Enjoys a heady internet conspiracy theory now and then
CAP: Stockpiles weapons and ammo hoping they'll be affective against the
alien overlords after the Mayan disaster of 2012

CAP: Has had more than one mild concussion in his life, the result of an active lifestyle
CAP: "Grog need food! Whut say Grog? No Food?!? Grog try eat Steelers Towel... Omnomnomnom... puh!"

so i keep running into these stupid little things that work fine on every flavor of Unix/Linux and even the free unix shell for windows (Cygwin), but they don't work on Mac. Really effin' annoying.
My favorite example so far is pipe grep.
for example:
ps -ef |grep ntp

Should take the process table info in extended format, find all the lines that contain the string 'ntp' and print only those. However, it behaves as if I hadn't typed the pipe grep part, supremely annoying as pipe grep is so useful and practically ubiquitous on *nix that there is even a comic named after it.
Or how about passing arguments...? Dunno why, but I needed to run a different version of my favorite editor(after googling and reading a bunch) to get it to accept a command line arg. These things should not be difficult, or different.

Also, don't even ask bout Mac's support for Java, if you're curious you could google it. Seems they have a very similar attitude towards Java developers that they have towards Iphone app developers. Looks like Sun has very limited support for Java on Mac and it makes me wonder why.

I was very surprised last week to have a discussion with one of the engineers here, whom I perceive to be very smart, complaining about Apple as the evil empire the way I used to complain about MSFT ten years ago. Granted most of his gripes were about their foray into DRM, and how ITunes refuses to 'store' your purchase history so if you lose your harddrive you must repurchase, however if you attempt to make more than 5 copies ITunes is denied by the mothership, so it looks like they _are_ keeping track. Ya, I'd call that evil.

Of course I could go on about their decision to put no less than four keys on the left pinky/thumb or the fact that they behave differently in different contexts (app, vs web), or the 'one button' trackpad on a $2k+ machine, effin' brilliant. I personally think that context menus (via rightclick) are probably the best contribution MSFT made to the mouse interface. Supremely less useful without a right click, and no I don't want to hear bout their guestures which cannot be accomplished without moving the fingers off the keyboard. Granted context menus were probably on Solaris and Mac, but MSFT went very far in making them standardized and generally dependable.

I wouldn't be surprised if the command key is causing extra cases of carple tunnel. My thumb is not comfortable moving that far sideways to hit a key, there's a reason that every other keyboard puts seldom used keys in that spot.
Going now to google how to switch command with capslock.

So I'm pretty sure its not my imagination, my neighborhood is headed downhill fast. For eight years, I lived less than 1/2 mile away from my current neighborhood. Closest thing we saw to a crime was watching *ahem* classy Tufts women have to endure a rooftop party thrown by beer-is-everything Tufts guys.

Fast forward to my current neighborhood, maybe its because I purposefully chose this neighboorhood because of the low rent, maybe it really is the economy, stupid. Maybe it is my super-duper new-parent sense of the community.

Since my son was born: High school kids walking down the street got into a fist fight in front of my house having body slammed most fo the cars on the street(in a snowstorm, so that must have been super fun), wrote profanities in the snow and when they noticed me observing them from the comfort of my living room window, threatened me with physical violence . They(someone?) got in the habit of letting the air out of my tires at night.

My car has been looted. I had questioned the 'investigating officer' (Mr. Its-too-expensive-to-bother-dusting-for-prints) about how frequently this sort of thing happens and isn't it likely that the local kids are looking for drug-money, and is there any correlation to be draw from the locations of the break-ins, because if anyone has that data, its you right? "No, no correlations, totally random". 'Sif.

Attempting to connect with said popo, in my best Tony Soprano voice: "But who steels a guys gym-bag? Whadda they want wid dat? Its not the money I care about (truth, t'was petty squirrelage). That's just disrespectful! Its not right, you know what I'm sayin'?" The next day, my gym bag unceremoniously (and anonymously) returned to my street, complete with unfenceable, non-monetary contents, four houses down of course after a side-street. For-real.

Both playgrounds in our neighborhood are frequently littered with 'adolescent' trash; cigarette butts, beer cans and I shudder to think what we don't see. Our formerly favorite playground has been vandalized at least 5 times that I know of (some reports involve actual human feces), and the police quite literally refused to accost the perpetrators in the act.

More to the point of paranoia: The (jackass) neighbor across the street has yelled profanities at me and my family with practically no provocation (in front of his probably 5 year old daughter), he's since bought a pit-bull puppy. complete with choke collar. Judging from the language he used, I'd guess that he's either done some hard-time in prison, or on much meaner streets that I'd be comfortable raising a human being near. He drives a Mercedes-esque Acura with serious bling rims. He has dreds, wears winter coats with the hood up in the summertime, and occasionally receives visitors who blair rastafarian music.

Now if you're still reading, you're probably thinking, "Ah ha, you're a racist f&cker" and wagging your finger in the Lewis Black style... well having grown up in the whitest part of the country, I try to be very aware of the spectre of racism. Well last night, I was taking the boy for a walk. As we passed Mr. Wintercoat's house, I spied a very tiny square ziplock bag on the sidewalk. Now having led a purposefully clean life, I wouldn't have known the significance or most-likely uses of that tiny bag (about the size of a dime) if it weren't for Hollywood. Specifically the movie "Rush". Well I was taught that racism is changing ones behavior based on the racial attributes of another. I understand that the world is a complicated place but when does "benefit of the doubt" become racism?

So I am well aware that just about everything I've described could be dismissed as 'circumstantial'. Very funny thing is, Mr. WC's landlord, also his common-law brother-in-law (who in the four years I've lived there has been very reluctant to make eye-contact or hold a conversation, quite uncharacteristic of this proud gregarious Italian neighborhood), when I sought to inform him about his lodger's combative nature informed me that he is a former popo, now collecting his pension so of course his lodger-in-not-law must be a good upstanding citizen.

Which popo you might ask? Now given that I'm paranoid, which popo would make the most sense as having drug connections, having the best oh-crap factor? Not that I know Mass very well, but Dorchester would definitely be in my top five. DING DING DING. To add to my paranoia, my first thought being, "Wow, he seems young to be collecting a pension, well I have heard that popo-pensions were good", my second thought being "How can you afford that recent model Caddy, your three other cars, expenses from your teenage daughters _and_ your mortgage on a popo's pension?" I've often heard that two-families were a great way to increase cash-flow.

To top things off, only the second smashed car window I've seen happened this weekend, four houses down, after a side-street, from Mr. WC and friends(other direction from gym bag, wouldn't want to be obvious). I'm told it was because they had Maine plates, people who travel are more likely to have stuff in their cars. Local old-guy at the playground (former see-bee from the war) recommended to tell the local popo we'd like to form a neighborhood patrol to protect the playgrounds. At this point, I feel sad for the people who own houses there, and saddly am not at all sure I want to invest any more of my time in this neighborhood. On the bright side, maybe housing prices will follow?

"Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki blamed Sunni insurgents for the recent attacks"
I am so amazingly sick of this 'Shiite said, Sunni said' crap. I don't care who started it, I think they all need a timeout. I say we build a giant Google wave-machine powered floating garbage processing island, and throw them all out there for a few years. Lets see 'em make a pipebomb out of rotting banana peels. In the 'oh-by-the-way' column, we should park the google-wave-garbage-processing-island between off the coast of Somalia, so they can see what they have to look forward to if they don't shape the eff up.

Ya, the Taliban must be stopped, no doubt. Allah is not cool with all the oppression and bloodshed and so on. However, I think they have a point about one thing. There is a time and place for skin; short skirts, bare shoulders etc..., and a workplace full of geeks is not one of them.

Don't get me wrong, I can appreciate the beauty of the human form with the best of them. However, these things do cause problems and sometimes even
make the news. Google Desiree Goodwin sometime, makes for great reading. Who knew a librarian could be too sexy? Oh wait, Harvard did.

The movie "Weird Science" was not far off, geeks just cannot cope with the sight of skin.

Now I know I sound like the old guy who is slowly morphing into a curmudgen, and 100 years ago, I'd be talking about ankles and wrists. The last 100 years has seen more technological progress than the last 2000, maybe they're onto something. OTOH, maybe our technological progress is outstripping our spiritual-sociological progress. Maybe its time to cover up, just a bit, out of respect for us old folk.

We are speciesists. Most major religions (save Buddism?) claim only humans have souls.
See also: http://evilbeetgossip.film.com/2009/05/05/just-because-21/

How many non-bipedal species in the Sci-Fi cannon had intelligence?
Search for Spock had whales. Intergalactic whales, just hanging out in our seas waiting, monitoring the health of our planet. Keeping us nicely stocked in whale blubber. Enabling our perfumes to smell very strong, which in a roundabout way adds to the prolificness of our own species.

Fast forward to TNG. Data had a cat. 400 years from know, a cat, no, the cat of a super-duper-smart android, is still just a stupid four legged pur machine? I think not. Roddenberry's agenda had been subsumed.

Birds can see electromagentic fields. We've all had the same amount of time to evolve, some have just had less to fix than others. Alligators, and sharks are arguably much more successfully evolved than humans. Alligators have antibiotics in their blood. Sharks are just freakin' cool (See Austin Powers), and rule at least 200% more Earth Volume than we do.. and birds(representin' dinosaurs) are catching us.

Egyptians thought cats were the gardians of the netherworld. Cats have recently been studied predicting when old folks will pass on. I'm sure Data was smart enough to have figured out what it is about cats that gives them an advantage, besides toxoplasmosis. Or maybe it is the toxoplasmosis bacteria that enables their paranormal abilities. It certainly enslaves those unfortunate of us humans to their will. Regardless, cats probably have the ability to sense through time. "Hey, that old Geezer is kickin' off in a few hours, maybe this time they won't catch on until I've had time to snack off of him."

So what didn't they report about the Rest Home cat? What would Data's cat have been like if Roddenberry were alive? Sadly, we'll never know.

Douglas Adams had the Dolphins leaving just-in-time. Maybe they invented the .NET platform just before they left. Joke's on us.

Not sure where I was going with this, but its time to get back to work...

and the bible had it off by a couple thousand years, or maybe hundred thousand...

I have a theory that the zodiac was handed down by our ante-deluvian ancestors (remnants of whose civilization being Easter Island statues, Ankor Wat, sphinx, that place in Peru). They knew that cosmic background radiation had a significant impact on the development of the human brain, enough to affect personality. Of course, since we travel through the different types of radiation at the periodicity of a solar year, they named the types after the constellations.

Easy enough... so can we confirm or deny this?

I'm guessing cosmic background radiation is very difficult for us to sense given that we may not know where to look, or in which EM band, or what to compare it to. Has NASA already launched a satellite to "sense" galactic radiation in the path of travel of our solar system? If it were easier to sense it by placing a satellite in it, it would take time for the satellite to get far enough out to give us adequate lead time, and its probably too late anyway (Hawking radiation from nearby blackholes).

How long does it take the Sun to travel as far as the telemetry range of current satellites? Lets have a bake sale, I think its worth funding.

I'm also guessing that given the accuracy of the Mayan calander, they probably had some insider info. So what did they know that we don't? What did it mean when their ball went through the hoop, game over man.

Periodically on this planet, there is a mass extinction. This much is not debated. What is the period and what causes it are great questions. When the next one will be and will humankind survive is the 65 million dollar question. 65 Million... what happened back then? Maybe Yellowstone is ready to blow, maybe a little excess radiation will send it over the top... maybe a hailstorm of superheated radioactive asteroids rides in the jets of hawking radiation from _every_ blackhole, not just the supermassive ones. The K/T boundary is said to be somewhat radioactive... and now they're not so sure about the Yucatan asteroid theory, death by radiation takes time... but maybe not that much time.

Is anyone studying the vector of the Hawking Jets(HJ) from Sagittarius A, or other HJ in our Galaxy? Does our galactic orbit conicide with any HJ, with any periodicity? If so, who's building the bunker, the ark... ?

How much money would it cost to put a copy of that Bill Gates(antichrist) funded Norwegian biodiversity library at a Lagrange point or even better, in the Earth's or Sun's galactic shadow. It would cost much less than 1/100 what wall street just evaporated with the whole sub-prime debacle (not exactly a productive rant). I propose we call it RaidOne http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_1#RAID_1

and they piloted all their spaceships into the sun... *groan*

No one has yet championed my theory of ‘gravitic polarity shift’ about the galactic center, which would come into play as we cross the galactic plane in 2012, perhaps flipping the earth... Given the nature of the rotation of the galaxy, I'm willing to accept that it might be a red herring.

It could also be an artifact of people not generally thinking in 3 dimensions. Think StarTrek TV series vs StarTrek Wrath of Kahn, or Wile E Koyote even.

(Which reminds me of another rant about the US Math and Sciences teachings… you can’t use the word Kite in a Texas public school textbook?!?)

So the latest round of doomsday theories discusses the concept of a ‘galactic superwave’. Nicely pseudo-debunked here.

You’ll notice the name of the star at the galactic center,(which I find strange since I’m rather fond of the theory that a supermassive blackhole sits at the center of every galaxy, kind of like the bubble gum at the center of a tootsie pop)… Alcyone. And the official name of the Subaru SVX, as per Subaru, Japan?

Yep.

So... all I have to do is fill my car with tootsie pops, and the answers will be revealed. Who knew?

Well, LaViolette is clearly off his rocker. Note that page seems to discredit him, yet is copyrighted by him. Maybe he's just too clever for me. Turns out there is a super-massive black hole at the MilkyWay center, named Sagittarius A. Which I find amazingly apropos since my last SO was a Sag. Life sucking beastie indeed.

To sum up, I'm wondering where the jets of hawking radiation from Sag A are radiating. Anyone know? Any chance we could be about to cross one of those jets?

Nah, they probably wouldn't affect us this far out, and what are the odds that they point at us, we're in the disk, they must be perpendicular to the galactic plane. Wonder if anyone has confirmed that. In the meantime, I'll start pouring the foundation on my bunker.