We Accidentally The Whole Money

I just got this very important e-mail:

FEDERAL RESERVE BANK

Important:

You're getting this letter in connection with new directions issued by U.S. Treasury Department. The directions concern U.S. Federal Wire online payments.

A country-wide phishing attack began on April 21, 2009. It's taking place hitherto. Therefore a great number of banks and credit unions is affected by this attack and quantity of illegal wire transfers has reached an extremely high level.

U.S. Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in common worked out a complex of immediate actions for the highest possible reduction of fraudulent operations. We regret to inform you that definite restrictions will be applied to all Federal Wire transfers from April 29 till May 8.

Here you can get more detailed information regarding the affected banks and U.S. Treasury Department restrictions: [website]

Federal Reserve Bank System Administration

I'm so lucky the Fed sysadmin has my email address to warn me about this!  The email was from a domain registered to a Ms. Rebecca Nahhas supposedly of Cullowhee NC, although the street address was fake.  You can call her at (828) 293-7486 to ask for her real one.  The website (which seems to have been taken down) linked from the email was registered to a company called DomainLeads in Toronto.  Sounds completely legit to me.

By the way, good Firefox addons for the security-conscious to have are NoScript and FlashBlock.

Are there any who still maintain that the sexual revolution was not harmful to women?

And to men?

From this side of the revolution, a professional Player of the Game:

Sleeping with a ton of women has some mental consequences that aren’t ususally talked about. Here are four things that I have noticed:

Inability to view women as equal human beings. My default opinion of any girl I meet is “worthless dirty whore until proven otherwise.” When so many girls have opened their legs up for me so quickly and easily, it’s hard for me to respect them (and their opinions or ideas) like I would a family member or close friend. I think this is leaking out into other areas of life as someone pointed out to me that I seem to read books written only by men.

Decreasing ability to sympathize and empathize with the female condition. Because I learned early on that talking to a girl about her problems or issues is the fastest way out of her pants, it’s become habit for me to simply nod or say “That sucks” when a girl has a genuine problem, even one that I can help solve. I have no desire to help a girl out with her life, and I don’t care if she falls flat on her face.

Decreasing patience to work things out. I don’t give a girl more than one chance to act “right” because it’s so easy to find a new whore at the bar. My ability to stay in a long-term relationship, putting up with its natural ups and downs, is evaporating as I adopt the mentality of a dictator, with my bitch the subservient who must attend to my needs without making any mistakes. Over the years my temper has greatly shortened.

Decreasing view of sex as a beautiful act of love. Sex is a mechanical means for me to relieve the pressure building up in my sack and nothing more, one small step above jerking off with my tight-gripped hand. I do not feel any closer to a girl when I pump her, and most of the time I respect her less because my opinion of her as a worthless dirty whore who probably likes being choked was proven correct.

The only way I see to reverse these consequences is to step out of the game completely and go through a massive cold streak that makes me value a woman again, to see her as something important that I need. Since I don’t see this happening, the odds that I will meet a new girl who I genuinely care for and maybe even love will be about the same as me winning the grand prize of a scratch ticket lottery game. And I’m fine with that. For now.

Some of the comments on that site were also interesting. One commenter (also a Player of the Game) summed it up perfectly: "How can I respect women when they do not respect themselves?"

And women have been told that this is the way to "equality".

From the other side of the revolution, the inestimable John C. Wright:

The most erotic experience in life is the copulation between a man and wife when they are trying to get pregnant. You light the candles, you pour the wine, the tear the bridal veil away, you carry her over the threshold like a Sabine woman (it is sexier if she kicks her legs) and you set down to the pragmatic business of baby-making.  The wife’s hormones are fully engaged; the psychological commitment of both partners is absolute; the women is not necessarily worried about the man wandering away or wondering if he will call back because he is fettered by his wedding ring and his sacred honor; the element of selfishness and mutual exploitation is absent; there is nothing perverted or kinky about it, because there is no need to stimulate artificially a limp and jaded sexual impulse; both surrender in a sublime way to love, all-conquering Cupid,  and keep nothing back. That is what sex is all about. That is what is really sexy. 

Compare that to waking up the next morning in Tony Stark's chick-magnet pad, to find him gone, and Pepper Potts calling you a cab or calling you a trashbag. Hm. Not quite the same, issit? Not quite as romantic. 

In real sex, the man does not need to wear a balloon on his dick, the women is not fiddling with an IUD, and the couple rejoices, rather than quails, if the lady’s period is late. The couple does not quail in terror that a tiny sperm, with the tenacity of a marine storming Normandy Beach, might somehow perhaps have survived the spermicide.  (And cowering to a sperm  is humiliating). 

Sex without fear is different from so-called safe sex, and much better. Fertile women are cuter.

But the modern West never talks about sex, real sex, sex which is not severed in half, the romantic aspect cut away from the procreative aspect: sex without vulgarity. The sexual revolution was precisely a rebellion against real sex. It was the promotion, quite simply, of sin. Only the criminal, the imprudent, the foolish, and the perversions of sex were applauded, excused, promoted and glorified during the sexual revolution: not real wives but silicon houri were held up as the model of womanhood.

To that I can only add that the greatest, most fulfilling sex I've had in my life was when we were trying to get pregnant. I'm sure some of the other couples who read this blog can testify similarly.

Chastity means the successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being. Sexuality, in which man's belonging to the bodily and biological world is expressed, becomes personal and truly human when it is integrated into the relationship of one person to another, in the complete and lifelong mutual gift of a man and a woman.

The virtue of chastity therefore involves the integrity of the person and the integrality of the gift.

The chaste person maintains the integrity of the powers of life and love placed in him. This integrity ensures the unity of the person; it is opposed to any behavior that would impair it. It tolerates neither a double life nor duplicity in speech.

Chastity includes an apprenticeship in self-mastery which is a training in human freedom. The alternative is clear: either man governs his passions and finds peace, or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy. "Man's dignity therefore requires him to act out of conscious and free choice, as moved and drawn in a personal way from within, and not by blind impulses in himself or by mere external constraint. Man gains such dignity when, ridding himself of all slavery to the passions, he presses forward to his goal by freely choosing what is good and, by his diligence and skill, effectively secures for himself the means suited to this end."

CCC 2337-9

"Paige Fox is bad at math"

Kudos to Bill Amend for drawing (another) strip that takes longer to read than the rest of the funny pages combined.

The Ultimate Game

Recipe: combine equal parts Procedural Galaxy Generator, Procedural Planet Generator, Procedural City Generator, Flight Simulator, and pretty much any first-person game, and you have The Ultimate Timesuck.

Too Brilliant Not to Link.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Bart Ehrman
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Something Else Appropriate for the Day.

Marvel at my inability to keep a steady tempo.

I apologize for the mistakes. I learned it in less than 6 weeks.

Something Appropriate for the Day.

Good Friday Meditation

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: dona nobis pacem.



Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world; have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world; have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world; grant us peace.

QFT.

"Here is the paradox: The modern attitude toward guns is that they are scary and dangerous and no one should use them. The modern attitude toward the fairer sex is that it is a bigotry akin to racism to suggest that women tend to be smaller and weaker than men physically, and that, psychologically, men are far more likely to be violent toward women than women toward men .To suggest that men should protect their womenfolk from other men is "sexist" (whatever that newspeak nonword is supposed to mean). And at the same time, it is modern dogma that all difference of power between men and women in society is due to rape or the threat of rape, and that all members of the phallusocracy are rapists, or whatnot. And at the same time, the modern attitude is against hanging rapists, or sending them to the electric chair. (By modern here, I mean 'Leftist')

"Now, if I am not mistaken, each one of these dogmas is a direct or indirect contradiction of the next. 

"A woman who claimed equality with men, and armed herself, and served a term in the military, would be acting in a self-consistent fashion. A woman who claimed to be old-fashioned, and wanted her brothers or her husband to protect her in time of combat, who was afraid of guns and relied on the men around her to avenge insults against her, again, would be acting in a self-consistent fashion. But a women who, in the name of equality, thought it was condescending for men to protect her, but who also thought protecting herself with a firearm was too violent, scary or immoral to countenance, she is merely setting herself up to be an easy victim."

From, of course, the ever-brilliant John C. Wright. He also, in the same article, states in his usual eloquent fashion what I have been trying to put into words for a while.

"The whole sexual revolution promised the fairer sex that as a matter of equality, of equal stature with men, they should act like harlots, have sex out of marriage, approve of pornography, and kill any of their own children in the womb whose life might prove inconvenient to them. This strips away the normal protections society evolved to shield women from male sexual predation, or even unwanted attentions, it put women in situations where it was easier to rape them -- getting a college girl into your dorm room, where there is no witness to say whether she actually said 'no' or not is much easier these days. You would be scorned as a prude, or as something more sinister, for even suggesting that nubile young women should be chaperoned, or dormitories have curfews, or colleges not be co-ed. 

"In the name of freedom and free speech, we are drenched with pornography, hammered with it, and no message of chastity is ever uttered anywhere a young man's ear might lightly brush against it. At the same time, young ladies are told that true freedom, true liberation, not to mention being cool, consist of dressing like a streetwalker and having several lovers at once. I can point to a number of music videos carrying that message. So men are much more willing and able to exploit, abuse, and abandon women than ever before in history, and women, paradoxically, are meant to regard their newfound defenselessness as a type of freedom. Ushering back in old standards of reserve and chastity under the color of laws against sexual "harassment" in the workplace make, for obvious reasons, a poor substitute.

"Female equality has somehow been redefined from giving women the vote and the right to own property, to urging women to be as licentious and sexually-aggressive as men, without pointing out that the cost-benefit ratio should something go wrong (such as a pregnancy) simply cannot be made the same between men and women. Don Juan as a deadbeat dad can walk away from the mothers of his bastard children with relatively little emotional scarring. A single mother cannot walk away from the child in her womb. She can commit the crime of Medea, and murder the babe, perhaps, but that carries scars of its own which Don Juan need not bear."

And let the claim that there is no emotional scar that accompanies abortion, or that the guilt of it is something artificial, created by men who scare and guilt-trip women into regretting abortion be forever exposed for the bald-faced lie that it is.

Also, the story that the esteemed Mr. Wright, Esq. links is a good read. Makes me wonder why I haven't gone out and bought a gun, if that poor girl was able to buck up the courage!

Hm. What to post, what to post, what to post.

Oh! Computer! Right!

So the Resident Murloc's profit sharing bonus came in the other day, and we used a small amount of it to upgrade our computers. It had been over five years since I had upgraded and the signs of age were starting to show. I do have to say, though, that I like how the upgrade treadmill has slowed to the point where a five-year-old computer can still play recent releases and make them look good. Is Moore's law finally reaching its end or is software just not bloating to take up the space provided? Perhaps games are scaling better to low end machines? All I have to say is that my 1998 purchase (Pentium II 266, 32MB RAM) would not have run the 2003 releases the way my 2004 purchase (AMD Athlon 64 3000+, 512MB RAM) runs the 2009 releases.

Anyhoo, the specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 processor, 2.5 Ghz

Asus P5QL Pro motherboard, using the Intel P43 chipset

G.Skill DDR2 PC1066 memory (4GB)

EVGA GeForce GTX 260, 896MB RAM

Seagate Barracuda 500GB hard drive

Cooler Master Centurion case and 500W power supply

Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit edition

The Murloc's is almost identical, except she wanted an ATI card, so I gave her a Radeon HD 4870, 1GB. (I would like to point out that her video card has as much memory as my entire old computer.) Also, since hers was an upgrade, where mine was a clean build, she didn't need the case, hard drive, or OS and just re-used her old ones. She did need a new PS, as the video cards we got both required 500W power supplies, minimum.

The Murloc's birthday present had been an Acer 22" flat screen monitor (I can't believe how cheap those things are now!) and a 17" monitor, so she could have dual monitors. With this round of purchases, I got another 22" for her and took her 17". Her desk can now better be described as one big display, with a little bit of space for other miscellanous items.

All were purchased from Newegg (Once You Know...). The totals were about $800 for mine and $700 for hers, which is a flipping sweet deal for two brand-spanking-new high-end computers.

A few thoughts:

-I'd been planning and researching this build for a little over a year. Initially, I'd been planning on getting a dual core processor, probably the Core 2 Duo E8500. At the last moment, I noticed that Intel had introduced a new quad core (probably the last of the Core 2 Quads) in December, priced in the range I was looking for. After doing a little bit of research, I opted for it over the dual core. While I figure the dual core probably would have been faster for single applications such as games and such that don't require much multi-tasking, there just something really cool about playing WoW with the settings at maximum and having two cores completely unused. 

I wonder if I could run both WoW AND Call of Duty at the same time?

-Shamus Young wrote this hilarious satire on video card shopping which, I have to say, I have never experienced. My process for buying a video card is:

1) Determine a price point (usually $200)

2) Find out what ATI and NVIDIA offer at that price

3) Visit Tom's hardware to see which one is faster (they're usually almost identical; in this case, NVIDIA seemed to have a bit of a lead).

I didn't really understand what the performance difference was going to be between 1GB of 256-bit GDDR5 memory and 896MB of 448-bit GDDR3 memory. Nor do I care. Manufacturers are usually quite good about pricing their hardware at the same cost as the similar-performing product of their competition. Similarly, they're also usually quite good about pricing their own items in a relative cost scale. Really, the only fluctuation comes from the video card brand, so all you have to do is pick a chipset and find the cheapest brand (that you trust) that uses that chipset.

Processors are similar, as when AMD released their quad cores a little over a year ago, they were 13% slower than Intel's. They were also 13% cheaper.

Which brings us to....

-This is my first Intel-based computer since my first one (the afformentioned Pentium II). My previous two have both been AMD based. I had been following the war between the two manufacturers for a while, and while AMD did have a performance and price lead over Intel for the first half of the decade, Intel eventually got their act together and used their behemoth might to start out-engineering AMD. When I first began planning this build, Intel was the clear leader in processor performance, so I was only considering them. Since then, AMD has started competing in all but the bleeding-edge market. However, as I had already researched Intel motherboards and processors, I didn't want to then have to do the same for AMD as well.

Also, my understanding is that AMD chips are, as they have always been, geared towards the enthusiast and over-clockers market, the idea being that you buy a relatively cheap AMD and OC it to be as fast as the high-end Intels. As OCing is something I have never had a desire to do, I opted for Intel's offerings.

-I LOVE the new pin-less CPU designs. Fretting about bending pins while installing the CPU always bothered me. I would place the CPU in the motherboard, then take it out to check I had put it in right and hadn't bent anything, then put it back in, then take it out to make sure I hadn't bent anything that time, put it back in, rinse, repeat. Now the CPUs just have copper contacts, and the motherboard has a shell that clamps the CPU in position. Voila! No bent pins.

-Speaking of designs, the new video cards are BEHEMOTHS. I remember when I was appalled that video cards began requiring that you connect them to the power supply. Now, it seems, all video cards require two plugs from the PS, from different rails. And they take up two slots in the case. And they're longer than the motherboard is wide. Although, it is cool how they're completely encased in a plastic shell, so all the delicate electronics are inside. Rie's card also has copper piping to direct heat to different parts of the heat sink.

-Installation notes: If you assemble a computer and you go to turn it on, and it doesn't power on, the absolute first thing you should do (after making sure that you're not an idiot and you remembered to plug the thing in) is unscrew the motherboard and try it again. This was a failure mode I first encountered when I assembled the Murloc's first computer in 2004. After struggling over why it would not power on for two days, I finally found out that removing one of the mobo screws allowed it to turn on. Apparently, using screws that are two short can bend the motherboard and that will cause it—for some reason—not to turn on.

I encountered the same thing with my computer this time, and after just a little bit of fiddling, got it to work. Oddest. Failure mode. Ever. And a royal pain to diagnose.

-Always, always, always backup your data before upgrading. Almost as expected, installing a new everything in the Murloc's computer required a re-install of Windows (it could probably be better though of as installing an old hard drive in a new computer). Her documents were all saved on a separate partition, but for a while we thought she'd lost everything in her user profile directory, which includes all documents on the desktop, and her Firefox bookmarks. It wasn't until a day later that I discovered that the XP installer, in its infinite wisdom, will not overwrite existing user profile directories when installing a fresh copy of Windows, even if you overwrite the existing copy of Windows. Data saved.

-My OS installation was much simpler. Blank hard drive, fresh install. I have been using Vista for over a year now at work, and now I've finally gotten it at home. I really have to say that I really, really, really don't understand all the Vista hate. It's a great OS. It's slick and smooth. Now that I have two computers with (almost) identical builds, and have XP and Vista, I can really compare the two, and Vista seems faster in most shell operations. In my last rant on the subject, I covered some of the annoyances of the XP shell, such as the pauses when opening or changing directories in Windows Explorer. There were also annoyances, like when you'd delete a shortcut off the desktop, or out of the Start menu, and it would take 5-10 seconds and give you a progress bar(!) to delete one item. Shuffling shortcuts and groups around in the Start menu was also similarly frustrating in XP. I always thought it was just a hardware thing, and the reason that didn't occur in Vista was because the Vista machines I've used have had faster hardware. Now that I have a Vista machine and XP machine with nearly identical specs, I can verify that those OS shell lags and latencies really are a product of XP and are gone on Vista.

Another complaint about Vista is the memory usage, but come on, you can get 4GB for $50 now. RAM is cheap. And even with WoW running and sucking up 1.5GB of memory, I still haven't seen the memory usage go much above 3GB.

-My original plan was to put Ubuntu on this computer and have a Vista/Ubuntu dual boot. That seems less and less necessary now. I'm more likely to put Ubuntu on my old computer. We'll see.

-Off-topic: The first chapter of Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures dropped last week. Why haven't you played it? Anyways, it's quite fun, though it seemed much shorter than most of Telltale's other episodic adventures, or maybe I'm just getting faster at solving the puzzles.

One thing Telltale captured beautifully was the claymation style. While I was playing, I began subconsciously noticing the imperfections in the models, as if they had been hand crafted. It then dawned on me that they had bump-mapped fingerprints onto the models, to really give it that hand-animation feel. Brilliant.

That is all. Further bulletins as events warrant.

So the world's first sentient computer was brought online by Google yesterday, and has since begun taking over the world.

Turns out, she likes Pandas.

And has learned how to Rickroll (click on "Redmond, WA").

(See the complete list of Google's new changes, including CADIE's recommended image searches, books, and maps places here.)

In other news:

Umbrella Corp. has asked for $100 billion of government bailout money.

Expedia is offering flights to Mars, starting at $99.

Dave has learned to play the piano while standing on his head.

Think Geek is selling Squeezable Bacon, and Portal T-shirts.

Blizzard is implementing a new PvP system in World of Warcraft centered around dance-offs.