Genius/Idiots of the Day/Week/Month

A double whammy.

First the genius: http://www.rightwingnews.com/special/xyz.php
Now the idiots: http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=1568143 (Don't bother reading them all. There are far too many.)

Of particular humor value among the idiots is this guy: "So then, the right wing is now admitting that we're not fighting the war in Iraq because of 9/11. That means, then, that we're fighting it for the oil. It's always nice to see your opponents sabotage themselves."

Because, as we know, the only two possible reasons for going to war are 9/11 and oil. By that logic, WWII was fought over oil. In fact, every other war in human history except for Afghanistan was fought over oil. Even the Trojan wars, which were fought before oil was discovered.

It's sort of an ambiguous question to ask if the war in Iraq is because of 9/11. In one way it is, because 9/11 forced us to take a different view about foreign policiy and waiting for terrorists to strike. But on the other hand, we're not in Iraq because of any organizational ties they had to 9/11.

But anyways, this coupled with a number of other things (including this, this, this, and this) have made me begin to wonder something... why are most nerds liberal democrats? Is this merely a correlation or is there some causation involved? Are people from the left wing more likely to go online or are nerds more likely to adopt a liberal ideology? This is something I've spent quite a bit of time pondering in recent days. Why do none of the people whom I encounter online share my ideology?

I have come to notice some key areas where I differ from others of my kind. I don't know why this is, but it is something I've noticed. It seems that nerds tend to be atheists, or at least agnostic. They look down upon Christians, for the most part, as ignorant. They have completely embraced modern "morality". They have no sexual morals (fark, somethingawful, and bbspot all either now or at some point in the past have linked to porn). If you ever want to have fun, go on some online message board and post "homosexuality is disordered and sex outside of marriage is wrong." See how long it is before you get flamed off. Even though 70% of the nation agrees with that at least to some extent, 99% of the online community think you're ridiculous. And even those who are not politically on the left tend to be socially and morally on the left.

Anyways, why is this? Is my sample inaccurate? Are there actually a number of conservative christian geek websites that I just don't know about? Or is it really that the people who are most likely to join the internet community tend to have this ideology? And if so, why is that?

Maybe I should devote F.U.News to be the first Conservative Christian geek site. Oh wait, that was sorta my founding principle. Well, for the three of us (four if you count Jeff), we now have a home (actually, we've had it for a year and a half now).

The Gallery of Windows in our Lives.

Ah, remember that blissful time before every facet of our modern lives was in the control of computers which, if movies are to be believed, will either try to kill us, enslave us, or both? Neither do I. I was born some 11 years after Moore made his conjecture about the density of transistors on microchips.

Of course, those movies are probably far from the truth, as a computer would never be able to effect a global take-over without a human stopping to press CTRL-ALT-DEL every few minutes. That many simultaneous threads running is bound to cause some memory leaks and conflicts.

But anyways, barring the complete and utter destruction of the earth, computers are here to stay. And now that they're here, mankind, as always, adapts to its changing world in much the same way as Algore adapted to life without Bill, or Barry Bonds adapted to baseball without steroids. So now when some piece of equipment horribly malfunctions and tries to kill its user, we just accept it and move on.

I can't seem to figure out where I'm going with all this, so lemme just get to the point: presenting the Gallery of Windows in our Lives. This gallery is an attempt to document various crashes and malfunctions of public computers, in what is surely the silicon equivalent of walking out of the men's room with your fly unzipped (particularly if you're a woman).

Firstly, this was taken in the building with terminals 21-24 in Long Beach airport. It's a public announcement monitor that shows the text for whatever current safety announcement is being broadcast over the PA, so the hearing impared can also know that the white zone is for loading and unloading of passengers only; there is no parking in the red zone.



It's blurry because my pancreas creates sugar instead of insulin, but it says "There are unused icons on your desktop. The desktop cleanup wizard can help you clean up your desktop. Click this balloon to start the wizard." It's nice that the Windows designers found it necessary to clarify what the "desktop cleanup wizard" does. Without those further instructions, I thought it might be used to land an airplane or something.



This warning was up for months! I flew out of LGB in August, 2004 and that's when I first saw it. I again flew out of LGB in February 2005 and it was still there! You'd have thought that at some point the poor computer would have realized that no one was listening to it and commit the computer equivalent of seppuku (downloading nothing but Britney Spears MP3s). As of my last flight out of LGB in June 2005, the message was no longer there.


Our next gem comes to us from Islands of Adventure at the Universal Resort in Orlando, FL. They, as do most modern theme parks, have computerized lockers. So now instead of having to worry about accidentally impaling yourself with the old-fashioned locker key, we have to worry about Skynet taking over the locker system and crushing your head in the locker door when you lean in to get your stuff. What's that you say? Locker doors don't have motors? Well, shift-levers on cars don't have electric motors either, but that didn't stop Skynet from taking over the police cars in Terminator 3. Skynet is that powerful!



So anyways. Lockers. On two of these particular locker terminals (at least, two that Dave and I found), if you selected your language as "Svenska" the program would crash to Windows with a series of errors. The first one is "PayPoint. Run-time error '9': Subscript out of range."



The next error was "Paypoint. This programs has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. If the problem persists, please contact the program vendor." Notice the inconsistent capitalization of "PayPoint" between the two error messages. For some reason, you would only get this error if you selected "Svenska" as your language. Maybe Skynet or the programmers have something against Swedes. This occured on two different terminals. Interestingly enough, the two terminals had different firmware versions, as Dave and I discovered during our investigation.



Speaking of investigation, our next move, as any true gamer would know, was to try and find minesweeper. Not only was it not in the Start menu, but it wasn't in the Windows directory, the Windows\System directory or the Windows\System32 directory. Oh yeah, hardware designers, by the way, if you ever design a public terminal where the software program that runs on it might crash to the desktop, try not to have it run as a system administrator. Bad Things could happen if the nerds who discover the problem are not benevolent nerds, like Dave and myself. We good nerds found the paypoint icon in the Startup group in the Start menu and restarted it. And then crashed it again, just to make sure it was repeatable. As it turns out, after 4 or 5 times of crashing from trying to communicate in Swedish, the program simply stopped asking for languages and became an Imperialistic American. Skynet is that smart.


Lastly, on our trip home from Flori-duh, Rie and I found a public display in the Delta terminal at LAX-itive. There were four screen (two for departure information, one for arrivals and another as a map) that were obviously part of a multi-monitor display, as the error message was spread across all four. Interesting enough, the top left corner of the error was on the top left monitor and the bottom right was on the bottom right monitor, but the top right corner of the error was on the bottom left monitor, and the bottom left part of the error was on the top right monitor.



The error reads something to the effect of "Windows Visual Basic Script runtime error" with a path of \\[network server]\...\patchinstall.vbs. The error is in line 43 at character 1, for those who have to know.



This isn't the first airport departures/arrival terminal that I've seen with an error. At Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, I saw, spread across several monitors, "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." Alas, I did not have my digital camera with me. Curses.

Anyways, that's all for now. Reader submissions welcome. I'll post a link to this in the sidebar so I can post updates.


---UPDATE 9/11/05---

Disneyland, for their 50th Anniversary celebration, has created photo-mosaic murals depicting scenes from various Disney movies, made from photographs sent in by ordinary people, and placed them in various locations around the park. They had a period some months ago, where you could submit a picture.

Now that the murals are up, you can find if your picture was used by going to one of the kiosks they set up. You just enter your first and last name, or your e-mail address, and the kiosk will tell you if and where they used your picture. These kiosks are running Windows XP and the database front end is just Internet Explorer, as I found out.



You can make this error appear by clicking the left and right mouse buttons at the same time.

Wedding Bells

Okay, this post is for the benefit of those (Tom) who were not able to attend Cari's wedding but wanted to.


The blushing bride and gleeful groom processing out after the mass. I had taken some pictures during the ceremony, but low light + no flash + max zoom + me on sugar high = blurry pictures.



A picture during the reception. 3.1 of 5 lovely carpenter girls are visible.



The club of hot hispanic chicks.



As the sun dips into the Gulf of Meh-hee-co, our two young lovers take to the sea...



...and with the expert navigating skills of the bride's dashing brother, the two cruise of into the sunset (er, well, they're actually going east in this picture, but you get the idea).

Area Man Intentionally Buys Car
Man: "That was easy."

CLEARWATER, FL - A local man, who was not identified, headed to Dick Norris Buick/Pontiac/GMC and purposefully bought a car, according to sources close to him. Said the man, "I was looking on the internet for a Pontiac G6 at the local dealerships. Dick Norris had one last 2005 GT, and it was even in a good color. I called ahead and reserved it, showed up later, drove it around the block and bought it. I easily qualified for a low-interest loan, paid $3000 down, and drove away after about an hour. I was surprised at how easy it was to sign away 21 grand." The man said the experience was not unlike "shopping for computers online, comparing features and options, finding the best value for the price, going to the store and buying exactly what you wanted. And I speak from experience on this one."

Some pictures:
































(Disclaimer: I do not own a digital camera, so I just superimposed pictures of Joe's car on aerial photographs of my driveway, courtesy of Google Earth. It's the same car, same color, but with a smaller sunroof)

China tells U.S. Congress to butt out of Unocal bid
"Or Else"

BEIJING -- China on Tuesday demanded that the United States Congress stop interfering in the proposed takeover of United States oil company Unocal Corp by China's state-owned CNOOC Ltd.

American politicians have warned that the 18.5 billion dollar takeover bid announced last month could pose risks to U.S. national security, and called for a full review by the Bush administration.

Company officials have welcomed a security review, and denied that CNOOC was acting on behalf of China's government, while looking furtively around the room and refusing to maintain eye contact. The Chinese government is in the midst of a multibillion-dollar campaign to secure foreign oil and gas supplies to "power its booming economy" and "make the children happy".

"We demand that the U.S. Congress correct its mistaken ways of politicizing economic and trade issues and stop interfering in the normal commercial exchanges between enterprises of the two countries," the Foreign Ministry said, while a dozen armed guards simultaneously cocked their weapons.

China has been insisting CNOOC's bid is purely a business matter. "CNOOC's bid to take over Unocal is a normal commercial activity between enterprises and should not fall victim to political interference," said the Foreign Minister in a flat monotone while maintaining a cold, threatening glare.

Developing bilateral economic and trade cooperation is in the interests of both sides, the minister said while pounding his fist on his desk.

CNOOC is bidding against Chevron Corp. for Unocal, the ninth-largest U.S. oil and gas firm. The Chinese firm has argued that its offer will benefit the United States by paying Unocal shareholders more and causing fewer job losses, as all US citizens will be given jobs in the underground salt caves when China invades the US. (AP)

Idiots of the Day/Week/Month

Nuclear Fusion Paves Way for Inexhaustible Energy

The idiots aren't the people trying to build the reactor, mind you. It's the people referenced in the last two sentences: "Environmentalists have reacted strongly against the project. Greenpeace has described the project as a nonsense money waste."

Ok, so we have the possibility of creating an efficient reactor, using the most common substance in the universe, thats only by-product is Helium, an inert gas. And what does Greenpeace do? Complain. Ok, then let's go to the next best thing: Nuclear fission. Highly efficient (could power the entire city of New York off of 6 reactors), very safe (if constructed properly), a nearly inexhaustible fuel supply, and relatively clean (the by-products are put into containers and stored away from cities, as opposed to being pumped into the atmosphere above cities, like a coal reactor). Oh, but the environmentalists don't like those either. So let's go to natural gas? Oil? Coal? Nope, nope, nope; environmentalists say you can't use anything that burns non-renewable fossil fuels (despite the fact that natural gas is actually manufacturable). Ok, wind power. Uh, no. That kills the local bird wildlife. Solar? Nope; toxic chemicals are used in the manufacturing of the photoelectric cells. Um... than what then? Obviously, the environmentalists want us to go back to sitting around fires in caves and trying to decide if rocks are edible. Oh wait, can't do that as the fire would involve cutting down trees, and eating the rocks would probably kill some endangered type of moss that's growing on it.

It just goes to show that environmentalists are less concerned with the environment and more concerned with stopping all scientific progress (boink).

Your Thoughts?

This... frightens me.
Homes may be 'taken' for private projects - U.S. News - MSNBC.com

Of course, we have the usual suspects in favor (Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer). I still find that odd, as this seems like the perfect cause for the liberals to go rushing to: the evil private-industry capatilists paying off the local government with the promise of tax dollars, and in exchange getting permission to bulldoze people's homes and building hotels, health clubs, and office buildings.

Well, I suppose it's not the first time a local government screwed people out of their homes (*cough cough* LAX and Westchester *cough cough*)

Area Man Couldn't Care Less About Reliability-Centered Maintenance.

OMAHA, NE - According to sources close to him, area man Joe Belland doesn't give "a rat's ass" for reliability-centered maintenance. During a recent training session, Belland was reported to state "and as you can see, by implementing a preventive maintenance policy with planned maintenance every 62,800 hours, and inspections every 4400 hours, we have increased the availability of this component and reduced the total lifetime cost by, ah s***, who gives a crap about this?"

It was reported that Belland then left the room to "watch the faucet drip or anything more interesting than this crap."

Idiot(s) of the Day/Week/Month

Actors Weigh Strike Over Video Game Voices

Yet another in a long series of pointless strikes. I think this one would be even lamer than striking over having to pay for healthcare.

I agree with Fargo. On the one hand, you have a group that contributes 99% of the product, works 90 hours a week (no exageration) for years to finish said product, gets paid sub-standard wages for their skill set, and are treated like sweatshop workers, and on the other hand, you have a group that contributes 1% of the product, works just a couple days, and is paid $273 an hour. So who's thinking of striking, demanding a share of the profits? The latter group! That makes perfect sense.

Y'know, I think my purpose in life is to form the first-ever white-collar software programmer's union. Then we can make the same demands as other unions, like free health insurance, yearly increases to the already-high minimum wage, and double overtime for working more than 8 hours.

As examples of the poor conditions video game makers work under, a group of former EA employees are suing EA for not paying overtime, even if their hours doubled a normal working week. EA claims that they don't have to pay overtime, under a California law that exempts businesses from paying overtime to certain "specialty" employees. However, that same law states that the entertainment industry, specifically mentioning film, theater, and television, does not fall under that "specialty" category.

In other news, Ubisoft sued a group of its former employees for leaving Ubisoft's Canadian division to work for EA Montreal. This violates the non-competition clause of their contract, which forbids employees from working at any video game developer within a year after working for Ubisoft.

So essentially the publishers can force you to work obscene hours for little pay, but you can't quit to work for another game developer. Sounds fair. For them.

Oh yeah, my sources:
http://goty.gamespy.com/2004/news/
http://www.gamespot.com/gamecube/action/splintercell/news_6076727.html

This is also an interesting discussion:
http://www.igda.org/Forums/showthread.php?postid=70676

No, no, no!
Yes, yes, yes

Dang, that Vader's good at Wheel of Fortune...

But he really doesn't like Roller Coasters.