BabbleFest

BRITAIN faces years of blackouts and soaring electricity bills because of the drive toward green power, a leading energy expert warned last night.

Headline:

Russia Ready to Deliver Fuel to Iran Despite Sanctions

Obviously another stellar outcome resulting from “smart diplomacy”.

West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd has died.

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), the longest-serving member of Congress in American history, died Monday at the age of 92. Byrd was the president pro tempore of the Senate and third in line to the presidency.

Full article here.

Sounds like the makings of a new reality show:

Authorities said a drunken man and woman were arrested after they were found pushing a baby stroller holding two young boys, open containers of alcohol and a bayonet inside.

The incident occured at about 1:30 a.m.

More details are here.

For years Apple cultivated the image that its products were more secure than Microsoft, not susceptible to the many viruses and security issues that have plagued Internet Explorer and Windows.

The truth was always that Apple simply didn’t have enough devices in use to make it worth the effort.

Welcome to the real world, where users are not limited to gen x-ers who think Apple is “cool” and public school students using free systems.

When Apple released its Safari browser with the catchy slogan “Secure From Day 1″ it took only a few hours for major security holes to be exposed by hackers. (Note to Steve Jobs: Don’t challenge those guys. They WILL take you up on it!) Within days, the iPhone’s security had been unraveled and “unlocked” phones became available. And Apple publishes a manual on how to reduce security threats to their operating system. It is 270 pages long. It’s not that Apple is per se inferior to Microsoft, it’s just that it also isn’t per se superior. Just more obscure.

Last spring, a major security hole in Safari was exposed which allowed a remote user to completely take over a Safari user’s machine simply by accessing ports which the browser didn’t bother to close off:

Goatse released an explanation of how the bug works on its website: To protect against hacks, Internet browsers typically restrict websites’ access to computers through communications channels known as “ports.” But Apple’s Safari browser failed to block off some illegitimate ports with unusually high numbers. A hacker could use those unguarded channels, in combination with Safari features that automatically execute software requests, to wreak havoc.

To most users, exploiting “illegitimate ports” sounds pretty complicated, something only the most sophisticated and determined hackers would think of, or know how to do. In fact, it’s a fairly basic security issue, and robots prowl the web day and night searching for unsecured ports.

A security patch was issued in March. But the patch was for the desktop version of the software. The mobile version, which is used on iPad, still has the security flaw uncorrected:

“Basically, there is a hole in the iPad Safari version that allows someone to ‘own’ your machine,” said Hemanshu Nigam, founder of SSP Blue, a cybersecurity consulting firm. “Once they break in, hackers can make your iPad do anything they want and take anything they want from it. It’s no different than saying, ‘Here you go, it’s all yours.’”

This revelation comes in the wake of an incident in which the hackers who originally exposed the Safari security hole gained access to the ATT-Apple website and obtained the email addresses used for activation by over 100,000 iPad users, together with the iPads’ SIM card ID numbers.

The hackers, a group called Goatse Security, had harsh words for Apple and ATT, accusing them of failing to take security seriously in failing to patch the known bug in the iPad browser, and claiming that obtaining the supposedly “private” email and SIM card information took just over one hour.

Read the full article here:
http://money.cnn.com/2010/06/14/technology/att_ipad_hack/index.htm

Quite frankly, the likelihood that I would have anything important on an iPad, which is incapable of multitasking (I have eight different things running on my PC right now) and can’t see 90% of the video on the web (because Jobs “hates flash” – probably because Apple can’t figure out a way to charge for it) is even smaller than the likelihood that I would ever buy a device with such limited capabilities. I’m too old now to buy stuff because it’s “cool”. I buy stuff because it works. And the cheaper I can buy it, the better.

But if I HAD bought an iPad, I’d want to know why the people who sold me such a “cool” toy sold it to me knowing that they were exposing me to a known and publicized security hole that put me at risk of having my cool toy hijacked by third parties, who would then have access to any and all information I had stored on it, and could then run it as if it were their own cool toy.

Then again, maybe Jobs and company figure it’s not such a big risk, since the iPad can only do one thing at a time, is incompatible with half of the software existing in the world, and is most likely owned by somebody who already has all their personal information posted on “Facebook”, anyway.

Well, not exactly. But the White House admits no mechanism in any of the current bills would prevent illegal aliens from getting insurance on the "exchange".

Of course, they’re still NOT admitting that the bills also don’t contain any way to keep illegal aliens from getting their "exchange" insurance subsidized by the taxpayers.

OBITUARY FOR COMMON SENSE

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who
has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was,
since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. He
will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:
Knowing when to come in out of the rain; Why the early bird gets the
worm; Life isn’t always fair; and maybe it was my fault.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don’t spend more
than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in
charge).

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but
overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy
charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended
from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for
reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the
job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly
children.

It declined even further when schools were required to get parental
consent to administer sun lotion or an aspirin to a student; but could
not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an
abortion. Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became
businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims.

Common Sense took a beating when you couldn’t defend yourself from a
burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.

Common Sense finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to
realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in
her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement.

Common Sense was preceded in death, by his parents, Truth and Trust, by
his wife, Discretion, by his daughter, Responsibility, and by his son,
Reason.

He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers:
I Know My Rights
I Want It Now
Someone Else Is To Blame
I’m A Victim

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone.

San Diego County and Palm Springs – you know, southern California San Diego County and out-in-the-desert Palm Springs - have been  hit by a snowstorm accompanied by rain, sleet, hail and ice.

A couple of days ago Palm Springs was 85 degrees.

Clearly, more proof of man-made global warming.

You hear people complaining all the time:  it always rains on the weekend.

Science says otherwise. A recent study concluded more rain comes down mid-week than on weekends:

The study was carried out by atmospheric scientist Thomas Bell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and his colleagues. They looked at data collected by NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite from 1998 to 2005. This method has advantages over rain data collected with ground-based gauges that can vary from one gauge site to the next.

They found it rains on average more between Tuesday and Thursday than from Saturday through Monday. The clearest day of the week was Saturday, with nearly twice the rainfall on the wettest day, Tuesday afternoon.

I just noticed we’ve had some issues over the last few days with posts not appearing when posted. We’re down to one error on the page now, and I’ll be inserting the missing material in the order it should have originally appeared. It’s not your imagination, and it’s not the time travelling space aliens that provided the computer and copy of MS Word for Dan Rather’s memos, there really are entries from before today suddenly appearing today.

Did You Know . . .

Once upon a time, the garage  organizers were meant to sort out the garages only. That meant figuring out storage arrangements etc.  Now, the concept of organizers has broadened to include things as mundane as a medicine cabinet. The cabinet organizer is responsible for  everything from the cabinet  knob to the arrangements. With advanced technology, we also have organizers for data storage systems. These organizers basically make sure that everything in the data storage systems is in an orderly fashion. There are organizers for the entire home storage line as well.

Velociraptor, the smart, pack-hunting man-eating dinosaur made famous in the film “Jurassic Park” may actually have been covered with feathers.

A close study of a velociraptor forearm found in Mongolia shows the presence of quill knobs, bumps on the bone where the feathers anchor, researchers report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

The feathers may have helped regulate body temperature, attract mates or intimidate adversaries, but the bone structure of the animal makes flight out of the question.

“Jurassic Park” just wouldn’t have been the same with the humans being hunted by a toothy version of Big Bird, but it gets even worse:

The velociraptor the researchers studied was about three feet tall and weighed about 30 pounds. The size of these animals was exaggerated in the movie.

Imagine “Jurassic Park” with the humans being hunted by a trio of ferocious meat-eating chickens the size of kindergarten students. Somehow it just doesn’t have “blockbuster” written all over it.

We have a nice image gallery script running, much like at the original site, but including a sidebar slideshow. More about that later.

We have some preventive measures in place to try to keep the spammers at bay, so we’ve gone back to our original “open comments” policy, which we’ll stick with as long as we don’t end up buried in spam again. More about this later, too.

We have site stats up. With the old platform, some pretty sophisticated site stats were integrated in the core script. We don’t have that here, and we’re still looking at options, but for now at least we have a counter/stats block.

So I’d say things are coming along nicely. We’re still looking at themes. We really like this one, but the title block has fixed dimensions and longer titles don’t display well. Geo is threatening to start digging through the code to fix that. But Geo spending all his time fixing stuff in the code was why we changed platforms in the first place. So don’t be surprised if you stop by for a visit and the site’s appearance has changed completely, maybe several times, as we experiment with different looks.