Microsoft Is Bill Gates. Bill Gates Is Microsoft. Understand Now?
Don Reisinger over at c/Net poses a question, regarding the company that made vaporware and FUD two of the central pillars of its business model…
I’m not going to sit here and say that every company should be admitting its failures for every problem with products, but can’t Microsoft finally admit that Vista is a major blunder that has cost the company far too much? Can’t Microsoft finally open its mouth just once and tell us what we should really expect for the future and promise us a new operating system that won’t commit the same mistakes Vista has committed?
No.
This has been another episode of Simple Answers To Simple Questions…
Good catch by Timothy Kincaid over at Box Turtle Bulletin. Gary Glenn, President of Michigan klavern of the American Family Association, waves the Homosexual Menace scarecrow over at Peter LaBarbra’s Americans For Truth. Beware the gays! Beware the Gays! Beware the Gays! Glenn is warning us about the Homosexual Menace. Can you spot the problem with this passage about the Homosexual Menace…?
Michigan’s largest homosexual activist group says once marriage is legally redefined to include homosexual couples, business owners and even news media outlets who refuse to recognize such marriages should be jailed or sued and “publicly slapped,” a Jewish and openly bisexual columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News reported Monday.
They call them Freudian slips. And hey…wasn’t Freud a Jew too…
Via numerous sources… When the homophobes say gays are obsessed with sex, count on them to describe the sex we are obsessed with in more detail then most gay pornography. So naturally, in the wake of the California decision, we see Peter LaBarbra framing the issues involved in his own demure way…
How Will California Homosexual Couples Consummate their Counterfeit ‘Marriages’?
Oh I suppose they’ll…Go To Disneyland!
Whatever. Here’s how my gay couple consummated the Lawrence v. Texas decision that finally overtuned the sodomy laws…
For someone who thinks same-sex sex is so ugly Peter, you sure do think about it a lot…
SecurityBob writes "Debian package maintainers tend to very often modify the source code of the package they are maintaining so that it better fits into the distribution itself. However, most of the time, their changes are not sent back to upstream for validation, which might cause some tension between upstream developers and Debian packagers. Today, a critical security advisory has been released: a Debian packager modified the source code of OpenSSL back in 2006 so as to remove the seeding of OpenSSL random number generator, which in turns makes cryptographic key material generated on a Debian system guessable. The solution? Upgrade OpenSSL and re-generate all your SSH and SSL keys. This problem not only affects Debian, but also all its derivatives, such as Ubuntu."
At last year’s Open Source Conference in Portland (OSCON), I was made aware of a wee dust-up between the Apache project and "some" Linux distros. Specifically, the Apache folks were complaining that certain Linux Distributions routinely modified their product, sticking libraries and configuration files wherever they damn well pleased because that was how, in their opinion, things should work.
Now…the beauty of Linux and open source in general is that it is open and community driven and anyone can do whatever they damn well please with it. I hope it always stays that way, Microsoft’s backdoor attempts to stifle it notwithstanding. But the other side of that coin is that if you modify someone else’s software to work with yours now it’s your responsibility. The Apache folks were complaining that they could not help end users configure their servers when they themselves didn’t know how the software worked anymore, particularly when it came to configuring it. That’s not a trivial complaint coming from a project that powers the majority of web servers. Most of what you see on the World Wide Web was fed to you by an Apache server, running on either Linux or Unix.
Well, the Debian folks pretty well knew who the Apache folks were talking about and sure as the sun rises they started pointing their fingers back at Apache’s big monolithic configuration file, and other in-their-righteous-opinion Apache shortcomings. Begun, the clone wars have…
My feeling is, if you change it you own it. At least in the sense of now you have to support it. At minimum you ought to run your "fixes’ by the people who are maintaining the software you are "correcting". They might actually appreciate what you’ve done and incorporate the changes into their build. Or they might tell you why you shouldn’t do that. Sometimes you should listen to that. But from what I hear, listening isn’t one of the Debian project’s best points.
I keep hearing about how wonderful Ubuntu is, and knowing that it’s a Debian family distro I’ve been highly reluctant to bother with it. I get along fine in the Red Hat family. For the past couple years I’ve been happily running CentOS here at Casa del Garrett and I admit I would like it a lot better if it came bundled with better multi-media support, but on the other hand adding packages to it isn’t hard because everything is pretty much where everyone expects it to be. Yes, I have to configure a lot of it in its own specific way, as opposed to having a nice common configuration system to do it for me. If you want consistency, open source isn’t going to work for you. Try Apple. Seriously. I run Macs here at Casa del Garrett too and damned if I haven’t been impressed by how well integrated everything is on a Mac. I do all my artwork on Bagheera, my art room G5 tower, because it just gets out of my way when I’m in a creative mood and lets me create. I love that. On the other hand, it’s like that because Steve won’t let software developers color outside the lines. Just ask anyone who ever unlocked an iPhone. That’s why I’m still running Linux here too.
I’ll endure lectures on how gays don’t actually want marriage rights from a lot of people…even from some other gay people…but not from another gay person who refers to gays as "same sex-attracted" not once, not twice, but eight times in a single column, as though he just can’t bring himself to utter the word ‘gay’ let alone ‘homosexual’. Still looking for that cure are we…?
"Are you embarrassed easily? I am. But it’s nothing to worry about; it’s all part of growing up and being British. This course is designed to eliminate embarrassment, to enable you to talk freely about rude objects, to look at awkward and embarrassing things and to point at people’s privates. The course has been designed by Dr Karl Gruber of the Institute of Going a Bit Red in Helsinki."
-Monty Python’s Flying Circus
Every Friday evening now for almost a year, I’ve made it a point to drive down to D.C. and hang with my gay friends down there. We have a regular happy hour/dinner end of week gathering. It keeps me sane. I’m single, I live all by myself up here in Baltimore, and if I don’t actively seek out companionship I just go nuts. I wasn’t cut out to be a loner.
This week I decided I wasn’t drinking. My body really isn’t used to regular drinking nights, and alcohol was never my favorite form of relaxation. So I just drank Cokes. One of my friends later blamed that for how embarrassed I became at the…erm…low altitude of the dinner conversation. But I don’t think so. You have to expect when you’re with a pack of gay guys in a gay bar in a gay neighborhood in a city with a large gay population, that the conversation is going to get a tad sexual. I strongly doubt that’s really any different from the tone of most conversations in straight pickup bars either, but I wouldn’t know about that. Last night however, thanks to a few folks at the dinner table the conversation got really really raunchy. So I did what I usually do when I’m not enjoying myself. I tuned out. Ironically, I suppose that was a tad rude of me. I really felt sorry for our waiter.
I blame my Baptist upbringing for the modesty to the point of paralyzing inhibition I’ve been stuck with ever since puberty. But it may also just be in my blood. I wish I could be more of a gay peacock. I was a cute little dickens when I was younger and I’ll go to my grave regretting I didn’t make more of that. And I get embarrassed. So much so that I’ve been asked outright on occasion if I really am gay. I think people mistake my embarrassment for disgust. But if I am anything it’s sexually frustrated, not turned off by the idea of sex between guys.
But I’ll cheerfully admit to being grossed out by some of the kinks people get into. Some heterosexuals get into those same kinks too and I don’t confuse my libido’s sexual tastes for a moral sensibility. As long as people consent to whatever it is they’re doing and as long as it’s done with some degree of care and sympathy it neither picks my pockets nor breaks my leg what they’re doing with each other. I don’t expect people to accommodate my embarrassments. Matter of fact I’m usually grateful when they don’t. But not last night. I wish I didn’t get embarrassed so easily, but I do not regret being a romantic in the least, which is the polar opposite of raunch, and there were other people in that dinning room besides us.
The night that started out with my making my first ever iTunes buy from my iPhone. Before heading downtown I was at a friend’s house when I heard Dionne Warwick singing This Girl’s In Love With You on his Pandora station…
You see this girl,
This girl’s in love with you
Yes I’m in love
Who looks at you the way I do
When you smile I can tell
We know each other very well
Somehow I’d never gotten around to buying that one…probably because I never saw it on the singles rack back when I was a teenager. But I sat there listening to it at my friend Jon’s house and next thing I know I’m calling up the iTunes store on my iPhone. My inner teeny-bopper has been grooving to it all day today. Probably as a tonic to last night’s raunch.
My hands are shakin’
Don’t let my heart keep breaking
‘Cause I need your love,
I want your love
Say you’re in love
And you’ll be my guy…
Am I really gay? As I was sinking deeper and deeper into my chair last night in embarrassment, one of the guys, who had been briefly married, started talking graphically about a certain way straight guys can make their ladies happy and That was when I started getting grossed out. No offense to my heterosexual readers here…I know some of you would probably get grossed out by a graphic conversation about the same sex version of that kind of sex, and that doesn’t make you homophobic. It’s just your libido grimacing. One person’s sweet delight is another’s gross-out and that’s just the way it goes. That part of us just has its own way of looking at the world and all you can do is just try to deal with it honorably.
I was embarrassed, not disgusted. But I think I have a plan. From now on I’ll save my drinking for when the conversation starts looking like the letters page of Screw magazine. Then I’ll walk up to the bar for a shot or two. They say people in a bar generally look better when you’re drunk. Probably they make better sense too.
Search Words: 2. explain the statement: "war is a continuation of politics by other means."
Okay…write this down… "War" is the sequel to the PlayStation game "Politics By Other Means", by D.C. LaRue Novelty and Business Software, the brash gaming upstart that revolutionized bash console 2D sprite games. Written entirely in ADA, a programming language created by the U.S. Department of Defense, "War" takes "Politics By Other Means" to new heights by introducing Higgs boson controllers, dark energy, lead free sprites and support for Hercules graphics mode. A version for Microsoft’s Zune player is in the works.
The False Positive Wasn’t The Drug Test…It Was The Police Exam…
Do you take vitamins? Did you ever travel with vitamins? Oh, well… if you take a lot of vitamins, and they’re not the kind that says "Joe’s Vitamins" on the side "the plain-looking vitamins" and you have a whole lot, and you don’t the whole big jumbo thing on the road, you take as many as you need – and they’re not marked. And the jar you put them in isn’t marked. If a policeman really wants to give you a hard time, he can hold you overnight while they check the vitamins. That’s why I travel with Flintstones vitamins!
-George Carlin
Unfortunately…that’s not a plan that works anymore…
SARASOTA — When the police stopped him one night in Sarasota, Villis Sanders told officers that the small blue pills in his car were Aleve, an over-the-counter medicine for his aching wisdom teeth.
A patrolman used a drug kit to verify what the pills were.
The test said the tablets were amphetamines, Sanders was jailed and his car was impounded.
But it turns out that the test was wrong. Prosecutors took the pills to a laboratory before Sanders’ trial and found out that they were Aleve, after all.
In typical fashion, the DA’s office never bothered to tell Sanders that the charges were dropped because…well…he was innocent. He found out when he went to court and they told him to go back home.
Experts say that "false positives" are rare, but when the police department tested additional pills — including an Aleve tablet provided by the Herald-Tribune — the results were the same: Aleve shows up as amphetamines.
No one knows why the test keeps getting it wrong.
The manufacturer said that officers might not have been properly trained, or that Aleve might contain a compound similar to one found in amphetamines.
Officials from Bayer Health Care, which makes Aleve, did not immediately respond to questions.
And Sarasota police officials questioned both the kits and the compounds in Aleve — but say that they did everything they could to figure out what Sanders was carrying that night.
Well…not quite Everything…
In this case, both of the tablets found in Sanders’ car were blue and oblong, and each was stamped with the word "Aleve."
I’m waiting for the day when I read a news story about a man who was arrested and jailed and had his car impounded for possession of a quarter pound of cocaine that turned out upon further examination back at the lab to be a Quarter Pounder With Cheese. Well the test said it was cocaine so we arrested him…
I saw the headlines passing through my news readers regarding "passive drinking" this morning and I took it to mean some kind of social drinking situation where people who aren’t really drinkers and don’t much like alcohol drink anyway for the sake of socializing and fitting in. But…no. Via Dan Savage over at SLOG…
First They Came for the Smokers…
…and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a smoker blah blah blah.
Actually, the Stranger did speak up: We urged a “no” vote on Washington state’s smoking ban because of its unenforceable (and largely unenforced) 25ft rule. We did, however, endorse the concept of a smoking ban. It was a perfect Stranger position on a controversial issue: We managed to piss off everybody. Anti-smoking crusaders were furious that we urged a “no” vote and smokers were furious that we endorsed the concept. Yahtzee!
The campaigns to combat the effects of “passive smoking” are widely credited for Europe’s growing number of smoking bans. Now alcohol is in the sights of the public health lobbyists, and they have invented the concept of “passive drinking” as their killer argument.
I have seen a leaked draft report for the European Commission, which is due to be published some time in June. It makes claims about the high environmental or social toll of alcohol, the “harm done by someone else’s drinking.” The report is likely to inform proposals for a European Union alcohol strategy later this year.
Uh-oh.
Er…haven’t we already been down this road once…?
Well…"passive drinking" does have a more scientific sound to it then DEMON RUM…
You have to reckon the object is, as for tobacco, to ban the product without actually…you know…banning it. Because a ban would be unenforceable and create more crime and cost the America billions in wasted money and wasted lives, whereas simply making it illegal to use the product anywhere won’t be a ban as such and won’t cause any of the horrific social problems that the war on drugs certainly has not caused…or that Prohibition never caused…
In the meantime I’m going to engage in a little passive resistance and go out for a smoke and then come back home and pour myself some Kahlua… Burn in hell Carrie…
So I’m reading this story about some Italian jackass former football general manager bloviating about gays in football…
Moggi: Gays Should Be Banned From Football
The 70-year-old was widely regarded as the best transfer guru in Serie A before he received a five-year ban from football in the summer of 2006 for his alleged role in the Calciopoli scandal.
Despite being out of the game Moggi still regularly has his say on current affairs, and he has had some controversial things to say about homosexuals.
“I don’t know if footballers are against gays in the team, I certainly am,” he stated.
“I can quietly confirm that, in the clubs where I have been, I have never had them, never.
“I would never have wanted a homosexual player. Even today I wouldn’t buy one. Supposing I were to make a mistake and I found one of them, he would be the first to go.
“I am a little old-fashioned. But I know the football world and its insides. You cannot live within it as a gay. A homosexual cannot be a footballer.
“In calcio there are no homosexuals, neither between players nor among directors. It’s not racism, its fact. Football has a particular environment; you get naked in the dressing room.
“I have no gay friends. I go out with other people. But I have to say that homosexuals are very intelligent people, they have the capacity to see things differently.”
Former Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi has again stated that he was the only person to defend the club before, during and after the Calciopoli crisis.
Moggi was one of Calcio’s shrewdest transfer gurus up until the Calciopoli crisis in the summer of 2006.
The 70-year-old received a five-year ban from football for his alleged role in the scandal, meaning that he cannot return until 2011, by which time he will be 74.
Moggi has always maintained that Calciopoli was a conspiracy, involving Inter Milan, as well as other important figures.
“I looked to defend a business that, in practice, had no parents. Gianni and Umberto Agnelli died and Juventus were left without a father or a mother,” he explained.
“We didn’t have the funds because shareholders weren’t putting money into the club and we didn’t have the television on our side. We were a step behind the others.
“RAI was of Roma and we won’t speak of who Sky and Mediaset belong to. We had to make do with what we had and look strong even if we weren’t.”
Moggi has always been painted as something of a shady and mysterious figure, but he says this is an unfair assessment. “I was arrogant, but it is not a crime,” he said.
No…but fixing football games is, isn’t it? Here’s the Wiki entry on what they’re referring to in that article as the "Calciopoli crisis"…
The 2006 Italian football scandal (Italian more common names: Calciopoli or Moggiopoli, sometimes referred to as Calciocaos) involved alleged match fixing in Italy’s top professional football leagues, Serie A and Serie B. The scandal was uncovered in May 2006 by Italian police, implicating league champions Juventus, and other major teams including A.C. Milan, Fiorentina, Lazio, and Reggina when a number of telephone interceptions showed a thick network of relations between team managers and referee organisations. Juventus were the champions of Serie A at the time. The teams have been accused of rigging games by selecting favourable referees.
…
The scandal first came to light as a consequence of investigations of Naples prosecutors on the Italian football agency GEA world. Transcripts of recorded telephone conversations published in Italian newspapers suggested that during the 2004-05 season, Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi had conversations with several officials of Italian football to influence referee appointment. The name Calciopoli is a pun on Tangentopoli, [rough English translation:Bribesville], a corruption-based attitude starting in the early 80s and ending with the Mani Pulite investigation in the early 90s, led by, among others, Antonio di Pietro. Another very common name for Calciopoli is Moggiopoli after the name of Luciano Moggi. Also Calciogate, a pun on Watergate, is used. Calcio means football in Italian.
So here’s a guy babbling about how gays should be banned from football, who has himself been banned from the game for fixing games. How…unsurprising. I doubt he was cheating for money so much as to stand in the winner’s circle as though he’d actually earned his place there and not cheated his way to it. That’s exactly how bigots go through life. A genuine crook will, when caught, take some smirking pride in putting one over on you. A bigot will deny how they tilted the scales and fixed the game to the very end, insisting that they’re perfectly honorable and respectable people and endlessly pass the blame for the damage they do onto someone else. It’s not about having the trophy, it’s about knowing deep down inside what a runt you are and bitterly resenting anyone and everyone who can achieve that which you cannot, and fixing the game as a way of revenge.
I had to take a closer look. The column from Craig Smith begins promisingly…
Before you know it November will be upon us, and we will be required to choose a new president. But as in all elections, we will also vote on certain proposals and ballot initiatives. So I suspect it is only a matter of time before we hear the voices of the gay and lesbian community demanding the right to government-sanctioned "marriage," and this year I am all for it!
Homosexuals should enjoy the same rights and privileges married couples have experienced since the beginning of time: To be able to love and cherish, to have and to hold, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, ’till death do they part.
But this is a Wing Nut Daily column of course, so actually Smith is being sarcastic here. His real point is…
Thus I suspect if married gay couples honored their vows, within two to three generations we would not have any more gay babies being born. Given most gay people say they didn’t choose to be gay but were born gay, it would eliminate innocent people being born into a world that homosexuals deem so hostile toward them. It would settle once and for all the argument that homosexuality is genetic and not a choice. Nature, not nurture. If there is no procreation, there is no passing of genes and, thus, the species does not survive.
Darwin would have been right!
…
Let’s get serious. Homosexuality is a choice. And the choices people make are their business. What goes on in your bedroom is your choice. But when a group or person attempts to force society into condoning their choice or demands that their choice be taught to future generations as a "normal" lifestyle, I have a problem.
If you want to take the position that homosexuality is not a choice, then let’s experiment with my idea. We will know rather quickly who is right and who is wrong for nature itself proves the whole genetic argument invalid.
We’re having a Darwin moment here I see…
From: Bruce Garrett
To: Craig Smith
Subject: Darwin and Homosexuality
You write, "If you want to take the position that homosexuality is not a choice, then let’s experiment with my idea. We will know rather quickly who is right and who is wrong for nature itself proves the whole genetic argument invalid".
You need to take a little better interest then this in how the natural world really works. Perhaps this AP article from 1999 will help you out a tad…
Why Do Peacocks Stick Together in Avian `Singles Bar’?
Groups of peacocks strut their stuff in hopes of attracting the finest peahens, but only a few lucky guys will find a willing mate in the wild kingdom’s equivalent of a singles bar.
Scientists have long wondered why the unsuccessful peacocks stick around the same group year after year when the hens tend to select the same few males each breeding season.
Research published Thursday in the journal Nature suggests a sound evolutionary reason: Many of the bird buddies within individual groups are brothers. By working together, the brothers are increasing the odds that their genes will be passed to another generation.
"By helping your relatives to attract mates, your genes are spread," said Marion Petrie, a researcher at Britain’s University of Newcastle, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
The research sheds light on why some peacocks seem unconcerned with sex and are content to be hangers-on in the animal singles scene: Larger groups of peacocks attract more females, so some of the peacocks are there just to make the group bigger.
"The benefits of helping closely related dominants to attract more females may outweigh the subordinate males’ own meager mating opportunities," said Cornell University researcher Paul Sherman in an accompanying Nature commentary.
Petrie and her colleagues studied about 200 free-ranging peafowl in Whipsnade Park north of London. Using DNA fingerprinting, the researchers found birds inside the strutting groups are more likely to be related to each other than those outside the group.
But how do the related birds find each other? That’s unclear, but it is not because the peacock brothers grew up together.
In fact, the researchers found that when peacock brothers were separated before hatching, and then were released into Whipsnade Park when they were yearlings, the brothers still tended to group together.
The mechanism by which the birds found their relatives is unclear. It could be by odor, feather patterns or the sounds the birds make.
"There is some way in which kin can be associated, which doesn’t require learning or environmental clues," Petrie said. "They didn’t know their fathers or mothers. They could not possibly learn who their brothers were. They had no reference points to where they were born, but they still found each other."
If you don’t pass on your genes, but you help your siblings pass on theirs, your family genes get passed on, and that’s good enough as far as natural selection is concerned. If you help make your family, or your tribe look desirable, then the genes in that pool, which likely include a good many of yours too, get to go a few more rounds. If a trait is recessive, not everyone in the group needs to express it, for it to get passed along too, with all the others. If this is not true, then the mating rituals of Peacocks would not look the way they do.
Here’s a little something else to ponder when considering Darwin and homosexuality: the humble prostate gland. When you massage it, which is what happens during a certain kind of male to male sex, you can bring a human male to a right dandy orgasm. I doubt that massaging any other gland in the human body will produce anything other then pain, let alone sexual pleasure, but that one particular gland, in that one particular part of the male anatomy is different that way. You need to pay attention to that, because militant homosexuality didn’t do that, godless secularism didn’t do that, the Warren court didn’t do that, millions of years of adaptive evolution gave that to every human male who ever walked this earth, whether they had any use for it or not. And let’s be honest here, most don’t. The vast majority of human males have utterly no use for that.
Yet there it is.
So…actually, you’re probably sitting on all the proof you need for the genetic argument at this very moment.
—
Bruce Garrett
Baltimore, Maryland.
I was too polite to tell him that as long as he’s got his head up his ass he should look around.
Despite the fact that I still don’t have my college degree and that I struggled to make ends meet for most of my life working various low paying blue collar jobs, I suspect I could never pass myself off as "a man of the people", were it not for the shot of "Bartender’s Special" a very foxy bartender gave me once at Larry’s Lounge in D.C..
To run for president, you need to drink a lot…
I think it had Southern Comfort in it, which automatically gives me extra bonus populist points. Which is good, because I wouldn’t have touched that glass with a ten foot pool if I hadn’t been completely twitterpated by the guy who handed it to me, and having a drink with a cute guy in a gay bar penalizes me severely on populist points.
Three Cheers For Heterosexuality. Oh Come On Now…Cheer!
Via Pam’s House Blend… Brian Blair is the opponent of Kevin Beckner, the openly gay man running for the Hillsborough County Commission in Florida. The county is holding its Day of Silence in honor of 15-year-old hate crime victim Lawrence King this year, and naturally, as Pam puts it, "…the idea of kids engaging in a silent, passive act against violence, harassment and prejudice during the school day is just too much to bear for these people of apparently weak faith." Here’s what Blair has to say about it:
"I have always believed that all citizens are equal and should be treated accordingly. On the other hand, no group of citizens should be given government sanction and support to promote their social and sexual agenda upon the rest of us and especially, on our children."
"Considering the fact that the same school system does not want to allow just one Minute of Silence in the classroom for God, this is preposterous."
"Can you imagine asking for a ‘Day of Cheer for Heterosexuality?’ If no action is taken to change this policy, then perhaps it is time for another surgical strike from the majority; ‘A Day of Abstention’ from school participation might be considered."
Brian Blair brings a high degree of seriousness to American politics, and Florida politics especially, not simply because he is a defender of heterosexuality against the militant gay agenda, but also because he was once a WWE professional wrestler. Here’s a photo of Mr. Blair (on the left) in his role as part of the WWE "Killer Bees" team…
Can you imagine asking for a ‘Day of Cheer for Heterosexuality?
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