MSN Music: It's really about Windows announces Microsoft's long waited entry into the digital music download arena, to compete directly with Apple's iTunes.
Expect iTunes for Windows to be mysteriously broken by Media Player 10, as well as RealPlayer.
Expect Walmart to decide they really don't want to sell downloaded music after all.
Expect, well expect all the monopolistic bullshit that Microsoft has become so beloved for.
Above all, if you like music, be afraid. Be very afraid.
This article in the Register discusses getting hydrogen from, of all places, sunflower oil.
Not scalable, either in cost or quantity. The quote from the article:
is unadulterated bullshit. The fuel that will replace oil has not been invented yet, and all the screwing around with hydrogen doesn't change that one bit. Hydrogen is not a source of energy, it is a method of storing energy that came from somewhere else. The best of all alternatives involving hydrogen is to make it using nuclear power, and you can do that with rainwater, not sunflower seeds.
If the planet runs out of exploitable petroleum sources before an alternative is available, a possiblity that seems more and more likely, the citizens of earth will get to spend an eternity living like their pre-industrial revolution ancestors did: a world lit by wood fires, the farthest place you will ever see limited by how far you are willing to walk, no meaningful medical care, no transportation that can move faster than a horse.
In other words, the world that the Green Party wants now.
BugMeNot is back up!
Update: Spoke too soon. The front page is back but nothing works as of 20:58 Zulu.
What's going on here?
I suspect a drive crash, and restoral from backups is going slowly.
Update 2: This is getting decidedly weird. BugMeNot now forwards to micetrap.net - a racist hate site that sells Nazi merchandise.
This is one of the wierdest situations I have seen.
Update 3: Here is an explanation. But they haven't caught on to the forwarding to the Nazi site yet, apparently.
Update 3 (and last, I hope ...): BugMeNot is back in operation and explains everything.
WTF!!!??! Now Stacy Carlson's excellent Picture Publisher graphics site, Webattitude, is gone. I hadn't checked in there for a while, and I was shocked when the webattitude.com address took me to a French site. A Google search turned up an IP url for Stacy's site, but now that page does a redirect to the frog site.
I have been a fan of Stacy's work for years, so I suspect her site predates the frogs. I am at a loss as to why she has to redirect her wonderful site to those America-hating cheese eaters.
Here's one of her pages from the Wayback machine.
BugMeNot is broken.
Update: It looks like it's more than broken, it looks dead. Where once there was a front end into a database full of logins for all those news sites that follow the odious practice of requiring intrusive private information before they will let you peek at their content, there now is only a naked directory with only one accessible file, and that is a piece of Microsoft boilerplate.
I don't have the whois info from BugMeNot from before this terrible thing happened, so I don't know if the site has been hijacked, or if it has just had the meat stripped from its bones. Either way, the result is ugly. None of the PHP scripts that drove the former site are there any more. I find myself thinking in conspiracies: did one of the big news sites drive BugMeNot off the web? Did a hacker from the media get in and delete all the files?
I have a feeling that the death of this site, if the facts become known, could be a newsworthy item. I find it inconceivable that the people who ran the site would leave a naked index, with no explanation whatsoever, while they revamp it or whatever.
Where is BugMeNot? What have you done with it? The world wants to know.
SCO Group has put their CEO's keynote address down the memory hole.
What's the problem, guys? McBride embarrassing you in public again? Since Bullshit Bob Enderle's rambling keynote is still available, Darl's must have been a real corker to be censored by his own company.
I guess you can't let some people out in public.
This is interesting:
BEIJING, Aug.12 (Xinhuanet) -- Russian scientists said they have discovered the wreck of an alien device at the site of an unexplained explosion in Siberia almost a hundred years ago, China Daily reported today, citing the Interfax news agency as the source.
SCO and Microsoft must be so proud of their little boy about now. What class, what polish, what sophistication Enderle shows in this speech, reminiscent in its language of what you can hear at any beer joint on Friday night.
Frankly, the speech sounds to me like someone who spent way too much time in the hospitality suite, slugging down the hospitality. I wonder if he crushed the last can against his forehead before he came down to give the speech?
Way to go Rob. You really scored some credibility points there.
Russian morons using the trojaned IP 200.62.136.145 are still trying to spam my comments system, days after I shut it down and turned commenting off.
Some people can't learn. Maybe I'll put a honey pot CGI in place of the comments system to see what they're trying to spam, so I can ridicule them more.
Another slam-dunk death penalty case, times four.
Justice would have them all beaten to death, slowly. The needle is an easy out for these animals.
The woman was caught, but only just. Apparently, she was in a disheveled state that suggested she had entered McAllen in the time-honored way - by wading the Rio Grand. And she was traveling on a South African passport - perhaps one of the hundreds, or thousands of passports reported stolen? And, her name is on a terrorist watch list, but she was arrested because she had no U.S. entry stamp in her passport, it was only later that they found out she was on the watch list. If nine get through for every one caught (very optimistic estimates, some say ninety-nine to one, ask any drug mule), how many of her traveling partners are out there right now, renting a U-Haul in Lawrenceville, Kansas, or renting a safe house in Arlington?
Naturally, her U.S. lawyer is "concerned" that his client hasn't been released on own recognition yet. She's got business to do so she needs to be out and about it, right?
McAllen is one of dozens of small-town border crossing points where the main attention is on drug smugglers and illegal Mexican immigrants. I think it is telling that this woman was not arrested trying to enter the country, she had already successfully done that. She was arrested trying to board a flight at the airport before she tidied up enough to look less suspicious. Perhaps she was in a hurry, and didn't get her fake ID before trying to board, and was left trying to talk her way onto the flight using her South African passport that had no evidence of her entry to the U.S. Are the terrorists that stupid, or do they assume we are that stupid? Or both?
This article in City Journal reveals how Aztlan is coming to pass by default. Mexico and other Latin American countries are taking over areas that were historically Spanish (i.e., California, Arizona, Texas) by assimilation. Driven out by U.S. military forces in the 19th century, they are sending an army of immigrants who never really assimilate into U.S. culture to take the territory back.
In 20 years, you will have to speak Spanish to conduct routine business in most of Texas and Southern California. Some communities in south Texas have already declared Spanish as the official language for municipal business.
It will only get worse.