Well, this is being written from the new Linux box. Or rather, the really old box that has a new Linux installation. I am having a bit of trouble with getting Java installed at the moment. That is because I am a hardware kind of guy. My software skills are very, very old now. (Remember Fortran?) (Um- never mind. I just found it listed in the Ubuntu installers. I missed it the first time.) Eventually, this computer will become a standby system. Let's face it, it is a pretty slow computer for today's world, even with the upgraded memory I put into it. (It's a little bit like hot-rodding a Yugo). But it will work fine for internet access and word processing
Here's an absolutely devastating analysis of the "defense" Al "Big Electric" Gore had his sycophants screeching when the news got out about his absolutely gargantuan energy usage at his home. Ecotality plants a big, old carbon footprint right to Al's cheek. So to speak.
So far, so good. So, where does Gore buy his ‘carbon offsets’? According to The Tennessean newspaper’s report, Gore buys his carbon offsets through Generation Investment Management. a company he co-founded and serves as chairman:
Gore helped found Generation Investment Management, through which he and others pay for offsets. The firm invests the money in solar, wind and other projects that reduce energy consumption around the globe…
As co-founder and chairman of the firm Gore presumably draws an income or will make money as its investments prosper. In other words, he “buys” his “carbon offsets” from himself, through a transaction designed to boost his own investments and return a profit to himself. To be blunt, Gore doesn’t buy “carbon offsets” through Generation Investment Management - he buys stocks.
And it is not clear at all that Gore’s stock purchases - excuse me, “carbon offsets” purchases - actually help reduce the use of carbon-based energy at all, while the gas lanterns and other carbon-based energy burners at his house continue to burn carbon-based fuels and pump carbon emissions - a/k/a/ “greenhouse gases” - into the atmosphere.
As the news media swarmed around the story of Gore’s gargantuan energy consumption yesterday, Gore’s people touted his purchase of “carbon offsets” as evidence that he lives a “carbon-neutral” lifestyle, but the truth is Gore’s home uses electricity that is, for the most part, derived from the burning of carbon fuels. His house gets its electricity from Nashville Electric Service, which gets its from the Tennessee Valley Authority, which produces most of its power from coal-burning power plants. Which means most of the power being consumed at the Gore mansion comes from carbon-emitting power sources.
This one is a real must read. It is thorough, carefully reasoned and absolutely points out why this is a big deal. Even Al's truest believers should read this. Because there are some real questions about what, exactly, Gore is actually accomplishing. It would appear to have little to do with saving the earth.
A 74 year old Italian woman got quite a surprise when she examined the sack of potatoes she purchased at her local market. She found a pineapple in there.
As in a live hand grenade.
"I found a bomb in the potatoes," Olga Mauriello said in a telephone interview with Reuters.
"I went to the market to buy some potatoes and that's where the bomb was. But this bomb was covered in dirt, and I put it in water and got all dirt off. And then I realized 'It's a bomb'!"
Police said the pine cone-shaped grenade, which had no pin and was still active, was the same type used by U.S. soldiers in Europe in World War Two. Authorities believe the mix-up happened at a farm in France, where the grenade was plucked from the ground along with potatoes.
Of course stories like this are nothing new, either.
Thanks to a former Canadian Defense Minister, we now know the solution to global warming! It's so simple. We don' t have to give up a thing with this solution, either.
All we do is get the aliens to fix it for us!
OTTAWA (AFP) - A former Canadian defense minister is demanding governments worldwide disclose and use secret alien technologies obtained in alleged UFO crashes to stem climate change, a local paper said Wednesday.
"I would like to see what (alien) technology there might be that could eliminate the burning of fossil fuels within a generation … that could be a way to save our planet," Paul Hellyer, 83, told the Ottawa Citizen.
Alien spacecrafts would have traveled vast distances to reach Earth, and so must be equipped with advanced propulsion systems or used exceptional fuels, he told the newspaper.
I'd like Gidney and Cloyd to drop off a scrooch gun for me while they're here. Or maybe Marvin would drop over and lend me a Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator. That would be swell.
In a true sign of a worsening economy, hundreds are expected to go on the unemployment lines at Kansas State University. The administration has bowed to pressure groups and has ordered that there will be no more chicken tossing at basketball games. It was the only work the chickens could get and now it's gone.
MANHATTAN, Kan. - The chicken toss has been declared off limits at Kansas State. For years, Kansas State students have smuggled live chickens into basketball games against Kansas, then thrown them onto the court and behind the opposing bench before tip-off — mocking their rival's Jayhawk mascot.
But an animal rights group objected to the mistreatment of chickens, and the school issued an open letter to fans this week calling for an end to the practice.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals responded to the latest incident during a game Feb. 19 by sending a letter to university president Jon Wefald, claiming at least three chickens were thrown on the court during player introductions.
The letter described chickens as "very intelligent and inquisitive animals" that appeared to have been subjected to "deafening noise, bright lights, terror, abusive handling and likely death for the sake of amusement."
The jobless chickens were last seen lining up for an unemployment check. Unfortunately, the sign on the building said "KFC", not "Unemployment". The chickens being somewhat less intelligent than the PETA folks are projecting anthropomorphically.
I've mentioned a few times the ongoing battles with computers around the Crabitat. Between driver problems, software issues and "fun" programs installed by the kids, it's been kind of unpleasant. Add to those the general intrusiveness of Microsoft Windows XP and their Genuine (Dis)advantage "updates" and the need to call the nice folks in India when you want to make a few hardware changes to a computer and it becomes a real nightmare. So I've really been interested in looking into Linux.
I happen to have a really elderly (by today's standards) Dell Optiplex GX1 with a dinky little Pentium II processor running at 333MHz. I installed the maximum amount of memory (3×128M) a while back. But it isn't exactly what you'd call lightning fast by any means. But I thought I'd just see whether Ubuntu would work on it. Heck - if Dell is looking at Linux for users, why shouldn't I? So I booted up off the live disk.
And everything - Every. Single. Thing. - on that computer was recognized by the software and set up to run flawlessly. Not one single glitch. (Well, except the ones I caused. I had disabled the on-board network interface a while back and had to change that in the setup and enable the on-board sound again.) Once that was up and running, the whole shebang worked perfectly. So I wiped the drive (through the Ubuntu setup) and installed it.
The darn thing runs perfectly. Not a single flaw that I have found yet. It reads my Palm Pilot even. USB zip drives, ditto. When I left it this morning, it was busily installing the 137 updates it found for itself (it asked me before it did so, of course). There were a lot of updates because I was using an older distro disk, by the way. Later on, I'll fire that puppy up and try blogging from it.
A woman from Thomaston, Georgia was lucky to survive the wreck of her pickup truck after an agent of the Animal Uprising™ attempted to hijack the vehicle.
Suspicion arose about the cause of the accident when Melton left the scene.
Reportedly, she flagged down a passerby and hitched a ride to her boyfriends house. A group of teenagers said they smelled alcohol.
However, according to Georgia State Trooper Cpl. Brandon Dawson, Melton was not driving under the influence but lost control when she bent down to pick up her rabbit.
“I thought my rabbit was going to get out of the cage,” Melton said, “The cage was in the seat and it fell over. I thought it was going to get out and get under my feet.”
Faithful readers know that the rabbit was attempting a carjacking. On the bright side, this could be a handy way to explain a damaged vehicle to a spouse. Just say the rabbit did it.
The left in this country and in the West in general like to screech about how they are being silenced. They tend to do this on national television, moaning about how civil liberties are being taken away from them. How these charges gibe with the national media exposure, they never quite say. Meanwhile, they praise cretinous thugs like Fidel Castro and his understudy (T)Hugo Chavez. (Sometimes they do this right here in the comments). Perhaps they should take a look at the editorial in today's Miami Herald. Then maybe they could understand what actual suppression means. Hint: It isn't going on a talk show and complaining or writing long-winded posts on the internet.
This is the point of the regime's reprisals last week that targeted three foreign correspondents.
The three — Gary Marx of the Chicago Tribune, César González-Calero of Mexico City's El Universal and Stephen Gibbs of the British Broadcasting Corp. — were notified that they wouldn't be allowed to report from the island. Mr. Marx was told that his work was ''negative.'' Mr. González-Calero was told that his coverage was ''not convenient'' for the communist government…….
…….Inside Cuba, the regime also controls all mass media and communications, including Internet access. Home-grown independent journalists run illegal press agencies and risk imprisonment at any time. Some 40 journalists have been detained, at tacked or threatened since Raúl Castro took power provisionally six months ago, according to Reporters Without Borders.
That is what silencing and suppression looks like, folks. I know that will make no difference to the far left, however. They love thugs, so long as they lean far enough to the left.
Leading scholars and respected researchers are raising their voices against the so-called revelations of James Cameron of the Tomb of Jesus and his family. They are calling it a shameless publicity stunt with no real basis in fact.
Leading archaeologists in Israel and the United States yesterday denounced the purported discovery of the tomb of Jesus as a publicity stunt.
Scorn for the Discovery Channel's claim to have found the burial place of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and — most explosively — their possible son came not just from Christian scholars but also from Jewish and secular experts who said their judgments were unaffected by any desire to uphold Christian orthodoxy.
"I'm not a Christian. I'm not a believer. I don't have a dog in this fight," said William G. Dever, who has been excavating ancient sites in Israel for 50 years and is widely considered the dean of biblical archaeology among U.S. scholars. "I just think it's a shame the way this story is being hyped and manipulated."
The Discovery Channel held a news conference in New York on Monday to unveil a TV documentary, "The Lost Tomb of Jesus," and a companion book about a tomb that was unearthed during construction of an apartment building in the Talpiyot neighborhood of Jerusalem in 1980.
James Cameron, the filmmaker who explored the wreck of the Titanic and directed an Oscar-winning feature film based on its sinking, is executive producer of the documentary. Its claims are based on six ossuaries, or stone boxes for holding human bones, found in the tomb.
There is, as I have said before, zero proof of anything other than the discovery of several boxes bearing extremely common names from that period. All of the rest is sheer speculation dressed up with impressive-sounding but ultimately worthless science. They tout DNA evidence. But of what? They have no idea of anything other than a family was related to one another. That's a surprise. That doesn't prove who the family really was. The only people who are going to believe this nonsense are the ones who already buy into an anti-Christian mindset. There is a heck of a lot more agenda than truth in this "documentary."
The Pelosi-Murtha team is still trying to rally support for their transparent attempt to lose the war in Iraq, but the house Democrats are not jumping on the bandwagon. In fact, they are beginning to fracture politically over the matter, according to the Washington Post.
House Democratic leaders offered a full-throated defense last night of their plans to link Iraq war spending with rigorous standards for resting, training and equipping combat troops, saying that they would hold President Bush accountable for failing to meet those readiness tests.
But after a fractious meeting of the House Democratic caucus, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) said Democratic members still have not united around the proposal.
More than a week after Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.) detailed plans that he said would curtail deployments to Iraq, Pelosi and other Democratic leaders said the coming debate on war funding would be about forcing the administration to live up to existing military requirements. War funds would be redirected toward equipment, such as night-vision goggles, that some troops lack. Democrats would insist on giving combat troops a year off between deployments, and they could impose restrictions on Pentagon policies that extend combat tours.
It would have been easier for them to try to slip this one over if John "Bigmouth" Murtha hadn't been so anxious to bask in the warm glow of anti-war activist acclaim. Want to bet Nancy Pelosi is really steamed at Johnny boy right now? His political ineptness will cause a serious divide in the Democratic caucus. The "Blue Dogs" want nothing to do with this plan to hamstring American commanders.
A brief hailstorm that dropped golf ball sized hail on the Kennedy Space Center caused significant damage to the insulation for the external fuel tank of the space shuttle Atlantis. The vehicle will have to be rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building for repairs. The next launch, scheduled for the middle of March, will be postponed until repairs are completed.
A brief hailstorm at the Kennedy Space Center significantly damaged the external fuel tank of the space shuttle Atlantis on Monday, and NASA officials said yesterday that a mid-March launch of the spaceship will have to be postponed as a result.
The golf-ball-size pieces of ice, which fell only in a small area around the Cape Canaveral launchpad, left hundreds of "dings and divots" that officials said will require repair. Shuttle program manager N. Wayne Hale Jr. said he hoped the work could be finished in time for a launch in April or May, although it could take longer.
Nature isn't cooperating real well at the moment. NASA was on a bit of a roll in recent months. This is too bad. But they are doing the right thing, of course.
Geek Stuff | Gaius Wednesday, 28 February , 2007 | 
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