Who the hell are these morons?

*sigh*...I seem to be a noticing an evolution of my posts (DID YOU SEE THAT GEORGIA??? I SAID EVOLUTION! EVOLUTION, EVOLUTION, EVOLUTION).

I'm getting bitter. Is it my age? Maybe. But I'm more inclined to blame the increasing numbers of complete moron assholes...or morholes...in the world around me. I hate you all so very, very much.

I was originally planning on having another "Separated at Birth" post. I couldn't help but draw "wild hair" comparisons between Saddam Hussein (at the time of capture) and James Brown (at the time of his recent arrest). But then I decided I would be insulting the Godfather of Soul, and I really didn't want to do that.

But in the process of looking for Saddam photos, I came across this site: La Voz de Aztlan, or, How I Grew Up to Be a Conspiracy Theorist and Hate the Country That Allows Me to Have This Website....whichever.

The link that drew me in was a story claiming the Saddam capture as a hoax. Look at how nicely they used Photoshop to draw the arrows to the meat and dates! And such irrefutable evidence from sources I'm sure exist and know what they're talking about!

Well, as you can imagine, I had to look for more! They are obviously "in the know." I got roped into an article entitled: "New York to be Nuked on Feb. 2", complete with another Photoshop masterpiece. My favorite part of the story:
"It is heartening to see that more and more Americans are finally awakening to the fact that there are sinister forces within the government taking their orders from an 'International Cabal'. "

Gah! I've spent more time on these people then they deserve.

Devolution in Georgia

So, the entire state of Georgia is considering banning the word "evolution" from schools. They won't stop the teaching of "biological changes over time", but just want to get rid of the word....a word they are referring to as a "buzz word."

Honey (that would be Superintendent Kathy Cox), get out your dictionary. The word "evolution" is older than "buzz word". It's not a "trendy or stylish" word..it's a word and a concept that has been used by educators and professionals for a hell of a long time.

The fact that you and your backwater-hick-close minded-ultra religious-fuckhead-conservative-asshole friends and supporters think that taking away the term will take away the concept, just shows that you have no right to have any say in the education of young people. You're just teaching them to be as ignorant as you are.

Rock on! Deodorant for President!

Oh yeah! Ronnie James Dio for president!

Don't forget that Ronnie is angry about "...the unchecked proliferation of evil women and dragons in America today." Now that's a platform I can get behind.

Bad omen

Especially when pulled into a work scenario that I can only use the term "goat rodeo" to describe - as has been the case since late last week - my drive in to work each day is the closest thing I get to zen time. This is not because suburban Chicago traffic is so pleasant to navigate, but it is instead because of the 20GB mp3 player installed in the trunk of my car.

Today's theme, though, would strike me as a bad omen (if I was the sort of person that believed that an mp3 player was trying to tell me something):

• Jeane, The Smiths
("I don't know what happiness means/But I look in your eyes and I know/That it isn't there")
• Only Happy When it Rains, Garbage
("You can keep me company as long as you don't care")
• Lose That Girl, St. Etienne
("She said 'cancel everything'/And like a fool/You never know what's happening")
• Here's Where the Story Ends, The Sundays
("And whoever would have thought/That the books that you wrote/Were all I loved you for?")
• Roads, Portishead
("I got nobody on my side/And surely that ain't right")
• I Know It's Over, The Smiths
("I know it's over/And yet it never really began/But in my heart/It was so REAL")

My interpretation of my mp3 player's subliminal message? It's a toss up between the fortune cookie-esque "You are about to be unlucky in love" to the slightly more pragmatic "You were very angst-y in the late '80s and early '90s".

This is bullshit.

Sorry to be so blunt in the subject line, but I am beyond pissed off. I'm not sure if any of you followed the story of the Representative from South Dakota, Bill Janklow, who was convicted of second-degree manslaughter, speeding, running a stop sign and reckless driving.

One day he was driving at least 70 in a 55 mph zone, when he blew off a stop sign and killed a motorcyclist. He has had 13 traffic citations since 1990. After his convictions, he was sentenced to 100 days in a county jail. A county jail. 100 days. What a ridiculous sentence for someone who killed a man, and obviously has problems following traffic laws. Oh, and it will all be struck from his record if he completes his probation without incident.

Now you might argue that losing his seat was punishment enough. Please. Imagine if it was just a "regular" guy who committed these crimes. Being a Representative is a job, not a piece of armor.

I would be insulted if I was Randolph Scott's family. They deserved better justice.

And I can't help but notice how the guy Randolph Scott was riding with testified for the defense and was surprised at the "large amount" of jail time Janklow received. Gee, I wonder who got to him.

Searching for ancient shipwrecks

Some interesting anthropology news for Desiree - the Canadian Institute of Archaeology and the Greek Archaeological Service are looking for the remains of a 20,000-man Persian fleet that sunk on its way to Greece in 492 BC.

Nintendo DS

The new portable from Nintendo - codenamed Nintendo DS - has some intriguing gameplay possibilities, but I'm concerned about it being more of a gimmick than anything else... I guess I'm having a hard time envisioning just how this thing will work.

Hey Microsoft, back off, eh?

I should have, but still couldn't believe the crap I've been reading about MikeRoweSoft.com.

Microsoft is *suing* a high school student because of his domain name, which is also his real name (Mike Rowe). They say:
1) People will get confused if they get to his site...i.e. we're all so stupid we think that the Microsoft we see EVERYWHERE could also be spelled MikeRoweSoft.
2) He uses his site to sell his web design business. So we idiots, having stumbled on the site, will forget that Microsoft doesn't actually create webpages for people. No other communication with Mike Rowe will tip us off that he isn't a huge software monopoly in Washington, and we'll give MikeRoweSoft money unintentionally...money Microsoft, and not a high school senior getting ready for college, surely needs.

And, can you believe it...they offered him $10 for the domain! No shit he was insulted. It costs more to register the damn thing. I would have told them to shove it too (and I would have asked for more money).

Mike Rowe...sorry you have to go through this crap at your age, but hopefully you'll get something out of it.

The advantages to working at home

...or "why Desiree wishes she was home right now":

Geek is Cool? Damn straight!

I think this article still doesn't quite get it right, but at least it's a start. I think that the term "geek" has had a positive connotation for some time. So saying a "typical Internet user" equals not a geek because he/she is socially active and involved in non-computer activities equals a cool person doesn't say anything about being a geek.

To me, it's: "typical Internet/computer user" equals geek because he/she is into computers AND IS ALSO socially active and involved in non-computer activities equals a cool person.

I'm a geek and I'm proud, damn it.

But I'm probably not making any sense.... :)

Nanny Nanny Boo Boo!

I want to stay mad at this guy...I want to tell him to just cram it! But, I can't (damn him).

A few weeks ago, our friend Mike sent me a link to a column written by Bill French, which was later posted on heraldnet.com. Unfortunately, I no longer have the link, but he basically alluded to how violent video games breed violent video gamers.

Here's a later article, written by French, discussing the backlash he received from his original article.

But, it sounds like he learned his lesson...thanks to the Penny Arcade guys. We gamers aren't so bad after all, eh?

Note:
.....killographic is a real word? Please! I'm going to go all killographic on the asses of whoever made up that stupid term or even felt the need to create it!

Note #2:
Aha! After much searching, I found French's original article.

Criminalized manga

The BBC has an article about a Japanese court ruling which asserts that the manga Honey Room was obscene.

The judge's standard for this ruling was that "bodies were drawn in a lifelike manner with little attention to concealment (of genitalia), making for sexually explicit expression and deeming the book pornographic matter". Hell, that description could easily be applied to any of the manga I've read. (Well, except for the Batman manga.)

I wonder what's going on here - has Japan singled out Honey Room arbitrarily in an isolated incident, or is this representative of a larger cultural shift looming on the horizon?

Punished for Trying to Learn

Dan sent me this story this morning. It's about a 13-year-old kid who saw his father do something neat on the computer and asked how it was done. It eventually led to him trying to do it on his own and accidentally sending an extremely innocent message ("Hey!") to every Windows machine at his school. Oops.

I simply cannot believe the repercussions.

To me...this was a learning event. He got a lot of crap from a lot of people, and that's a big lesson in itself. He also learned that what he tried to do just didn't work that way....another lesson. Yes, he did need to also learn that things can go wrong and to make sure that doesn't happen, but I hardly think that necessitates a 3 day suspension.

I mean, hell, if he wasn't "such a good kid" he was going to get expelled???
All because he learned something and then tried to apply his knowledge in as innocent a way as possible.

I'm still fuming mad that his principal immediately called him a liar and refused to believe the facts presented to him. What an asshole.

The best part of this story follows...it gave me goosebumps as I read it:
Mr. Brandt from PC World Magazine wanted to send me a subscription. He said that if I couldn't learn computers in school, maybe his magazine would help teach me what my teachers wouldn't teach me.

You Are the Quarry

As we mentioned earlier, Morrissey finally got a record deal he was pleased with in June 2003. Now the NME has details about the new album - his first in 7 years - which is reportedly entitled You Are the Quarry.

The release date in the UK is tenatively set for April.

Permanent lunar base and manned mission to Mars

There's not much to say about President Bush's soon-to-be-announced plan to build a permanent space station on the moon and send astronauts to Mars within 10 years, except that it's about time.

Kaboom!

For many, many years I have lamented the loss of my favorite Atari 2600 game ...Kaboom! Hope was raised when I came across these joysticks at my local gaming shop. Still, there was no Kaboom!, and boy was I good at that game. I would get almost zen while sitting there in front of the tv screen catching those damn bombs.

Well, imagine my delight to come across this flash version of Kaboom! I wish I had the paddle, but it's still so fun to play.

Crack-Extort-Go to jail

Let's say you find some unpatched security holes on the BestBuy.com website because you are an unimaginative script kiddie. What should you do? Obviously, you should threaten full public disclosure of the vulnerabilities, then change your mind and ask for US$2.5 million or else you'll exploit the holes yourself.

That was the thinking of AOL user Thomas E. Ray III, at least until the FBI busted him for extortion. What a moron.

India: to the moon by 2008

India's President announced their intention to put an unmanned probe on the moon in 2007 or 2008.

The "Chandrayaan Mission" to the moon is part of India's overall plan to be a fully modernized nation by 2020, which includes objectives such as doubling their agricultural yield and developing an AIDS vaccine.

Google goes public

US$4bil is a lot of cash, and it's roughly the amount that Google plans to get by selling off a third of their company in stock during their newly announced IPO.

A year-old-article at Wired points out that Google's overriding philosophy up to this point has been "don't be evil". But the author, Josh McHugh, also notes that while Google has been able to stick to its principles and still be profitable, some of the decision to continue to adhere to the "no evil" policy will be taken out of their hands by their new shareholders. The following excerpt from the Wired article illustrates this well:

As a private company, Google has one master: users. As a public company, there are shareholders to worry about. And more than happy users, shareholders want ever-greater profits... Such pressure could cause Brin to rethink other policies, like his decision to refuse all alcohol and tobacco advertising. The fact that Google accepts advertising for adult content sites is an intriguing commentary on Brin's morality: Cigarettes and booze are evil; porn is not. It's a policy that would become progressively harder to defend were Google to go public.

Despite Google's profitability, this IPO seems more about survival than about growth. I believe Google senses a threat - one that starts with "M" and ends with "icrosoft" - and is about to embark on a technological arms race in order to secure its position as the search engine of choice for the forseeable future.

Microsoft plays dirty - there's no question about that. Consider the fact that most error pages displayed by Internet Explorer take you to the MSN search engine, and you'll think "hmmm... anti-competitive?" Now, what if I told all of you non-IE users that the default Internet Explorer home page is http://www.msn.com/ ? Nothing inherently wrong with that, I suppose. But what if I went on to explain that the index page for msn.com has a little piece of markup in it that looks like this:

<body onload="document.all.S1.focus">

That tag means that if you try to start typing a URL in the "Address" bar of IE while the default home page is loading, the focus is changed to the MSN search engine text field on www.msn.com and you "accidentally" end up searching for whatever URL you were typing. This has the triple effect of providing business intelligence to Microsoft about the web pages users are trying to navigate to manually when their browser first opens, increasing consumer awareness of the MSN search engine, and artificially boosting the engine's Nielsen//NetRatings to make the service more attractive to advertisers. It's no wonder, then, that this searchenginewatch.com article says that "even MSN admits some people may not realize how they ended up doing a search at its service."

So how do you fight a competitor that has no history of or interest in playing fair? You can try to fight fire with fire, but frankly Google (or just about any tech company) has no chance to out-weasel Microsoft. So it won't do that, instead sticking to its #2 truism: "It's best to do one thing really, really well." Google's core competency is not mudslinging, so the only option it has is to rise above dirty tactics and just be better. Period. I imagine that the bulk of their newfound US$4bil is going to go straight into R&D, and specificially, natural language processing. My recent work on creating a self-authoring weblog uses Bayesian analysis to help determine what to post. As you might expect, I wanted to see what (if anything) others were doing regarding Bayesian analysis of HTML and XML documents, and look who pops up as the first paid advertiser when you search for the word "Bayesian" on Google?

Let's hope that Google's soon-to-be shareholders understand that Google's marketshare thus far has been derived from treating the users correctly and being the best damn search technology on the web - and in order for those shareholders to see real value over the long haul (i.e., win a fight with Microsoft on its way to true market dominance) Google simply has to continue to be better than the rest, both in terms of customer satisfaction and technology.

The third time's a charm

Whether you like to think of it as launch #3 or re-launch #2, stupefaction.net is back up and running.

What's different this time? A lack of editorializing and a host of new automation tools that I've written means our sister weblog about the evil (or stupid) that people do now practically writes itself.

I might as well take this opportunity to issue the (now standard) disclaimer: We are not attempting to glorify bad behavior by posting about it. Our reasons for producing such a site are the same as before.

What you say?

Yes, we're alive, and no, there really hasn't been anything on the web that's been interesting enough to post about recently. Frustrating, yes. Annoying, yes. But those are not topics for these pages. :)

We're both back at work today for the first time in a couple of weeks and we've spent the past few days being supremely lazy. Which, I must admit, has been good. The batteries are recharged and I think we're both ready to hit the ground running work-wise. Hopefully some good blog material will be forthcoming!