Sunday, May 16, 2010
Friday, May 14, 2010
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Conservative Canadian governement spends $800,000.00 on translated bibles for Africa and Asia
Excerpt:
Can someone explain to me how the bible being translated into African
and Asian dialects is supposed to help a poor weak and tired woman
feeling nothing but despair, wondering how she’ll feed her kids today?
Or how does sending preachers to explain how end times are a comin’ to
women whose time has come now or that of her child’s due to starvation
and lack of proper health care? And a question that I share with ACR’s
Pale Cold: How comforting can a preacher who has translated the Lord’s
Prayer be to a woman who is dying from complications to giving birth to
13 kids in a 10 year span?
Canadians seem to care more about sports than Canada
Excerpt:
How come Canadians can’t be this passionate and channel all that energy
into politics? I mean, it’s about their futures, for the love of gawd.
To me, it seems that they care more about what happens to their
favourite team and/or least favourite player than they do about
themselves, regarding the most important things; will I be able to
continue earning a living? Will I be able to access health care for my
family and myself? Will we become a nation of Evangelicals waiting
while they engineer the end times (wouldn’t it put it past those
wingnuts to do just that)? Will be able to retire? If we had at least
half that passion, we wouldn’t be living under such scary and uncertain
times, or at least, we wouldn’t allow our governments to ‘boil the
frog’, in turning Canada into a place we are starting to no longer
recognize.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Limewire busted
Time to find a new replacement for sharing music.
Diaspora - 4 nerds working on a private social network for the general public
4 students at NYU are working on a private, open-source social network alternative to Facebook.
Here is a link to their project site Diaspora.
Update:
Facebook Rival Raises $200K Without A Single Line Of Code
Why to not get a Mac - by Murphy at MaximumPC
He recently wrote an article about some utilities to make your Windows operating system look more like a Mac's. After getting a lot of flack for that article (basically, why would you want to do that when the Windows OS is already better than the Mac OS) he wrote this article.
For me and my tech support experiences, the areas where Macs fall short are:
- Price - for the same hardware in the system, you can buy a Windows PC for 2 to 4 times cheaper (in other words, for the same quality and power of hardware, a Mac is anywhere from 2-4 times the price of a Windows PC). When Apple says this is not true, that Macs are cheaper, they are comparing to very specialized brand-name Windows-PCs, not most Windows PCs.
- Compatibility (hardware and software) - I often run into situations with Macs where the person has installed an upgrade patch and now some of their software and or hardware won't work (also including external devices like printers, scanners, etc). Meanwhile on a Windows PC, when you install updates and service packs to the OS, in most cases, your software and hardware will continue to work. Or, the Mac owner wants to add a new part. But, we find out the only manufacturer of said part is Apple and that it is obsolete and you can't buy it, or, if someone else makes it and you can get it, it won't work with their machine. The end solution in many of these cases is that they have to go buy a whole new computer or a new printer or such. In all of these cases in a comparable situation with a Windows PC, I could easily buy a new part, it doesn't cost much, plug it into the computer, it works and there are no problems with the OS or the drivers or such.
- User Interface - No right-click mouse. Extra steps to open or close something. Not able to customize things. - Even Mac users are frustrated by some of the counter-intuitive things about the interface. In my experience with Mac clients, we have found that there are more steps to do things, or that certain things that you should be able to do, cannot be as easily done on a Mac as on a PC.
Want a system that is easy to use and intuitive, that you will be able to easily buy replacement parts for years from now, and that you will be able to add components to easily and inexpensively as the years go buy, and that most software and hardware is compatible with - get a Windows PC.
Britain's Conservatives and Liberal-Democrats to form government.
You can bet that the Conservatives will make sure the referendum they promised will fail (badly worded, little or confusing information to the public beforehand, etc).
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Guld Oil Slick - the real story
Watch the video.
"... some speculate it may be closer to 1 million gallons per day." "It's not a leak, it's a volcano spewing oil."
Frank Frazetta, artist, died May 10, 2010
Frank Frazetta died of a stroke at the age of 82.
I will miss him. He made so many amazing illustrations and paintings. Below is one of my favourite from the Conan The Warrior book cover:
Monday, May 10, 2010
National Post sued
University of Victoria Professor Andrew Weaver has launched a lawsuit
against the National Post, Terence Corcoran, Peter Foster, and
Kevin Libin. It's about time.
The National Post columnists stated the Weaver is a
"corrupt scientist". They claimed that he fabricated stories about a
break-in into his office.
Weaver did no such thing. His office was indeed broken into, and
there is a police report to prove it. However, Weaver never made any
accusation with regard to who was responsible for it.
Why, then, did it say in the National Post, not once but
on four different occasions, by three different authors, Corcoran,
Foster, and Libin, that Weaver had accused the fossil fuel industry of
being responsible for the break-in?
Because the National Post prints lies, that's why. The editors
and management of the National Post know that Terence Corcoran is
a liar, but they keep him on the payroll, and don't fact-check his
stories.
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Happy F*cking Mother's Day (from Harper)
excerpt:
Harper again makes Canada an international pariah.
By the way,
the argument that 'abortion is mostly illegal in the developing world
anyway so what does it matter' is, surprise, surprise, bullshit. Abortion
-- at least to save the life of the woman, and often to preserve her
mental and/or physical health -- is nominally legal in most of the
counties where aid is desperately needed.
Access, of course, is a
totally different matter. And that's where the West must help,
providing training and supplies and supporting local efforts to improve
access and expand the conditions under which abortion is allowed.
Conservative harsh drug sentancing law up again
Tenants caught growing as few as six marijuana plants in their dwellings
could face automatic jail terms of at least nine months, under a
federal drug-sentencing bill revived Wednesday that imposes harsher
penalties on home renters than on owners.
...
Friday, May 7, 2010
Election results in Britain may push them to electoral reform
Yesterday’s British parliamentary election provided yet another
breath-taking example of how an antiquated winner-take-all voting system
distorts election results.
With 626 of the 650 seats declared (8am, May 7), the Conservatives
won about 47% of the seats with just 36% of the votes. Labour received
an equivalent windfall of undeserved seats: 40% of the seats with just
29% of the votes.
Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats won only 8% of the seats, despite
winning about 23% of the votes. As Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg
said, it is “abundantly clear the electoral system is broken.”
“As ludicrous as Britain’s election results are, they are no worse than
what we experience in Canada,” said Bronwen Bruch, President of Fair
Vote Canada, a multi-partisan citizens’ campaign for voting system
reform in Canada. "The big difference is that Britain may well move
forward on electoral reform, since both Labour and the Liberal
Democrats, who together represent a majority of voters, are prepared to
scrap the discredited first-past-the-post system. The Liberal Democrats
are expected to demand action on proportional representation.”
...
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Religious people more likely to be racist, study shows
No surprise here.
Excerpt:
This “religion-racism paradox,” as University of Southern California
social psychologist Wendy Wood explains it, is deeply embedded in
organized religion which, by its very nature, encourages people to
accept one fundamental belief system as superior to all others. The
required value judgment creates a kind of us-versus-them conflict, in
which members of a religious group develop ethnocentric attitudes toward
anyone perceived as different. The study, “Why Don’t We Practice What We Preach? A Meta-Analytic
Review of Religious Racism,” appeared in the journal Personality
and Social Psychology Review.
“Religion creates a very strong sense of a moral right and wrong
within the group,” says Wood. “When you do that, members of the group
will be more likely to derogate anyone who is not part of it.” And
because religion in America is practiced largely along segregated lines
(just 12 percent of U.S. congregations report even a moderate level of
diversity, one study shows) that derogation, and the sense of
superiority that drives such diminishment of others, can extend beyond
religious differences to race, class and ethnicity.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Lack of sleep can be hazardous to your health
“Consistently sleeping six to eight hours per night may be optimal for
health,”
How hot would the Earth have to get before it would be unlivable?
If global temperatures rise just 21 degrees Fahrenheit, half of humanity
will be cooked. A recent study shows that the planet doesn't have to
warm up very much before it becomes unlivable. And the death blow comes
from humidity.
...
Listening to prayer halts brain activity
Excerpts:
A team of Danish researchers have found that when listening to a
well-spoken person who claims to have divine healing powers, the regions
of the brain responsible for scepticism and vigilance become less
active.
...
Only in the devout volunteers did the brain activity monitored by the
researchers change in response to the prayers. Parts of the prefrontal
and anterior cingulate cortices, which play key roles in vigilance and
scepticism when judging the truth and importance of what people say,
were deactivated when the subjects listened to a supposed healer.
...
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Woman with severe environmental allergies is evicted.
Those plug-in air fresheners burn and constrict my throat. And I have mild environmental allergies.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Why Americans should never be allowed to travel
(thanks Glen!)
Hilarious anecdotes from travel agents.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Canadian DND contracted with Blackwater
Excerpt:
Post: The National Defence Department has spent more than
$6-million having its troops trained by the controversial Blackwater
security company [recently renamed Xe Services], whose own employees
have been accused of needlessly killing civilians in Iraq and
Afghanistan, documents show.
succession of personnel to Blackwater's Moyock, NC, training compound
from 2005 to as recently as April 2009... The work continued even after
the US State Department cancelled its pricey security contract with the
company in Iraq amid mounting criticism of Blackwater's actions...
Monday, April 26, 2010
Americans to pay health care penalty
Excerpt:
Nearly 4 million Americans will have to
pay a penalty if they fail to get health insurance when that element of
President Barack Obama's health care overhaul law kicks in, according to
congressional projections released Thursday.
The penalties will average a little more than $1,000 apiece in 2016,
the Congressional Budget Office said in a report.
The vast majority of people paying the fine will be middle class,
which would violate Obama's 2008 campaign pledge not to raise taxes on
individuals making less than $200,000 a year and couples making less
than $250,000.
...
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Psychedelics and anxiety treatments
aid anxiety treatments in study
Excerpt:
"There is now more psychedelic research taking place in the world
than at any time in the last 40 years," said Rick Doblin, executive
director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies,
which funds some of the work. "We're at the end of the beginning of the
renaissance."
He said that more than 1,200 people attended a conference in
California last weekend on psychedelic science.
But doing the research is not easy, Doblin and others say, with
government funders still leery and drug companies not interested in the
compounds they can't patent. That pretty much leaves private donors.
"There's still a lot of resistance to it," said David Nichols, a
Purdue University professor of medicinal chemistry and president of the
Heffter Institute, which is supporting the NYU study. "The whole hippie
thing in the 60s" and media coverage at the time "has kind of left a bad
taste in the mouth of the public at large.
Boobquake
Excerpt:
A
ONE-WOMAN mission to prove breasts don’t cause earthquakes has
swollen into a shirt-straining global movement preparing for the
inaugural “Boobquake”. Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi angered
womens’ groups around the world on Monday when he claimed that
promiscuous women were responsible for literally making the earth move.
“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt
their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently)
increases earthquakes,” Sedighi said…
Jennifer McCreight is determined to prove him wrong. Since
launching the “Boobquake”
Facebook page two days ago, she has enlisted more than 20,000 women
promising to show as much cleavage as possible on Monday, April 26. If
the world doesn’t then disappear into an apocalyptic fiery chasm, then
Sedighi will have no option but to admit he was wrong. “On Monday, April
26th, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own,” Ms McCreight
wrote. “Yes, the one usually reserved for a night on the town. I
encourage other female skeptics to join me and embrace the supposed
supernatural power of their breasts. Or short shorts, if that’s your
preferred form of immodesty. With the power of our scandalous bodies
combined, we should surely produce an earthquake.
...
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Noam Chomsky has "Never seen anything like this"
(thanks Ron!)
Excerpt:
...
What are
people supposed to think if someone says "I have got
an answer, we have an enemy'? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the
illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are
a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and
the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be
beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it
will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world
power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don't
think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the
Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who
will sweep the next election."
"I have
never seen anything like this in my lifetime," Chomsky added.
"I am old enough to remember the 1930s. My whole family was unemployed.
There were far more desperate conditions than today. But it was
hopeful. People had hope. The CIO was organizing. No one wants to say it
anymore but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil
rights organizing. Even things like giving my unemployed seamstress aunt
a week in the country. It was a life. There is nothing like that now.
The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration
and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is
going off into self-destructive fantasies."
...
Upcoming summer 2010 movies
I really wanna see Inception!
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