Blackmoor Vituperative

A few pieces over the weekend that are worth reading.

NYT op-ed columnist Frank Rich takes a swipe at competitive sourcing:

Mr. Safavian, a former lobbyist, had a hand in federal spending, first as chief of staff of the General Services Administration and then as the White House’s chief procurement officer, overseeing a kitty of some $300 billion (plus $62 billion designated for Katrina relief). He arrived to help enforce a Bush management initiative called “competitive sourcing.” Simply put, this was a plan to outsource as much of government as possible by forcing federal agencies to compete with private contractors and their K Street lobbyists for huge and lucrative assignments. The initiative’s objective, as the C.E.O. administration officially put it, was to deliver “high-quality services to our citizens at the lowest cost.”

The result was low-quality services at high cost: the creation of a shadow government of private companies rife with both incompetence and corruption. Last week Representative Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who commissioned the first comprehensive study of Bush administration contracting, revealed that the federal procurement spending supervised for a time by Mr. Safavian had increased by $175 billion between 2000 and 2005. (Halliburton contracts alone, unsurprisingly, went up more than 600 percent.) Nearly 40 cents of every dollar in federal discretionary spending now goes to private companies.

George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley in the LAT on the return of TIA:

‘Big Brother’ Bush and connecting the data dots [LAT, 6.24.2006] The Total Information Awareness program was killed in 2003, but its spawn present bigger threats to privacy.

And WP tech columnist Rob Pegoraro on the missing personal data:

We’ve spent years trying to secure our computers against online identity theft, but the clumsiness or incompetence of Big Government and Big Companies is going to leave us unguarded anyway.

(from FCW Insider, The FCW Insider: Some weekend reading)

Note to self: The next time I am in an interview and I am asked if I am willing to provide support to users, do not simply say “Yes: I like working with end users because it helps me understand what the system I am developing is supposed to accomplish for them.” Reason: that answer assumes I am actually DEVELOPING something, rather than acting as a glorified help-desk for poorly designed COTS software.

Second note to self: The next time I am in an interview and I am asked if I am willing to provide support to users, make sure that such support is provided during normal working hours ONLY, and that the portion of my time spent on such support will be no more than 15% (rather 50%-70%).

File under “as if you needed yet another reason to swich to OpenOffice”:

A weakness in how Office applications handle Macromedia Flash files exposes Microsoft customers to cyberattacks, experts have warned.

Flash files embedded in Office documents could run and execute code without any warning, Symantec said in an alert sent to customers on Thursday. The security issue is the third problem reported within a week that affects Microsoft Office users.

“A successful attack may allow attackers to access sensitive information and potentially execute malicious commands on a vulnerable computer,” Symantec said in the alert, which was sent to users of its DeepSight security intelligence. The vulnerability was reported by researcher Debasis Mohanty.

The issue relates to the ability to load ActiveX controls in an Office document and is not a vulnerability but an Office feature, a Microsoft representative said. “This behavior is by design and by itself does not represent a security risk to customers,” he said. An ActiveX control is a small application typically used to make Web sites more interactive.

(from ZDNet, Microsoft Office hit by another security problem)

Microsoft Office, Flash, and ActiveX? Wow, that’s a trifecta. If it was put to music, it’d be a country music song. All it’s missing is a Sony rootkit, and you’d have the four horsemen of the software apocalypse.

More evidence of the absurdity of intellectual property law in the USA (specifically software patents, this time):

Microsoft loses appeal in Office patent spat

I’m all for the “little guy” standing up to Goliath. Nonetheless, software patents are an inherently bad idea. The sooner we rid ourselves of them, the better off all of us — including Microsoft — will be.

Google unveiled on Monday a new version of its Google Earth application, which features greater coverage and higher resolution, even showing people walking in some locations–detail you get with aerial photography and not usually satellites.

The downloadable Google Earth 4.0 runs on PCs, Macs and Linux-based machines and is available in localized versions in French, Italian, German and Spanish, according to Michael Jones, chief technology officer of Google Earth. Jones, speaking here at Google Geo Developer Day, said the improvements will eventually show up in the Web-based Google Maps site.

(from ZDNet, Google Earth zooms in)

While you are over there, check out Google Sketchup.

I had a great idea for a vacation. I was going to buy tickets to Wicked during one of the breaks between Susan’s classes, and we’d fly to wherever it was playing, stay there a few days, and then come back home. As it turned out, the show is playing in Costa Mesa, CA during Susan’s end-of-summer class break. This is down the road from one of my sisters, as well as being practically next door to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. I even found a deal on a four star hotel in Los Angeles for almost half price. Everthing was working out.

So we sat down today and planned out the dates, so that we would get the best prices on airfare (the most expensive part of the trip). Leave Virginia on Tuesday, go to Disneyland on Wednesday and Friday, Knott’s Berry Farm on Thursday, go to the beach Saturday and Sunday dutring the day, see the show on Saturday night, visit my sister on Sunday night, come back on Monday. Everything meshed perfectly.

So I go to the web site to order tickets. Not available online. So I call. They do not go on sale until 2006-06-19. No problem: I can wait a few days to order them. Out of curiosity, I asked if shows at this theater normally sold out.

Him: “Oh, this show will sell out very quickly. In fact, there are only a few seats left, in the balcony at the back.”

Me: “Wait a minute: I thought you said that tickets wouldn’t go on sale until June 19th.”

Him (cheerfully): “That’s right.”

Me: “…”

Me: “How is it that the seats are almost sold out if the tickets aren’t on sale yet?”

Him: “Oh, season ticket holders, and some American Express premiere card members have bought tickets. Over 80% of them have been sold already.”

I wanted to say something really nasty, but I didn’t. What I did say was, “I guess we won’t be going. Nevermind, then.”

I would still like to say something really nasty.

I’m not sure what, if anything, we will do for our vacation now. I’m kind of bummed.

I wonder if they picked the date intentionally to coincide with our Independence Day?

Gun Owners of America E-Mail Alert
8001 Forbes Place, Suite 102, Springfield, VA 22151
Phone: 703-321-8585 / FAX: 703-321-8408

Home

ACTION: Please urge your two U.S. Senators to cosponsor legislation by Sen. David Vitter (S. 1488) to withhold funds from the UN. And please send a message to the State Department, encouraging Secretary Condoleezza Rice and our ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, to oppose the global gun control that is being planned for July 4! Contact information and pre-written language can be found at the end of this alert.

Wednesday, June 7, 2006

The letter to one of our GOA members starts off innocently enough.

“Dear Friend,” it says. “Thank you for taking the time to contact me… regarding United Nations (UN) firearm regulation and protection of Second Amendment rights.”

The senator goes on to say, “As an American citizen, I believe that is of the utmost importance to protect our liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. Among these is the Second Amendment.”

Sounds like one of our guys, right?

Actually, this May 11, 2006 letter was penned by none other than one of the most anti-gun senators in the Congress — Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI).

What especially caught GOA’s attention is that Sen. Kohl emphatically states that the UN is NOT trying to disarm us.

“Current UN proposals do not infringe upon these [Second Amendment] rights,” he says. “The State Department has assured me that ‘the Convention is intended to address the problem of transnational trafficking in firearms, and is not meant to regulate the internal firearms trade’ of individual nations, including the United States.”

Did Kohl really say that? And did the State Department really say that current UN proposals don’t infringe upon Second Amendment rights? That the UN is only interested in stopping the international trafficking of firearms, and is not trying to infringe the rights of law-abiding citizens?

Well, as they say on the farm: that’s just horse-pucky.

The fact is, the United Nations has ALREADY TRIED to impose mandatory gun controls for member nations. In 2001, delegates from more than 140 nations met together to hammer out various firearms restrictions. But there were a few countries — most notably, the United States — that resisted all efforts to discuss legally binding measures or restrictions on civilian ownership of firearms.

The hero at that conference was our very own John Bolton, who at that time was an undersecretary for arms control at the State Department. Bolton, who is now the US ambassador to the UN, said that our country would not support any language that conflicted with the constitutional right of our citizens to keep and bear arms.

That was the proverbial monkey wrench in the cog wheel. Without US support for mandatory restrictions, the agreement became a “voluntary” one.

But make no mistake about it, the overwhelming majority of member nations at the UN hate the idea of civilians owning guns, and they want to bring an end to such freedoms. They despise our Second Amendment to the US Constitution.

The leading organization that is pushing for global gun control is IANSA (International Action Network on Small Arms). They are the umbrella lobby group for all the anti-gun groups at the United Nations.

IANSA is helping coordinate an international convention this July 4 to discuss, among other things, “the importance of regulating guns owned by civilians.” This is the latest series of conferences where nations are putting together a global gun control treaty.

But Sen. Kohl is either lying or is ignorant to what the UN has been up to. All he needs to do is check the IANSA website to see what the global gun grabbers are saying about the upcoming global meeting on small arms. Kohl tells his constituent that the UN “will not infringe upon the rights of U.S. citizens to bear ‘firearms such as hunting rifles and pistols.'”

But that is exactly what a majority of the UN delegates want. In its 2006 report, Bringing the Global Gun Crisis Under Control, IANSA defines small arms as “weapons that can be carried and used by an individual, for example, revolvers, pistols, rifles, shotguns, sub-machine guns and assault rifles.” So, it sure sounds like they’re talking about regulating the kinds of guns that average citizens own.

IANSA laments that “there are no international guidelines to assist states in regulating gun ownership among their own citizens.” So what kinds of guidelines (that is, gun restrictions) would IANSA like to see imposed in countries around the world? Consider just a sampling:

* Registration of all firearms
* A national system of licensing
* Prohibition on the private ownership of military-style rifles, including semi-automatic variants
* Mandatory, lock-up-your-safety storage requirements

Thankfully, there is something that we can do about this.

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) has introduced the Second Amendment Protection Act (S. 1488), which will “withhold funding from the United Nations if the United Nations abridges the rights provided by the Second Amendment to the Constitution.”

If the UN wants to meddle with America’s internal affairs and attempt to undermine our freedoms and our U.S. Constitution, then the American taxpayer will stop paying a huge portion (22%) of the entire UN budget, something we can ill afford and which serves no great purpose at any time.

If the UN tries to mess with us, they will pay a price for it.

CONTACT INFORMATION:

1. Please urge your two U.S. Senators to cosponsor the Vitter legislation (S. 1488) to withhold funds from the UN. To contact your senators, you can visit the Gun Owners Legislative Action Center at http://www.gunowners.org/activism.htm.

2. Please send a message to the State Department, encouraging Secretary Condoleezza Rice and our ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, to oppose these global gun controls. While there is no direct email that is available, you can contact them via phone or fax (Talking Points are provided below to assist you):

Phone: 202-647-9572
Fax: 202-647-2283

Welcome to Urville, the imaginary city.

http://www.kirchersociety.org/blog/?p=361

http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant/gilles.cfm

http://www.urville.com/

I wonder if the Mac cultists will ever realize that Apple is just as evil as Microsoft, if not more so. The only real difference is that Microsoft understands how to tread the thin line between despot and “hero of the people”. Apple doesn’t.

Apple’s logo should be a bundle of birch rods tied around an axe with a red ribbon.

Fake crab meat. You know what I’m talking about: that sweet, white-with-red-stripes substance that you can get for about one-quarter the price of real crab meat. I love it. I can eat a pound of it at a time (preferably cold).

But I always wondered where this stuff came from. From a factory somewhere, certainly. But how is it made? Like sausage? Like lunch meat? Like soylent green?

Today I found out:

How products are made — imitation crab meat

Wow. I had no idea that the underlying technology that makes fake crab meat possible had been kicking around since the 16th century. That’s wild. I also would never have guessed that the sugar and sorbitol in fake crab meat served an essential manufacturing purpose. I always just figured it was there to make the product sweeter so that we fat-assed Americans would buy it.

The Internet really is amazing, you know. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.