Blackmoor Vituperative

This is just too cool.

I only have one question: how can someone have such a great secret base, and not use it for super-villainy? Using it for mere horticulture shows such a lack of ambition. But then, I guess that’s what they say about marijuana….

If God can do anything, can he make a mountain so heavy that God himself cannot lift it?

The computer requirements to run the Energy Department’s performance program for a national nuclear waste repository are so complex that they may thwart state review of the government’s work, a Nevada official said.

A simulation that aims to forecast whether Yucca Mountain can safely hold thousands of tons of nuclear waste needs a network of 30 master servers and 298 process servers – or a total of 752 processors operating in tandem, said Bob Loux, chief of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.

“No participant can reasonably expect to duplicate” the computer cluster, Loux said in a letter sent Tuesday to Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Dale Klein.

“The model is so complicated and so large, and takes so many computers to run it,” Loux said, “that it is fundamentally not checkable by any third party, including the NRC staff.”

(from Nevada Appeal, Nevada Appeal)

YesButNoButYes has collected what they think are the top 15 unintentionally funny comic book panels ever. Funny, funny stuff.

You can see more where this came from at http://www.superdickery.com/.

In a truly incredible display of governmental disregard for personal privacy, Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin has refused to take down — or provide any access restrictions — on tens of thousands of personal data records that identify borrowers’ SSNs, bank account numbers, home addresses and phone numbers, The Associated Press reports.

His resistance comes just weeks after he criticized Gov. Deval Patrick for failing to protect voter information on his campaign site.

“It’s totally unacceptable that they are contemplating leaving it up,” said Betty Ostergren, a Virginia-based privacy advocate. “Once they realize it’s a veritable treasure trove, identity thieves will flock to it. They need to shut the links down.”

Galvin refused to shut down the links, saying: “This is standard practice in the business world,” he said. “It’s necessary for commerce. There are people who are reliant upon this system.”

At issue are Uniform Commercial Code filings that borrowers make when they put up collateral to secure a loan. While intended for lenders’ research, the information is freely available to all. The site has no access restrictions.

A quick check on Wednesday by The Associated Press showed names, addresses and other personal information for various Massachusetts residents. In one case, a copy of a woman’s personal check — complete with her name, phone number, address, bank account number and all the account information for a loan with General Motors’ financing arm — was posted.

And Galvin sees nothing hypocritical about criticizing Patrick while displaying all this data on the open net.

“That’s very different from what we’re talking about here,” Galvin said, who was aware of his office’s policy when he criticized Patrick. “The governor’s site is a political committee. Our site is a governmental function. This is an essential part of commerce.”

Complete nonsense, of course. Commerce is not at restrained by having to enter a password or having the data encrypted so it can only be used by legitimate lenders.

(from ZDNet, MA exposes thousands of private data – and doesn’t plan to stop

While corporate IT departments spent countless hours and dollars updating IT systems for the March 11 move to daylight-saving time (DST) in the U.S., the largest cost of the time change to companies involves business meetings — some of which are still susceptible to DST-related scheduling errors.

[…]

“The biggest cost is the hidden cost of confusion over the time of meetings,” Ferris wrote in a subscribers-only Web bulletin yesterday. “Almost everyone involved with U.S./Canada meetings will miss some, or show up prematurely.” Those missed connections waste an average of half an hour to one hour per person, he said, and with about 100 million electronically connected workers in the U.S., that will cost about $3 billion in lost productivity.

“A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money,” he said.

(from Computer World, The corporate cost of DST? $3B, says analyst)

This doesn’t even begin to approach the real cost, factoring in the time wasted by normal people in their everyday lives, running around fiddling with clocks, missing appointments, and so on. Why, on my personal laptop (which still runs Windows — Windows XP Pro, to be exact), the time change required a patch from Microsoft which played hell with my calendar, turning around 1000 appointents and scheduled items into two-day events.

It would be very easy to blame Microsoft for that. Hell, it’s not like they haven’t done enough things worth blaming them for. But this wasn’t their fault. There should have been no need for that patch, because there was no need to fiddle with the time to begin with. So, on top of the hour or so that it took me to straighten out my calendar (and I’m not the only one, by the way — this was a pretty widespread problem), how much did Microsoft and other companies spend to patch and update software just to comply with this idiotic, useless, and completely arbitrary change in the display of our clocks? And that’s just one way this absurd Daylight “Saving” Time fiasco costs us all time and money.

A hack for Microsoft is spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (aka “FUD“) concerning GPL3. This is no surprise, since that’s primarily what hacks for Microsoft do.

As I am looking at the auditions for the second season of Who Wants to Be a Superhero?, a few of things have become apparent:

1) Most aspiring supers desperately need help with their costumes.

2) Most aspiring supers are doughy guys with guts bigger than mine.

3) Of the few aspiring female supers, most are doughy gals with guts bigger than mine.

4) Something about being near a wrestling ring makes people think they need to shout to be heard, even though they are speaking into a microphone.

5) A lot of people are unclear on the distinction between “super hero” and “renaissance fair volunteer” (huzzah!).

Here are my picks of the best from the auditions currently online. It’s hard picking good ones, because, well, most of them are just really, really bad (and not in a good way). Even these are just sort of okay, and not really good.

American Angel
Elementas
Fire Ant
Jetstream
Mama Voodoo and Wyld Cat
Midnight Wolf
Omnicron
Optimyst

I thought about listing a few of the worst, but I started to feel sorry for them, so you’ll have to find the bad ones on your own. Maybe I am getting soft-hearted in my old age.

Here’s some fun stuff:

PC World’s The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time

Computer World’s Don’t Believe the Hype: The 21 Biggest Technology Flops

The early onset of daylight saving time in the United States this year may have been for naught.

The move to turn the clocks forward by an hour on March 11 rather than the usual early April date was mandated by the U.S. government as an energy-saving effort.

But other than forcing millions of drowsy American workers and school children into the dark, wintry weather three weeks early, the move appears to have had little impact on power usage.

“We haven’t seen any measurable impact,” said Jason Cuevas, spokesman for Southern Co., one of the nation’s largest power companies, echoing comments from several large utilities.

(from ZDNet, Daylight saving shift fails to curb energy use)

Gee, what a surprise.

The problem with people is not just that that they are stupid. They are, but by itself that is not a large problem. The real problem is that people are stupid and that they want to force others to obey them. That’s where the real problems of a society come from: people having the power to force other people to do stupid things.

As for Daylight Saving Time, I like this analogy:

“It’s like cutting off 6 inches from the bottom of the blanket and sewing it on the top because your shoulders are exposed.”

Yes, that’s exactly what it’s like.

The US Department of Homeland Security is insisting that Verisign hand over the master keys of the Internet.

If it succeeds, the US will be able to track DNS Security Extensions (DNSSec) all the way back to the servers that represent the name system’s root zone on the Internet.

Effectively it would mean that US spooks could snoop on anyone in the Worldwide wibble and place control of the Interweb tubes firmly in the paws of the US government.

(from The Inquirer, Homeland Security wants master key for the Internet)