Updated: 10/1/04; 11:32:10 AM.
A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog
An attempt to use Radio to further my goal for world domination through the study of biology, computing and knowledge management.
        

Tuesday, September 28, 2004


John Stewart For Debate Moderator Part II. I am going to take this a step further. John Stewart as Debate Committee Chair. He decides what rules apply. The candidates aren't allowed any say. Via AMERICABlog, the latest daily show transcript:
JON STEWART: Well Stephen, what do you think is going to happen now at CBS News?

STEPHEN COLBERT, Daily Show Senior Media Correspondent: Jon, there's got to be some accountability. Dan Rather is the head, the commander in chief if you will of his organization. He's someone in the ultimate position of power who made a harmful decision based upon questionable evidence. Then, to make things worse, he stubbornly refused to admit his mistake, choosing instead to stay the course and essentially occupy this story for too long. This man has got to go!

STEWART: Uh ... we're talking about Dan Rather...?

COLBERT: Yes Jon, Dan Rather. CBS is in chaos, it's unsafe, riven by internal rivalries. If you ask me, respected, reputable outsiders need to be brought in to help the rebuilding effort.

STEWART: ... at CBS News?

COLBERT: Yeah, at CBS news! What possible other unrelated situation could my words be equally applicable to?! Now people need to be held accountable. The commander in chief, the vice president, the secretary of defense, the national security adviser -- everyone at CBS News needs to go! Jon, I can tell you, Walter Cronkite is rolling over in his grave.

STEWART: Walter Cronkite is still alive.

COLBERT: Not according to my sources ... at CBS News.

Ya know what. Forget the whole debate thing. I want Jon Stewart to be head of my new organization, the National Organization against Broadcasting Stupidity (NO BS.) Before you are allowed to practice the craft of journalism you have to be approved by Jon Stewart and his crack team of fake news experts. If you think being objective means when one guy says something awful, you have to report something equally awful from the other guy, no license. If you rush a story to print or broadcast, without fact checking the hell out of it, because some scumbag at another rag is gonna beat you to it, you get suspended for two weeks and have to give your next two scoops to the competition. If you buy into the language as framed by some politician, you have to put 5$ in the obsenity jar. If you run ads as news, without fact checking them as you report them, you get fed to lions. More rules to come. NO BS will be starting local chapters soon. Be ready. [Change for America -]

Stewart is one of the top 10 political reporters named by the Columbia school of Journalism. Damn straight. It is a topsy-turvy world when satire tells you more aout politics than the news. Or perhaps not so weird, given the state of today's news organizations.  comment []9:55:52 AM    



Hackers use porn to target Microsoft JPEG hole. Malicious hackers are seeding Internet news groups that traffic in pornography with JPEG images that take advantage of a recently disclosed security hole in Microsoft Corp.'s software, according to warnings from antivirus software companies and Internet security groups. [InfoWorld: Top News]

ANother reason not to have Windows. My friends with Windows have tremendous roblems with viruses and spyware. Now they need to worry about downloading pictures. From shutting down airplanes to wreing individual computers, Windows really seems to be more of a danger than a help.   comment []9:46:19 AM    



flight risk -or- "where do you want to crash today?".

Win2K crash strands 800 planes mid-air; leads to at least 5 in-air "near-miss" incidents. What I want to know is how they got the okay to deploy Win2K, since I'm almost positive the Microsoft EULA (that's the End-User License Agreement for you non-techy types) forbids the use of the software in "life-critical" situations. (Google isn't being my friend this morning, or I'd cite chapter and verse.) Yet another reason to never climb on a plane again...

Link via Boing Boing.

[genehack.org]

Oh my God! Remember the shutdown of the airports in Southern California a wekk or so ago because of a disruption in the radio system. read this a wee. It was due to Windows:

The failure was ultimately down to a combination of human error and a design glitch in the Windows servers brought in over the past three years to replace the radio system's original Unix servers, according to the FAA.

The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload, a union official told the LA Times. To avoid this automatic shutdown, technicians are required to restart the system manually every 30 days. An improperly trained employee failed to reset the system, leading it to shut down without warning, the official said. Backup systems failed because of a software failure, according to a report in The New York Times.

The need to restart before 49.7 days is an old bug in Windows. MS apparently never expected anyone to go 50 days without having to reboot (one would think a pretty safe bet, given how buggy it is). But they did release some patches. Why were these not applied? So, they forgot to reboot at 30 days and then crashed the system. What idiot went from a Unix-based system, which can essentially go forever without rebooting, to Window?. Especially in a setting where Windows is life-threatening. Who is running the FAA these days?  comment []9:42:43 AM    



Florida All Over Again.

Jimmy Carter, international man of voting integrity, writes in the Washington Post today about what we can expect this time around in Florida, concluding that, "basic international requirements for a fair election are missing":

The most significant of these requirements are:

  • A nonpartisan electoral commission or a trusted and nonpartisan official who will be responsible for organizing and conducting the electoral process before, during and after the actual voting takes place. Although rarely perfect in their objectivity, such top administrators are at least subject to public scrutiny and responsible for the integrity of their decisions. Florida voting officials have proved to be highly partisan, brazenly violating a basic need for an unbiased and universally trusted authority to manage all elements of the electoral process.

  • Uniformity in voting procedures, so that all citizens, regardless of their social or financial status, have equal assurance that their votes are cast in the same way and will be tabulated with equal accuracy. Modern technology is already in use that makes electronic voting possible, with accurate and almost immediate tabulation and with paper ballot printouts so all voters can have confidence in the integrity of the process. There is no reason these proven techniques, used overseas and in some U.S. states, could not be used in Florida.
  • A recent issue of Vanity Fair took an incredibly in-depth look at what happened in 2000 and what has (and hasn't) changed since. Since they don't have a web site, one blogger got permission to post PDFs of the article[~]read it here.

    [Blog for America]

    I wonder if there will be enough international observers for our elections? Sounds like Florida, the state run by the President's brother, could suck up all of them.  comment []12:43:02 AM    



    "How F**king American Are You?" [Daypop Top 40]

    Only in America. At least for now.  comment []12:38:41 AM    



    FUBAR. Rage. Stuff like this just makes me filled with determination to get us a new president. We can no longer afford this kind of ignorance.
    Hecker retired from the military years ago but recently left his lucrative private practice in Detroit to save lives at Landstuhl.

    "I'm here for him âo[per thou] nobody else," he says, pointing to the soldier. "I didn't come here for my government."

    He pauses, then blurts out: "Bush is an idiot."

    Immediately, he regrets having said that about the U.S. president, and makes clear he's been under enormous stress.

    He describes taking a bullet out of the neck of an 18-year-old soldier six days ago, a wound that left the young man a quadriplegic.

    "It's terrible, terrible, terrible," Hecker says. "When we talked to him, he just cried."

    "If it was me, I'd tell them to take me off the machine," he says. He then considers his job and adds, "I'll never be the same mentally."

    What the hospital's chief psychologist calls "compassion fatigue" is a widespread syndrome among the medical staff.

    "There's a great deal of hurt going on in the hospital," says Maj. Stephen Franco.

    But Maj. Cathy Martin, the nurse in charge of the intensive care unit, prefers to deal with her stress by calling on Americans to consider the plight of the war wounded when making a choice in the Nov. 2 presidential election.

    "People need to vote for the right people to be in office and they need to be empowered to influence change," she says.

    As I think of my cousin who just returned from there (who was regularly treating the injured), as I think of another of my cousin's step brother, who just died there, as I think of every family who has someone over there dying for this Administration's poorly planned, badly executed, misguided, manipulative, horrifying war, I remind myself that we can not take this election for granted, not for a second. Do not get complacent for a single day. Do not waiver. Go make phone calls. Go through your roledex. Leave no stone unturned. We must win this election, or all our families will continue to suffer needlessly while this president stubbornly sticks to a failed policy that has made us far less safe, and has given the terrorists the best recruiting tool they ever could have asked for. And when you think of that magic number, 1000 troops killed, like it has some kind of signifigance, think of these numbers too:
    Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began in March, 2003, almost 16,000 wounded, injured or sick soldiers from the conflict have been evacuated to Landstuhl.

    As of Friday, 1,042 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq âo[per thou] more than 900 of them since May 1, 2003, when U.S. President George W. Bush declared major combat over âo[per thou] and 7,400 were wounded in combat, according to the Pentagon. About 3,400 of the wounded returned to duty after 72 hours. Almost all the rest came to Landstuhl, in southwestern Germany, for treatment.

    Remember why we are all here. Go out and do your part. [Change for America -]

    No words.  comment []12:35:36 AM    



    OOPS

    WOnderful. The FBI had messages from al Queda sources before 9-11 that said that zero-hour was Sept. 11 and that the match is about to begiin. But they apparently did not have enough translators to read this until days after the attack. Perhaps if someone had been shaking the trees, some of this would have fallen out. When Clinton did tis, the Millennium plot was discovered. After reading the report in August that Bin Laden was determined to attack in the US, why was nothing done.

    How about the fact that the Army released 7 highly-trained Arabic linguists from its elite Defense Language Institute because they were gay. See sexual orientation is more important than national security. When the government has a critical shortage Arabic translators, we shitcanned them. 37 of them have been released over the last two years. So they clean out pools instead of working to help our national security.

    The same idiots who are afraid of gay marriage may also have helped harm our national security due to their idiotic prejudices. Perhaps if we had had enough translators in 2001, we would not be where we are today. Perhaps if we had another 37 or more, we would find the next attack. But then, that would take an administration that would do whatever it took to fight terrorism, even use gay translators, even anger some in its base. Not gonna happen in this administration. It appears they would rather have another attack than use homosexuals.

    At a time where the need is critical, where we have a demonstrated instance where the lack of translators failed us, why in the world would this Administration waste the training and usefulness of all these translators? Why are we not using EVERY single body we can to fight the war on terrorism? The only thing that pops to my mind, given this Administration's action in many areas (i.e. protection of ports) is that they really do ot want the war on terrorism to go away. Fear makes winning elections so much easier. Every fascist regime in history has known this.  comment []12:00:44 AM    



     
    September 2004
    Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
          1 2 3 4
    5 6 7 8 9 10 11
    12 13 14 15 16 17 18
    19 20 21 22 23 24 25
    26 27 28 29 30    
    Aug   Oct






    Blogs
    News
    Journals


    Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website.

    Listed on BlogShares

    Subscribe to "A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog" in Radio UserLand.

    Click to see the XML version of this web page.

    Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


    © Copyright 2004 Richard Gayle.
    Last update: 10/1/04; 11:32:10 AM.