Robot Monkeys

“Strike me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” – Ken Lay

Well no, not really, but it might as well have been.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is investigating Enron’s role in setting up a regime to manipulate crude oil prices. A regime that still lives on some seven years after Enron’s collapse.

Enron and the complete collapse of the regulatory mechanisms in the 90s really apparently did a number. Not only did Enron cause the California Power Crisis, and through extension oust Gray Davis for the Governator™, but apparently they’re responsible for setting up a shadow market to manipulate the price of oil.

So I’ve seeing the propaganda ads from the American Petroleum Institute talking about how we should pump America dry. The big selling point? We have enough oil to last us 60 years. We can run out in my lifetime. Jesus. That’s a winning solution, all the way.

Not to be out done, the coal industry just ran ad saying how if we don’t strip mine America, “We’ll have to say goodbye to the American life we all love.” Wow. Fear. Nice.

So I finally saw Iron Man.

Three words: Retractable Stripper Poles

tail (GNU coreutils) 5.97:

tail: warning: following standard input indefinitely is ineffective

Interestingly enough, not only does it let you do this (Yay UNIX!), but this message doesn’t exist in tail (textutils) 2.1 from four years previously in 2002. I also find it interesting that GNU moved tail from textutils to coreutils as well.

So I saw this article on /. about burning up a some VIA chip, and for some reason I read it. I think because I thought there actually was an answer about how long it took for the chip to die without a heatsink. Apparently this is all some marketing stunt by VIA to promote their new ARTiGo Pico-ITX builder kit. Normally I don’t really care too much about this stuff, but I’ll admit that sometimes those modded cases are kind of cool, albeit in that incredibly lame way. The thing that caught my eye about the the Pico-ITX was that it’s smaller than a baseball, and is designed to fit (with a 2.5 inch IDE drive) into a 5.25 inch drive bay.

Wow. I can have multiple complete machines within my main machine. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those! ;)

Edsger W. Dijkstra:

I found the UCSC campus not an inspiring place, and the longer I stayed there, the more depressing it became.

So I put of making my SSRC retreat poster to the last minute so I can’t use BELS to print it, so I’m stuck going to Kinkos. $100.90 for a single 48 in x 36 in color poster. The kicker? “So you want this tomorrow afternoon?” Yeah. It takes 24 hours for you to just press print.

100 dollars? Please. Print 34 posters and you’ve already paid for a HP Designjet Z3100 Photo Printer. Such a fucking rip off.

So Microsoft is colluding with General Electric (via NBC-Universal) to break television and to move us 30 years into the past. That’s right. Microsoft conspired to remove the ability to record television shows. Why? They probably got paid off. I suspect this is part of the .

Should anyone really be surprised that this happened? Of course not! Microsoft shoved their ironically named, “Play for Sure” digital restrictions management scheme overboard and screwed all the those dumb enough to exchange money for something they don’t control. (This goes for both the end users and the device “partners.”)

So just in case any of you still don’t understand how things like this work. You are not a customer. You are a commodity. You don’t even have a seat at the table. Microsoft, GE, none of the megacorps care about you. You’re a resource to be exploited, and are bought and sold like a jailhouse bitch.

So GWB calls the Democrats, and in an obvious implication, Obama as “appeasers.” Nothing is new here. GWB and the Republicans have been doing that for seven years now. It’s absurd rhetoric, but again, none of that is new. What is new is that he did it from Israel.

That’s crossing the line. He can has the right to make sure everyone knows just how stupid he by making outrageous attacks all he wants while here. But you don’t criticize the government abroad. You don’t engage in political games while abroad. As the saying goes: “politics stops at the water’s edge.”

Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD):

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think I would be great. First of all, I know how to behave at weddings and funerals. And I know how to be commander in chief. I’d bring a lot of fun to the job. We would rock the Naval Observatory.