Habemus plus vis computatoris quam Deus

Or, not.

LiveJournal appears to have made some global change somewhere in the bowels of S2 that has broken my comments page beyond my ability to figure out what's wrong with it.  I'd noticed some anomalous behavior over the past month or two, and then sometime last week it completely blew up.  I've managed to find some of the errant HTML that's fouling it up, but not all of it, and I can't determine where in the system it's coming from.  Not only that, but the original style I based mine off of doesn't appear to exist on LiveJournal any more (or if it does, I can't find it).

So I guess it's time for a restyle on the LiveJournal side.

I'm thinking about starting with this, and tweaking from there ... but probably not nearly as extensively as my modifications to the previous style, where I moved elements around, installed new chrome, changed code and all kinds of stuff.

(Gaah!  It doesn't look as though I can statically link to a preview of a specific style.  The preview link displays as "whatever S2 style preview you last looked at", which is less than useful.  :p  Ah well ... maybe I'll just have to go for it.)

... from the Dreamwidth staff is that it's believed the DDoS against LiveJournal is targeted not so much at LJ itself, as at Russian bloggers who post on LJ.

Keep in mind, by the way, that having a Dreamwidth account doesn't mean you have to stop using LiveJournal, as one commenter imputed.  For about the past year or more, I've been making ALL of my posts on Dreamwidth — even though LogJam still doesn't work quite as well on Dreamwidth, and can't re-edit Dreamwidth posts — and having them automatically crossposted to my LiveJournal account.  One benefit of this, in addition to redundancy, is that I don't have to keep retrying to find a time when LJ is responsive to make a post.  Dreamwidth's servers will retry the crosspost for me.  So when LJ is under DDoS, like now, I can post more reliably to LJ via Dreamwidth than I can directly.

So, for those commenting that offering Dreamwidth invites is helping the DDoSers:  Think it through.

(Of course, replying to comments is still problematic...)

It is fairly well documented that a massive lobbying effort had been undertaken by the Wall Street banks to remove the last restrictions that had been placed on the financial sector by the government in the aftermath of the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.  PBS Frontline has done a good job of documenting this.

[...]

We now have an economy in which five banks control over 50 percent of the entire banking industry, four or five corporations own most of the mainstream media, and the top one percent of families hold a greater share of the nation's wealth than any time since 1930.  This sort of concentration of wealth and power is a classic setup for the failure of a democratic republic and the stifling of organic economic growth.

[...]

We must recognize that a partnership between corporations and government is a dalliance along the road to fascism, inimical to the freedom of the individual.  Corporations do not and must not have the same rights of individuals, because it is the Bill of Rights that was meant to balance the power, to protect the individual from powerful combinations and concentrations of wealth and power.

[...]

The United States [is] in what I call a credibility trap, in which no substantial reforms can take place because both political parties are compromised, I am not optimistic that real change will occur until the economic situation get much worse and a genuinely independent third party movement threatens the status quo with serious investigations and criminal indictments.  The Tea Party started as a movement for financial reform, but became quickly co-opted by powerful financial interests and slick public relations campaigns.  You hardly ever hear about real financial reform from them anymore.

Another interesting article from the same source:  Catherine Austin Fitts on "the financial coup d'état".

Other than Bernie Madoff, essentially no one has been indicted or convicted.  Indeed, the people who engineered the housing bubble and related policies have been rewarded with numerous public and private positions as well as financial compensation.  We are watching record bonuses on Wall Street.

The institutions that engineered the housing bubble and the financial crisis have been richly rewarded with $12 trillion in bailouts, expanded access to the federal credit, and government assumption for the debt and liabilities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

[...]

Wall Street and Washington issued trillions in fraudulent securities, used it to gain control over trillions in assets, and then were able to engineer the taxpayers refinancing out the fraudulent paper.  Think of this as a leveraged buyout of a planet.

Cupiditas pecuniae radix malorum est.

Quick recap:

Two years and ten months ago, I bought a Hanns-G HG281D 28" LCD monitor.  It came with a three-year warranty.

After just less than two years, it developed a fault causing screen distortion severe enough to render it unusable.  I sent it in for repair under warranty.  It came back with that fault fixed, but with a different fault instead.  I called Hannspree, who said they'd replace the monitor.  They did, with a used monitor.  They assured me my original three-year warranty transferred and was still in effect.

A few months ago, the replacement monitor developed a fault.  A column driver in the LCD stuck on, leaving an always-on red line down the screen.  When I called them about it to check on warranty status, they told me it was out of warranty, and offered to repair it for $90 plus shipping, half the price of replacing it with a new monitor.  The repair would be warranteed for only 90 days.  Apparently ANY repair is warranteed for only 90 days, which as I understand it is why my monitor is now out of warranty.

To give credit where due, the service manager said he could get the repair fee down to $80.  Though in that case, why not quote $80 up front in the first place... that's still around $120 with shipping.

Anyway, about a week ago I decided that for $120, I can live with a vertical red line more easily than I can manage without the extra 120 rows of a 1920x1200 vs. 1920x1080 monitor, on my work machine.  So I switched the Hanns-G back onto babylon5.

Well, now the power switch appears to have gone intermittent.  There's no point calling Hannspree.  They already told me the monitor is out of warranty.

Moral of the story:

DO NOT BUY HANNSPREE PRODUCTS.  They do not honor their warranties.

Unfortunately there appear to be vanishingly few 28" range monitors on the market that still do 1920x1200; and the next jump up, 30" monitors at 2560x1600, is a huge price jump to about $1500, more than I can justify right now.

Speaking of fail, here's the Washington Examiner again on the GM bailout.

One huge problem – and a crystalline visual aide of all that is wrong with TARP and government ownership - is GM Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chairman of the Board Dan Akerson.

Akerson is not – and never has been – a car guy. He himself said so. What is he? He is a DC-connected, Wall Street hedge fund big coin guy.

...

Hedge fund guys are very fond of taking massive risks in pursuit of short-term profits.  And that’s fine - when they’re doing it with their funds.

...

You’re seeing myriad examples of this fake-it short-term policy from the company – and from its Washington, D.C. masters.

Begin with President Barack Obama’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Austin Goolsbee, announcing in late February that the government will seek to sell its GM shares as quickly as possible.  Which – to no one’s surprise – caused a dip in GM’s share price.

Which currently sits - below its Initial Public Offering [IPO] price - at $33.  For We the Taxpayers/Shareholders to break even, it has to get above $54.

Which ain’t happening anytime soon - putting the lie to all this talk of We the Taxpayers/Shareholders making money on TARP.

To try to artificially pump up short-term sales, GM has been repeatedly slashing car prices and handing out purchase discounts well above the industry average.

As we saw with another government car giveaway, Cash for Clunkers, this only moves up car purchases that would have been made anyway.  Again – short-term vs. long-term.

Akerson, the article points out, has presided over two large-scale bankruptcies already, Hawaii Telecom and XO Communications.  So hey, what's a third?  We shouldn't count it against him.  After all, it's not like it's actually in a business he knows anything about.  Right?

If you develop code, you're gonna love this.

I have a multi-threaded Perl ICB client that I wrote.  I've always had an occasional problem with a race condition between different threads trying to write simultaneously to the screen.  I thought I had it solved at one point, but all hell broke loose after I built a new babylon5 with a six-core processor.  I tried various approaches to solve it, including meticulous use of Thread::Semaphore.

Well, I think I've finally solved the problem this time, by using a simple shared scalar as a semaphore and using lock($sem) instead of using a Thread::Semaphore object and $sem->down()/$sem->up() calls.  But, the ironic, yet inescapable conclusion from this...?

Thread::Semaphore isn't thread-safe.

Sometimes you don't need to think outside the box, so much as build a better one.  Rather than describing, I'm actually going to just paste from the newsletter I just got from Infinite Kind LLC, the creators of Moneydance, announcing their new iPad app, SyncSpace.

SyncSpace

I'm pleased to introduce our amazing new iPad app: SyncSpace is a drawing/sketching/brainstorming app that lets you express your ideas on an infinite, shared, zoomable canvas.  My objective in creating SyncSpace was to connect people remotely to brainstorm and share ideas visually in a way that can't be done with a phone call or video conference.  For example, people in different geographic locations can use SyncSpace to work together in real-time to sketch out an application's user interface, web site, magazine layout, network architecture or a variety of other projects.  SyncSpace can also post your drawings to Facebook, Twitter and 37 Signals' Campfire.  It's available for an introductory price of only 1.99 USD on the app store , so check it out soon.

Now THIS is smart thinking that leverages the strengths of a touchscreen tablet device.  It's an intelligent use of the technology.  Every application like this is worth a hundred or a thousand Angry Birds.  Yet Another handheld game device that can also kinda sorta be used as an awkward phone?  Meh.  Working interactively on a diagram or flow chart in real time with someone a thousand miles away, without needing ten thousand dollars of teleconferencing hardware or some inflexible remote-collaboration package designed for the PowerPoint mindset?

...OK, NOW you have my attention.

Lengthy report here.

Publicly, ATF and Justice have tried to downplay any notion it would let guns knowingly flow to straw buyers to Mexican drug lords.

Newell, the special agent in charge in Phoenix, was asked at a news conference after the Avila indictment whether his agency would ever let guns knowingly cross the border.  Newell answered, “Hell, no.”  But, he said, suspects under surveillance sometimes elude agents, which could result in guns winding up in Mexico.

[Sen. Charles] Grassley got a similar answer.

In a Feb. 4 letter to the senator, the Justice Department said ATF never “knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons to a straw purchaser who then transported them into Mexico.”  ATF, the letter added, makes “every effort to interdict weapons that have been purchased illegally and prevent their transportation into Mexico.”

Grassley told the Center he now believes those representations are contradicted by the documents his staff has gathered and the testimony of agents like Dodson.  “The Justice Department and the ATF put up a wall to mislead the American people and were less than forthcoming,” he said.

So on top of everything else, now the BATF is openly lying to Congress.  (Again.)  Only this time, the Senate doesn't believe them.

The new snow finally tapered off today not long after 5.  So I got my boots and cag on and went outside to fire up the snowblower to clear the driveway.  Again.

Refueled snowblower.  Started snowblower.  Brought throttle up, cut back choke, engaged auger drive.  Snowblower died like it had been poleaxed.

Huh.  Must have engaged the drive too suddenly on a cold engine.

Restarted snowblower.  Engaged auger drive, more gently.  Snowblower died.

Huh.

Examined auger.  Found a bunch of semi-thawed-and-refrozen icy slush blocking the impeller barrel.  Cleared it out and made sure impeller turns.

Restarted snowblower.  Carefully began to engaged auger drive.  Snowblower bogged, clearly about to die.

Shut off snowblower. Examined auger again.  Found a bunch of ice frozen around the auger spur drive box that looked like it might be locking up the auger.  Broke away the ice.  Made sure I could turn the auger at least slightly.

Restarted snowblower.  Carefully began to engaged auger drive.  Smoke began to come from under drive belt cover.

Stopped snowblower.  Sent upstairs for socket set.  Removed belt cover.¹

Restarted snowblower.  Auger immediately began to spin, even though drive lever was disengaged, spitting a wad of snow out the chute.

Hmm.  That's funny.  Maybe the auger drive tension roller stuck in engagement on the last try.  Gently begin to engage drive to see if I can unstick the roller.  Auger drive belt snaps.

Well, crap.

[1]  This would be the belt cover that I had to modify because there was insufficient clearance under the PVC drive belt cover for the belts², causing the auger drive belt to rub on the cover when the drive is disengaged.  (Yes, when "disengaged", the belt is actually still being driven by the driveshaft sufficiently to wear away the belt cover and heat it via friction to the point of smoking and partially melting.)

[2]  Yes, in case you were wondering, this MTD snowblower IS a piece of junk.  But it was free.

An excellent article from Shikha Dalmia at Reason, via Bruce Schneier, points out that in any realistic sense the threat from Al-Qaeda to the US is all but non-existent.

But this year marks the 10th anniversary of 9-11 and none of the horrible scenarios conjured then have materialized.  Islamic terrorists have not flown more planes into buildings.  They haven’t detonated “loose nukes” or dirty bombs.  They haven’t released nerve gas into subway stations.  They haven’t poisoned the water supply.  They haven’t even strolled into one of America’s hundreds of malls or farmer’s markets and blown themselves up.

Maybe this is because enhanced post-9/11 security has made America invulnerable.  Or maybe the Islamists never posed that big a threat to begin with.

The article quotes Ohio State University political-science professor John Mueller, who observes that even taking 9/11 into account, an average American is more likely to drown in his or her bathtub than to be killed by international terrorism.  Unfortunately, all that screaming hysteria about terrorism sells newspapers, justifies increased budgets and new government agencies, and provides a rationale for expanded local and federal police powers.

The true threat to America is not international terrorism.  It is Washington DC's reaction to — and eager exploitation of — international terrorism.  It is Capitol Hill, not Al-Qaeda, that is destroying America.