Wired on Hacking RFID

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Wired has a surprisingly nonhysterical piece on the lack of security in many RFID systems; it’s worth a read. They only miss in one area that we saw, and it’s a picky point: most supply-chain (which is to say, shipping) tags don’t have pricing data, at least not when it comes to biggies like Wal-Mart and the DoD. Those tags hold only a 96-bit number that is associated back to a database entry. They’re not secure per se, but since they’re essentially active bar codes, it matters a lot less in this application than it does in, say, keycards.

Really?

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Slashdot is reporting that, come September, Lucasfilm will release two-disc versions of each of the first three Star Wars films (which is to say, episodes IV, V, and VI, known colloquially as “the ones that don’t suck all kinds of ass, as even the one with the goddamn ewoks looks like Citizen Kane compared to any of the other three”) including both the remastered versions as well as the original theatrical release versions. Clickthrough to the actual story fills in that the “classic” versions will have only 2-channel soundtracks, and we assume won’t get the fancy remastering treatment, but at least they’ll exist.

Of course, this could be a huge hoax. There’s no press release at LucasArts or LucasFilm or Fox that backs this up, which makes us nervous. However, the source quoted in the story (Jim Ward) is in fact an exec with Lucas’ empire as stated, so either the hoaxers did homework or it’s legit. It’s also apparently being viewed as an add-on event to the launch of a new video game on September 12, which creates a bit more believability.

If true, MUST HAVE.

Cato Institute on GWB

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They’re on the right (they’re libertarians, not republicans) and they’re not at all happy about George’s assault on the Constitution and its implications for presidential power in America. The full report is a PDF, but here’s the executive summary:

In recent judicial confirmation battles, President Bush has repeatedly — and correctly — stressed fidelity to the Constitution as the key qualification for service as a judge. It is also the key qualification for service as the nation’s chief executive. On January 20, 2005, for the second time, Mr. Bush took the presidential oath of office set out in the Constitution, swearing to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” With five years of the Bush administration behind us, we have more than enough evidence to make an assessment about the president’s commitment to our fundamental legal charter Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power. In its official legal briefs and public actions, the Bush administration has advanced a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a view that includes
  • a federal government empowered to regulate core political speech — and restrict it greatly when it counts the most: in the days before a federal election;
  • a president who cannot be restrained, through validly enacted statutes, from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror;
  • a president who has the inherent constitutional authority to designate American citizens suspected of terrorist activity as “enemy combatants,” strip them of any constitutional protection, and lock them up without charges for the duration of the war on terror — in other words, perhaps forever; and
  • a federal government with the power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave.
President Bush’s constitutional vision is, in short, sharply at odds with the text, history, and structure of our Constitution, which authorizes a government of limited powers.

Bad News Hughes makes us laugh again

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From this entry, which the delicate ought not read, as it is in fact a discussion of collegiate male depravity somehow unassociated with alcohol and therefore all the more horrific. Hughes understands drunken shenanigans, as he explains:

Sometimes people say unkind things about drinkers. I understand why. It’s not like I, personally, never got all liquored up and kicked all the slats out of a fence, or threw a small man into some bushes, or helped Eric Gilmore huck a frozen turkey through a window with such force that it actually crashed through a corresponding window in the house next door, like six feet away, and we had to run outside and pretend we knew nothing about it, a ruse that worked because everyone was preoccupied with water squirting from the bathroom pipes I had burst moments before by firing a large firework into the toilet and holy shit that was one of the best parties I’ve ever been to and I often like to think it was our partnership that night that helped Eric overcome some of his dislike for white people. You never want to wholly overcome your dislike for white people. Anyway, I can’t speak for Eric, but I’m willing to accept some of the blame for the unkind things some people say about drinkers. I’ve had drinks, I’ve been naughty. But then the people who say unkind things about drinkers, who are they? They sit at home, gray and shriveled souls sipping tea and gnawing at cardboard and using the bitter resentment only borne from a life without joy to criticize and castigate those of us who occasionally take in a draught or two of spirits to loosen the shoulders, sharpen the mind and googly up the eyes. A practice that — as you and I know — puts a little sparkle on the Twinkie, just like Grandpa used to say. So fuck those guys. I feel like a good drunk does for the soul about like what four or five bowls of raisin bran do for the bowel. I even enjoy the hangover, as long as there’s nothing too taxing on the schedule and I can swagger through the day with a refreshing minimum of forebrain activity, just as pleasantly retarded as Coldplay fans, Democrats, Buddhists and people who maintain Harry Potter books can be enjoyed by adults. […] Oh, and you know what else? I don’t want to get all blah blah blah about society and gender roles and certainly people should be free to define masculinity in any way that makes them happy, but there’s this thing, right, with men, this lowest common denominator, and it’s that on some level we all measure our manliness by the level of menace we present to polite society. Like, even the most law-abiding and square of us take pride in, for example, how bad our feet stink, or that we shat out an abnormally large poo, or that we did a cannonball into the pool that ruined a nearby wedding ceremony, or something. We’ll brag about it. Sometimes under the guise of regret, but make no mistake — it’s still bragging. Look for the gleam in our eyes as we apologize. Somewhere, deep down in our hypothalamus, that apology is being transmuted into a humorous tale shared with our brother warriors around the campfire. Don’t try and change this. Don’t try and dim that gleam. Recognize that it’s there, for, like, evolutionary reasons, because back in ye olden times disputes were settled by the size of poo and men of the tribe often had to drive away saber-toothed tigers with their terrible, terrible feet.

It’s the things one particular Gainsville crowd did when stone sober that trouble him.

Sweet Fancy Moses do we ever love this headline

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“Truckload of Missing Art Found in Trailer Park“

Our love for it, however, is eclipsed by the highlighted graf below, which is perhaps the finest one to ever appear in an article about an art heist:

A multimillion-dollar art heist that began two weeks ago when a truckload of paintings, sculpture and antique furniture vanished on the road from southern Florida to New York ended on Wednesday night in a most unlikely place: a 30-year-old trailer park in Gainesville. It was there, at the 300-family Arredondo Farms, that a task force of the Gainesville Police Department and the Alachua County sheriff’s office arrested the driver of the truck, Patrick J. McIntosh, after they had surrounded a trailer belonging to what one official called “his baby’s momma’s sister.” Mr. McIntosh surrendered without incident, the authorities said, and the art was found intact. “The guy gave up,” said Sgt. Keith Faulk, who works for the sheriff’s office. “He was a big ol’ boy, too — 6-8, 280. I think he might have thought about slipping out. Then again we had the residence surrounded.” Mr. McIntosh, 36, had been missing since April 17, when he and his 24-foot Budget rental truck pulled out of Boca Raton with millions of dollars worth of art, including seven canvasses by the Abstract Expressionist painter Milton Avery. He had been hired by David Jones Fine Art Services to deliver the art from private dealers and collectors — and at least one museum — in Boca Raton to a series of homes and galleries in New York. “He appeared to be very polite, very hardworking, you know, dependable,” said Susan Buzzi, who works for David Jones. “But who knows what lurks — well, it’s a mystery I suppose.”

Thank you, Jesus, for blessing us with such abject beauty. Thanks too to Miss Griggaloo, who says “There should be more of that sort of thing in today’s journalism.” Indeed, Griggy, indeed.

More on Colbert

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The media’s reaction to Colbert’s stellar “fuck you” to both them and the Bush Administration has been kind of funny to watch. First, they ignored it completely, focussing instead on the lame Bush v. Bush skit that preceded it. Now that the video has been burning up the net all week, they’ve been forced to actually address it — and their talking point is the same as the administration’s: “He wasn’t funny.”

Bzzt. Wrong. We’re sure the press corps didn’t like the degree to which he pointed out their utter and complete emasculation and failure to provide any sort of watchdog role, but that doesn’t make it not funny. It just makes it funny, but about them. The press corps has become a lapdog, useless and ultimately powerless, so it’s no surprise they didn’t enjoy Colbert pointing that out so brilliantly. Now, if they’d just start doing their damn jobs again — but that’s probably too much to ask.

No, we still don’t run any antivirus software.

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John Gruber explains why the recent Dan Goodin “story” about the “rise of OS X malware” is, well, bullshit. It was an AP piece, so it ran all over the damn place despite being a poorly researched piece of shit, as Gruber illustrates. Bullets, in case you’re in a hurry:

  • Yes, if you’re an idiot, and download supposedly unreleased OS updates from dodgy websites and try to install them, the odds are you’ll get infected. Dumbass.
  • No, we’re not invulnerable in Macland. But no reasonable person every said we were.
  • Yes, it’s still true that the Mac is essentially virus-free, and has been since its introduction.
  • Yes, this is partly because of its market share, but also because of the way the system is designed since the shift to OS X.
  • No, Apple’s move to the Intel platform does not mean it’s going to be subject to an increased level of malware activity — virii are still system dependent; you’ll note that Linux is virus-free, too, but has always run on the same hardware as Windows.
  • Finally, journalists sure are lazy:
    If Goodin wanted to be reasonable or accurate, he could have written a story titled “Some Guy Double-Clicked a Trojan Horse Virus for Mac OS X but It Didn’t Actually Spread to Anyone Else”, but what kind of story would that be? OK, it’d be a true story, but it wouldn’t be a good story. No one would have linked to such a story except to make fun of it: What would be the point of making a big stink out of one guy who got hit by a Mac OS X Trojan horse — which was so poorly written that it couldn’t even successfully spread to another computer — when there are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of Windows users suffering from malware every single day? What good journalism calls for is taking that one guy, and writing an article that presents his episode as though it were part of a trend of increasing Mac virus attacks. No one is going to make fun of Dan Goodin — or the Associated Press, or the dozens of reputable news outlets that ran the story — for that.

Oh, did he hurt your feelings?

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The White House is apparently upset about Colbert’s routine at the WHCD. Hilariously enough, right-leaning US News covers both their anger and their clear talking point that Colbert wasn’t funny. Um, right. We’ve seen it. It’s all over the net, and it’s hilarious. Maybe it’s not funny if you’re trapped in the west wing with an out-of-touch demagogue, but we can’t really help you there. It was funny, bitches, and you’d best shut up and take it. If you don’t want to be lampooned as an administration that ignores reality and the opinions of experts on virtually every front — and that famously insulates itself from every whiff of dissent or disagreement — well, don’t be that administration.

Whoa.

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So, some researchers have found another pyramid.

In Bosnia. Bigger than Giza. That nobody knew about.

We repeat: Whoa.

Update: We Been duped, but we’re in good company. Hat tip to the Attorney.

How far will we let him go?

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Bush Challenges Hundreds of Laws:

WASHINGTON — President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution. Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ”whistle-blower” protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research. Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush’s assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty ”to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ”execute” a law he believes is unconstitutional.

Seriously, go read the whole thing. We use BugMeNot.com to get in — the login that worked was holy_fool_69@yahoo.com with the password “bugmenot”.

Bush has made clear his contempt for the rule of law and the idea of separation of powers. What must we do to remind him of the oath he took to uphold the Constitution?

We call bullshit

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Incoming Sun CEO Schwartz has a nice long ass-kissing blog entry up claiming that Scott McNealy is directly responsible for the creation of the millions of jobs associated with the Internet.

Um, no.

McNealy is a big-iron salesman who managed to ride the boom up, and should be given all the credit and blame for Java that Gosling can spare, but the Internet is built not on his pronouncements and hardware but on 30 years of work that happened before the mid-90s. The network Schwartz gives credit to McNealy for was already there. His famous line about “the network is the computer” was a description of fact, not a call to arms. It was already true when he said it, and the world of online business was already off and running.

McNealy’s true claim to fame these last 6 or 7 years is less attractive: He led a company with enviable market position and products to almost complete commercial irrelevance. It’s not easy to see how he could have avoided this — after all, Sun is synonymous with expensive and high-performance hardware no longer required in light of the advances in the “white box” world — but with the kind of war chest he ended the 20th century with, it seems like a fair bet he could have at least tried something else. Instead, he made Sun a target for spot-on jokes like this (image from ArsTechnica):

Our government, fucking us over

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So remember that EFF lawsuit against AT&T brought because, apparently, AT&T has been surreptitiously allowing the Feds to eavesdrop on pretty much everything for years?

Yeah, the Feds have weighed in</>, and are bringing a motion to dismiss this lawsuit under the state secrets privilege.

This is more or less proof that (a) the Feds have been doing some naughty things and (b) are deeply committed to continuing to do said naughty things no matter what the law says and (c) are willing to use all the power of the state to get their way.

Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?

Bad Idea Jeans branches into film

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You remember that SNL commercial for “Bad Idea” jeans, where the actors just kept having terrible ideas? Some were “Even thought he affair’s over, I think I’ll tell my wife about it” and “I thought about wearing a condom, but when am I ever gonna be in Haiti again?”

Add to this “How about a film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged starring Brad and Angelina?” Seriously, there’s no way this won’t make “Snakes on a Plane” look like “Citizen Kane.”

What happens when Hertz gives Heathen a Lincoln

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“What, you mean you gave away all the other shitty cars already?”
May it be known that our stored profile mandates midsize and NeverLost, and that therefore the Lincoln is a total accident presumably based on local inventory issues. We once got a Volvo station wagon under similar circumstances.
How we can tell Detroit is doomed, pt 1.
Even working on a platform designed to be a Jaguar initially, they still manage to make it feel cheap, half-assed, and plastic. The mealy-mushy button feel we associate with American cars — and have heretofore assumed was due to lack of attention to detail — is present in enough quantity in the LS to make us think it’s deliberate.
We assume this is because most Lincoln drivers are fat old men, but still
The seats, covered in cheap leather, are like bench seats on the bottom and crappy buckets on the top, thereby creating a wholly new category of uncomfortable seating.
How we can tell Detroit is doomed, pt 2.
While this is clearly an attempt to compete with, say, the 5-series BMW, the overall fit and finish is a joke. The car has 10,000 miles on it, but some buttons are already falling off. Only so much of that can really be attributed to “it’s a rental.”
Love that American car transmission!
Despite having a beefy V-8, the automatic tranny in the LS provides virtually no way to exploit the power and torque available in a hurry. You end up with just as much transmission lag and jerk as you would in a mid-80s Buick.
How we explained the LS to Mrs. Heathen
“It’s like a BMW as designed and built by retarded Detroit schoolchildren. For their grandfather.”
How we can tell Detroit is doomed, pt 3.
Our boss showed up with a rental car this week, too, having started the trip in Orlando. His car was apparently created by some lameass division at GM that thinks people might accidentally come to a Chevy dealer and be confused enough to buy their knock-off of a PT Cruiser instead of the real thing.
Dept. of Dubious Achievements in Ergonomics
Despite being about the same size as any 4-door sedan, somehow the Lincoln folks managed to make visibility in the LS as bad as it was in our grandmother’s yacht-sized Mark V.
The LS: Safe for the BeGutted
Whenever we turn the LS off, the driver’s seat moves back and the steering wheel retracts and tilts up. This is all well and good, but there’s PLENTY of room to get in and out without this little bit of fat-man-accommodation theater; frankly, it just makes the LS look even more ridiculous.
So: squishy ride, sloppy transmission, uncomfortable seats, and a nameplate that makes people want to ask about your grandchildren…
All this for forty grand. Right.

Dept. of Birth Announcements, 22 Years Later

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Here is the complete 1984 Newsweek ad insert for the newly-launched Macintosh. Looking at them side by side, it’s hard to understand why they didn’t take over completely — in 1984, PCs had no mice, no GUI, and next to no graphics. They were big and clunky and typically used green- or amber-on-black displays.

We didn’t realize, though, that there was ever a time that Macs had no-kidding RS-232 ports. That’s kinda funny. Funnier is how young the software kings look in the brochure.

Via MeFi.

Dept. of Wholly Unsurprising and Probably Overdue News

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Scott McNealy is stepping down as CEO of Sun. He will stay on as chairman.

Once a silicon darling, Sun has fallen on hard times since the dot-com bust. Their problems weren’t dot-com related, though; they’ve been torpedoed by some very basic business problems.

Their bread and butter was proprietary systems running their own version of Unix called Solaris (oddly named, given that the book and movie entity named Solaris drives people insane). Solaris was, in its heyday, easily the best such animal available. Sun’s hardware, too, was impressive at the time, and for a while at least was synonymous with computing power in a time when Intel hardware was barely capable of running Win3.1. We remember being amused and amazed when, in 1997, we helped deploy one of the first web stores with Oracle, Netscape Application Server, and the Netscape web server all on one fairly low-end Sun (an Ultra 5 — just like the one we use a doorstop in Heathen World HQ now). Of course, now the much-cheaper Xserve that runs Heathen is completely capable of running all that and more, and in fact does.

The the world changed. Intel hardware got much better, and did so very quickly. Linux came out of nowhere and caught all the expensive, proprietary Unixes flat-footed; the combination has been huge for Sun. Other firms were caught, too, but some managed to be more agile; IBM in particular adopted Linux as its own, and has been busily giving back to the FOSS community. Sun, on the other hand, became convinced that they could give away hardware and make it up on software — i.e., the still proprietary Solaris — and survive. They were, and are, wrong. Sun hardware may still be an acceptable choice for HUGE database applications, but those jobs are few and far between, and Sun no longer owns the market. For 95% of the applications, there’s no reason to buy fancy hardware or software, and that’s the problem. For 100% of the applications, there’s no reason to use Solaris and be tied to Sun when choosing a supported enterprise Linux keeps your options open.

Sun has given the world Java, of course. Their vision for Java has never been completely in line with reality, but that’s Silicon Valley for you. Java remains a solid contender for server-side development (and even the occasional client-side app); aspects of the language make it a much better choice than almost any other compiled language. However, you still need a pretty big app to justify it over options like the stack, or Ruby on Rails, or other open source offerings. The world of Java is often an overly complex one full of cargo-cult dogma and huge codebases nobody actually understands; more recent approaches tend toward the simple, with attendant increases in maintainability. Java was and is free, however, so it’s not about to fix Sun’s bottom line issues; the minute they try to charge for it is the minute the FOSS options bury it.

So that’s what Sun’s got: expensive hardware of dubious value, a white-elephant operating system, and a language/technology they gave away for free. Vanishingly few people want the first two, and the third can’t save them. And all this has been true for years. The surprise isn’t McNealy’s departure; the surprise is that it took the board this long to do it.

Congress may yet destroy the Internet

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But it’s not over, and if you stay informed, you’ll be better able to help save it.

The Internet is a giant open network that, basically, no one has been allowed to exert much control over, even bandwidth companies. They’re expected to carry all traffic, and treat it equally, and this is how we’ve gotten this far. If the telcos had their way, the Internet as we know it would never have happened; now they’d like to be able to block traffic they don’t like, or charge more for some kinds of traffic, because they think they can make more money that way. Is your ISP also your cable company? Maybe they’d rather you didn’t get to watch TV at iTunes anymore. Is your ISP also your phone company? Kiss Skype goodbye, and ditto any other competitive VOIP service.

This is real. Pay attention.

Dept. of Strange Assortments

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Things Introduced Into Heathen World HQ As A Result Of Errands Completed Moments Ago:

  1. 1 inflatable neck pillow;
  2. 1 replacement briefcase strap for rollaboard suitcase;
  3. 1 colored handlewrap to increase identifiability of said suitcase;
  4. 1 new shaving kit;
  5. 2 Alien ALR-9800 RFID readers;
  6. 2 Alien linear antennae;
  7. 2 Alien circular antennae;
  8. 1 case Halal-certified MREs

I am Curious, Geeky

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Are there two cities in the world farther apart than Barcelona, Spain, and Wellington, New Zealand? This calculator says they’re 12,338 miles apart, and if the circumference of the earth is 24,901 (at the equator), this suggests a theoretical max of 12,450.5 miles, or only 112.5 more than these two.

Update: Here’s a better calculator that reports slightly different figures (Wellington to Madrid is now 12,327, and also-ran Quito to Singapore is 12,248), but seems a bit more serious.

Nostalgia Overload

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This guy has posted a huge list of YouTube links to Sesame Street clips, including some fine celebrity appearances (Robert DeNiro, Norah Jones, Johnny Cash) as well just plain sweet bits that make even Heathen smile or, maybe, feel a little sad.

Do NOT miss the funktastic song by Stevie Wonder in a bit that can’t be from much later than 72 or 73.

Oh, and in a related development, it looks like the commercials Gladwell mentioned that we blogged about a few days ago are also on YouTube, and elsewhere we turned up an MP3 and transcript of the long-lost “Lower Case N” segment.

Et Tu, Rupert

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FOX — Fox! — has Bush’s approval rating at THIRTY THREE PERCENT, or several bucks less than half the cost of a barrel of oil today.

The Heathen wonder what the floor is. We mean, presumably, there exists a hardcore cult-of-personality segment who will approve of Bush’s administration even if he and Rove do a televised tag-team gang-rape of the Olsen Twins in prime time (like they haven’t been doing that to Lady Liberty for 6 years already…). What is that chunk? 30% 25%?

(Via TPM.)

Anderson v. Corrupt Government, Posthumous Division

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The jackbooted government thugs are desperate to sift through the papers left by muckraking journalist — and therefore agent of liberty — Jack Anderson. They’re insisting he may have gotten some secret papers, or something, and that they have the right to review, remove, and redact that which constitutes the most valuable segment of his estate. Fortunately, his heirs are none to pleased about this, and are fighting the demands in the courts.

The F.B.I. is seeking to go through the files of the late newspaper columnist Jack Anderson to remove classified material he may have accumulated in four decades of muckraking Washington journalism. Mr. Anderson’s family has refused to allow a search of 188 boxes, the files of a well-known reporter who had long feuded with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and had exposed plans by the Central Intelligence Agency to kill Fidel Castro, the machinations of the Iran-contra affair and the misdemeanors of generations of congressmen. Mr. Anderson’s son Kevin said that to allow government agents to rifle through the papers would betray his father’s principles and intimidate other journalists, and that family members were willing to go to jail to protect the collection. “It’s my father’s legacy,” said Kevin N. Anderson, a Salt Lake City lawyer and one of the columnist’s nine children. “The government has always and continues to this day to abuse the secrecy stamp. My father’s view was that the public is the employer of these government employees and has the right to know what they’re up to.”

(Local PDF.)

Surely Jacksonville is not a pit of culinary despair

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However, we’ve seen no evidence of this. Have any Heathen any idea where we might go in this might-as-well-be-south-Georgia burg to get a decent meal? The hotel (see prior entry) has suggested both Ruby Tuesday’s and an execrable Texas-themed steak chain called Longhorn, so we’re not starting off well.

Sure, it’s a great book and all, and it’s chock full of fascinating information, but this is our favorite part

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From Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point:

Part of the appeal of Jim Henson and the Muppets to the show’s creators, in fact, was that in the 1960s Henson had been running a highly successful advertising shop. Many of the most famous Muppets were created for ad campaigns: Big Bird is really a variation of a seven-foot dragon created by Henson for La Choy commercials; Cookie Monster was a pitchman for Frito-Lay; Grover was used in promotional films for IBM. (Henson’s Muppet commercials from the 50s and 60s are hysterically funny but have a dark and edgy quality that understandably was absent from his Sesame Street work.) (p. 117, paperback edition)

WHERE CAN WE SEE THESE COMMERCIALS?

Go Read This

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There’s a stellar slam of the religious right over at Kos called If I Were Christian. Here’s a bit:

If I was a Christian, I’d guess Christ wouldn’t really give a hoot about gays or abortion, and would in fact minister healing and grace to those people in God’s name, and shower them with His love. There’s only one or two verses in the entire Bible even mentioning homosexuals or abortion, as opposed to so many telling us to help the poor and sick and even those we might not approve of if we want to honor His Name. So if I was a Christian, I’d also shower anyone persecuted by religious opportunists with all the love they could stand, and tell them God loved them deeply and forever, no matter what they do or did. I would tell them that nothing they can do will ever stop God from loving them dearly. If I were Christian, I’d have to guess that Christ, who was after all beaten to a bloody pulp and then nailed to a cross to die a horrible, lingering, death, for our sins, wouldn’t think very highly of a party, a faction, a group, a pharaoh, a Caesar, or a President, that thinks they should be able to legally whisk people off to torture chambers to foreign shit-holes run by despots, with no trial or charges ever held for them! And were I a Christian, I’d have to guess that any beliver would and absolutely should be very nervous about being associated with torture in any way, shape, or form.

No word of it a lie.

Bill Nye speaks at a community college, and Slacktivist is there

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Fred notes that Nye made some commentary about how the “lights” mentioned in Genesis are actually (a) the sun, one of billions of stars and (b) the moon, which isn’t actually a light source on its own at all. Predictably, some literalist idiots left. Fred:

This sad, angry woman has somehow been convinced that it is impossible to believe in God without also believing in an illiterately literal reading of Genesis 1:16. She’s painted herself into a corner in which she must reject not only evolution, but the existence of the dark side of the moon. She is forced to regard Neil Armstrong as the pawn of Satan.

Awesome. Read the whole thing.

In which we discuss certain ratings with Captain Telescope

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The Money article published today listing the Best Jobs in America resulted in the following exchange with one of our far-flung correspondents:

Telescope: you see that money magazine rated software developer the #1 job?
Heathen: yes. they were not thinking of the part where you fuck with ant.
Telescope: obviously they didn't consider "bait shop owner" either

Word.

In re: “fuck with ant:” Ant cannot be bothered to check for normal environment variables, since cell phones don’t have them (fuck cell phones; just sniff for the goddamn things and use ’em if they’re there, and fail back to a config file or command line args if not). Ergo, if you need to do your http lookups through a proxy, just setting the http_proxy environment variable gets you precisely nowhere.

Ant has a setproxy task you can use, but it apparently isn’t honored by some things, like javadoc and saxon. Nor are -D parameters sent on the ant command line honored by said miscreants, nor are .build.properties settings followed. To get the javadoc/saxon standard to use the cocksucking proxy, you have to actually insert the parameters in the target stanza.

Not, of course, that this is documented anywhere. Fucking cargo-cult Java bullshit.

Vulgar.