Oh, Microsoft. Do you EVER stop failing?

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I had a little free time tonight, so I thought I’d (finally) download the expansion to Fallout 3 (which, by the way, isn’t available any other way). Turns out, I don’t have enough Microsoft magic script to do so, I I tried to buy more, both on the XBox itself and on the XBox Live web site.

Cryptic error messages ensued, followed by a frustrating call with idiot tech support people with a tenuous at best grasp of English. The links are true. It’s some goofball, poorly implemented halfwit “fraud prevention” thing. What’s absurd, btw, is that you can only get this information from Google; the web site gave no error message at all (“try again later”), and the XBox itself gave only a bit more data: “Can’t retrieve information from Xbox LIVE. Please try again later. Status code: 80169d94.”

That opaque message is the money shot. Apparently, my account is locked now because the info on my XBox live account itself — entered long ago on a free trial — did not match the information provided on my credit card (which was accurate and complete). That’s all well and good (though, I note, they had no difficulty automatically renewing my membership back in October); calling them ought to make this right.

Oh no. No, no, no.

As the Google search told me, they’re not actually able to fix this on the phone. They have a “process” and require “escalation.” Someone will call me within 72 hours, and after that it’ll take 5 to 10 business days to process the unlock.

Whatever, boneheads. I think I’ll watch something on my AppleTV instead. 100% FAIL.

Birthers? 9/11 Truthers? Positively sane compared to…

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Middle Ages Denialists. I shit you not:

The Phantom time hypothesis is a conspiracy theory developed by Heribert Illig (born 1947 in Vohenstrauß) in 1991. It proposes that there has been a systematic effort to make it appear that periods of history, specifically that of Europe during Early Middle Ages (AD 614–911) exist, when they do not. Illig believed that this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation and forgery of documentary and physical evidence.

Wow. (Via Nix over on Facebook.)

Exits

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I’m surprised it’s taken them this long, but Charlie Weis has been fired at Notre Dame. Contrary to ESPN’s Forde, though, I don’t think they’re one good coaching hire away from national relevance again. Their clear inability to recognize what’s working (n.b. that it was the fired Willingham’s recruits that buoyed Weis’ early years; when they graduated, Weis tanked) will lead them to many more years in the wilderness, and probably more expensive buyouts.

I watched this happen with Alabama in the pre-Saban, post-Stallings era, and it wasn’t pretty; I think it’s likely to get uglier in South Bend given their perhaps even more unrealistic expectations. And, from the Alabama perspective, I’m sorry they’re firing him. He’s clearly not head coach material, but keeping him around would ensure the Irish continue to spiral the drain in perpetuity. Oh well.

In other news, there are also sources saying that Bobby Bowden is reitiring at FSU, which is a long time coming, but there are conflicting reports on other sites. This is something he should’ve done a while ago, but it creates another hot-seat job opening that is probably far, far more appealing than the Notre Dame job. Whups.

Well, how about dat.

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The Saints are now 11-0 after Brees and the rest put thirty freakin’ eight points on New England tonight with a dominant, blowout performance on either side of the ball. Final score: 38 to 17.

Bonus: In the process, Brees posted a perfect passer rating of 158.3; doing so puts him in the company of such gridiron luminaries as Doug Flutie, Kurt Warner, the Manning brothers, Ben Roethlisberger, and his opponent tonight, Tom Brady.

We’re still evil.

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Or, at least, evil is still being perpetuated in our name. We can tell, because government hacks are still insisting that they can’t be held accountable for kidnapping an innocent Canadian and ending him to Syria for torture:

Maher Arar is both a Canadian and Syrian citizen of Syrian descent. A telecommunications engineer and graduate of Montreal’s McGill University, he has lived in Canada since he’s 17 years old. In 2002, he was returning home to Canada from vacation when, on a stopover at JFK Airport, he was (a) detained by U.S. officials, (b) accused of being a Terrorist, (c) held for two weeks incommunicado and without access to counsel while he was abusively interrogated, and then (d) was “rendered” — despite his pleas that he would be tortured — to Syria, to be interrogated and tortured. He remained in Syria for the next 10 months under the most brutal and inhumane conditions imaginable, where he was repeatedly tortured. Everyone acknowledges that Arar was never involved with Terrorism and was guilty of nothing.

[…] [T]he U.S. Government has never admitted any wrongdoing or even spoken publicly about what it did; to the contrary, it repeatedly insisted that courts were barred from examining the conduct of government officials because what we did to Arar involves “state secrets” and because courts should not interfere in the actions of the Executive where national security is involved.

Just so we’re clear: This is the “there are no checks and balances,” imperial executive POV. They get to do what they want, and nobody gets to second-guess them. Down this path lies all sorts of abuses, and it absolutely must be stopped. Mr. Arar cannot be alone; he’s the unlikely guy who escaped the nightmare of extraordinary (and illegal) rendition. Someone needs to go to jail over this, but it’s increasingly likely that no one will.

And that’s very, very bad.

More from Mullins

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Aimee Mullins’ guest columns at Gizmodo continue with an excellent discussion of the use of prosthetics in competition.

Basically, she points out that it was totally kosher for people like Oscar Pistorius and herself to compete in regular track-and-field events — right up to the point where they might win, at which point they were DQ’d for having an unfair advantage despite the fact that even advanced prosthetics pale in comparison to the real thing. So far.

Mullins also points out where we may be going: What if paralympic sprinter times are lower than regular, able-bodies sprinter times?

Here’s something you don’t see every day

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A review of the $2.1 million Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport. This is a vehicle that generates over a thousand horsepower from an 8-liter, 16-cylinder engine, and uses it to get to 60 in under three seconds.

The author’s takeaway? It turns out not to be nearly as much fun as you’d expect:

The car comes with a great cocktail-party boast: if your Veyron, at rest, were passed by a $500,000 Mercedes McLaren SLR doing 100 m.p.h., you could floor the accelerator and still reach 200 m.p.h. before the Mercedes could match its speed.

That kind of physics-textbook problem is where my issues begin. At speeds where cars from a $40,000 Nissan 370Z to a $90,000 Porsche 911 become your wingmen, delivering pure blasts of driving joy, the Bugatti feels bored to death. The artillery-shell acceleration is diverting, but the Bugatti leaves you nowhere else to go, except directly to jail.

Yeah, you read that right. The official sports car of Heathen Central costs less than 5% of the Bugatti.

Many Bugatti buyers surely have access to racetracks, yet I’m equally sure that 90-some percent of them won’t have nearly enough driving talent to exercise this car. Mostly, I picture Euro-poseurs needing valet assistance to back up the Bugatti in Monaco, while jaws drop and the owner barks orders into his diamond-encrusted cellphone. When your car makes a Lamborghini seem tasteful, there’s a problem.

As with the New York Yankees or most Picasso paintings, I respect the Bugatti as an engineering exercise and a conglomeration of overpriced talent. Yet I might argue that any $2 million car should be powered by hydrogen, electricity — even nuclear fusion — not a gas engine blown up to overkill proportions. The Bugatti isn’t the future of the fast car; it’s the past writ in extra-large type.

[…]

For half the Bugatti’s price, one could buy four genuine exotics that I find better looking and more rewarding: the Ferrari F430, Lamborghini Gallardo, Audi R8 V-10 and Aston Martin DBS. That would still leave $1 million for a 10-car garage filled with classics like a Jaguar E-Type and a Corvette Sting Ray fuelie.

Update from the comments: I thought my old climbing buddy Joe was making a joke when he said “If you want to pick one up cheap, someone parked one in Galveston bay,” but it turns out someone really did put a Veyron in the marsh this week. Whups!

It’s like a perfect football weekend. Hail Saban, Geaux Saints, and Praise Breesus

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First, obviously, Roll Tide. By quashing LSU, Bama ensures its place in the SEC title game, and therefore a path to the championship if we can get past Florida. Even better: the new BCS puts Alabama back in the #2 spot, behind Florida and ahead of Texas. The gap between the top 3 and the next 7 is large, with virtually no chance of TCU, Cincy, or Boise powering up high enough to challenge a lossless Texas or lossless SEC champ for a Pasadena berth. (And upset for Bama or the Gators prior to Atlanta might change that, but it’s not a given.)

Second, jumping ahead to Sunday and the pros, the Saints are 8-0 for the first time EVER, firmly atop the NFC South (actually, the whole NFC) and one of only two remaining perfect squads in the NFL — the other is the AFC’s Colts.

Third, say goodbye to any title hopes from previously perfect pretenders Iowa (dropped by unranked Northwestern) and Oregon (who lost in a shootout to unranked Stanford 51 to 42; does nobody out west play D?), and also to USC given their loss to now 2-loss Oregon looks even worse today than it did on Halloween.

The icing on the cake, though, is Notre Dame’s 2nd loss to NAVY in three years. At home, even. The Irish’s hopes of a BCS berth floated away as they found themselves unable to beat a Midshipmen team they outsized and outproduced. That’s some fine coaching there, Charlie. I sure hope the ND faithful rally to keep him, because I love this coach.

No, dumbass, “prayer” is not health care.

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LA Times via JWZ:

Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.

The provision was inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy, both of Massachusetts, home to the headquarters of the Church of Christ, Scientist.

The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments — which substitute for or supplement medical treatments — on the same footing as clinical medicine. While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against “religious and spiritual healthcare.”

How about we just limit it to scientifically valid treatments? How would that be?

Just so we’re clear, ok?

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If you’re not vaccinating your kids, you’re a fucking idiot — and, worse, you’re not just endangering an innocent for whom you are completely responsible (i.e., your own kid), you’re also creating a public health problem and potentially endangering other people’s kids through your wrongheaded, goofball, crystal-gazing, Jenny-McCarthy-listening crackpot beliefs.

Period. Full stop.

It’s crap like this that points out two things really damning about America today:

  1. Journalism is dead. If there were any still real journalists working, we’d see widespread coverage of just how fundamentally stupid the idea of eschewing vaccinations is, and just how monumentally wrong claims of an autism link are.

  2. People would rather believe some kind of muzzy-headed bullshit than actual science. This isn’t surprising — there’s an astrology column in every major newspaper — but it’s tremendously disappointing.

There’s a real undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in this country that leads people to rely on their own imperfect impressions of complex ideas and concepts that require years of study to actually grasp. Doctors know more than you do. Physicists know more than you do. Your gut feeling that homeopathy probably works is worth precisely squat compared to more than a century of actual science-based, double-blind-tested medicine. From the article:

The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincare said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” […]

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.

Before smallpox was eradicated with a vaccine, it killed an estimated 500 million people. And just 60 years ago, polio paralyzed 16,000 Americans every year, while rubella caused birth defects and mental retardation in as many as 20,000 newborns. Measles infected 4 million children, killing 3,000 annually, and a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae type b caused Hib meningitis in more than 15,000 children, leaving many with permanent brain damage. Infant mortality and abbreviated life spans — now regarded as a third world problem — were a first world reality.

How’d we fix that? VACCINATION.

A very succinct and clear discussion of the White House v. Fox News imbroglio

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I’ve been very pleased that the Obama White House has called it like it is and declared that Fox isn’t really a news organization. That’s been abundantly clear to anyone with a brain for a long, long time — after all, we’re talking about a group that went to court to protect their right to lie in the news, right? A group that sponsors Teabagging protests, and that was an active cheerleader for even the most egregious Bush-era atrocities. It’s not a point of debate.

What’s been shocking is that the rest of the mainstream media — the parts that are supposedly “liberal” — have basically just started parroting Fox’s own talking points on the subject.

Gawker’s Jezebel has a great summary of the whole affair:

Even if MSNBC does have a liberal bias in its news reporting (as opposed to its opinion and analysis) — for our purposes here, I’ll even stipulate that it does — it’s still comparing apples and rotting, bug-infested oranges. The problem is not that Fox News leans a bit to the right (in my opinion, so does CNN and so does half the “liberal” opinion on MSNBC), but that they consistently violate principles of journalistic ethics as if that is, in fact, their primary goal and they’re systematically working through a checklist. It’s not that they editorialize; it’s that they lie. It’s not that they sympathize with right-wing whackjobs, it’s that they sponsor them. You want to have a conversation about media bias on both sides, that’s fine, but you cannot have an intellectually honest version of that discussion if you begin with the premise that Fox and MSNBC are equally outrageous in their departure from objectivity and distortion of the facts — or, you know, “the fiction that Fox News is a traditional news organization.”

It’s convenient for folks at CNN to pretend that the two are equivalent, since that makes them look like the one cable news outlet that gives a damn about balanced reporting. But such an assertion actually betrays both bias and bull on their part (even if the bias is chiefly toward their own profits). Fox News has consistently displayed such a flagrant lack of concern for facts, balance and integrity, any journalist with the slightest pretension to objectivity should be mortified by the mere thought of defending them.

Fox is not news organization. Period. It’s a partisan extension of the right wing of the Republican party, and it has no right to the courtesy typically extended to nominally fairminded journalists. Their slogan “fair and balanced” is so brazen as to be Orwellian, and to defend them as somehow equivalent to CNN or MSNBC in their slant is to betray your own fundamental misunderstanding of words like “truth” and “journalism.”

The fact that Campbell Brown is whining about the White House’s treatment of Fox doesn’t suggest the Obama Administration is wrong; it suggests that Brown is nearly as shoddy a “journalist” as anyone at Fox. Fox is a major part of the problem, but it’s a problem that extends to all broadcast media today. So-called journalists have abandoned their traditional investigative, critical role in favor of a bullshit “present the controversy” approach that reaches its apotheosis when birthers like Orly Taitz are given airtime to suggest Obama isn’t actually a citizen.

Controversy may sell ads, but the responsibility of a news desk is to present facts. Countering the views of epidemiologists with Jenny McCarthy babbling about vaccinations and autism, and providing no voice of reason, is simply malpractice. And that’s what’s happening with the Fox vs. Obama coverage.