I always wondered what happened to that guy from the Six Flags commercials in 2004.
]]>"Through my visit over the past couple of days in the United States, I am surprised by the sophistication of the U.S. military, including its weapons and equipment and doctrines and so on," People's Liberation Army leader General Chen Bingde said. "I can tell you that China does not have the capability to challenge the United States. As a matter of fact, the reconnaissance activities along China's coast by U.S. military aircraft and vessels are seen in China as deterrents."
For emphasis, the general added, "What I'm trying to say is that we do not have the capability to challenge the United States."
. . .
"As it is known to all, the United States is a super-power in the world today; how can China easily have the ability to challenge it? That is simply not part of Chinese culture and we do not have that capability. We would strive for world peace, civility and development and well being of the whole humankind...The United States has far more advanced weapons and equipment."
I... don't believe him. In fact, the first thing I thought of when I read this was the South Park season 3 episode called Chinpoko-mon, about a Japanese company that uses a Pokemon-like game to brainwash American youth to join a new Japanese-supremacist military. Specifically, this part (starting at 0:33), where company officials try to distract a concerned American toy shop owner from the threat of Chinpoko-mon:
"I am President Hirohito. And this is Mr. Osa."
"Pleased to meet you."
"We understand you have big concern about our fine product."
"Well, yes. Do you mind telling me what the hell this is about?" [activates Chinpoko-mon doll]
"The American Government lies to you. Join the fight for Japanese supremacy of the world. More to come!"
"Well?"
"That is so strange. I do not know how this could happen. But rest assured, I will make sure it does not happen again!"
"Well, now come on, I don't think that that quite satisfies my - "
"You are... American?"
"Yes."
"Oh! You must have very big penis!"
"Excuse me? I was just asking you what you're up to with these toys."
"Nothing. We are very simple people with very small penis. Mr. Osa penis is especially small."
"So small!"
"We cannot achieve much with so small penis. But you Americans... wow! Penis so big... so big penis!"
"Well, I guess it is a pretty good size."
...
"Well, it certainly was nice meeting you folks; I just wanted to bring that little malfunction to your attention. Bye-bye now."
"Thank you for stopping by with your gargantuan penis!"
Damn straight it is. And we intend to be the ONLY swinging dick in the Pacific.
]]>I wasn't originally planning on running this race, it being a week before the Mastodon Stomp which I planned to use to try to break my 5K PR. Then I heard they'd have beer. And that about 2/3 of the race was on FWA property. And about half of that was actually on one of the runways. So I figured I'd run it nice and easy as a LSR - add a mile to warm up and a mile to cool down, and that'd be the 8mi run my training plan called for that weekend anyway. Plus I'd get beer.
Which is how I found myself outside Fort Wayne Metals that 40-degree morning, in a strong westerly wind with occasional drizzle, contemplating not getting out of my car. So I offered myself a deal: cut the warmup short - it's just a training run, right? Jog out to the airport, futz around on the runways for a few miles revelling in the coolness of it all, jog back, jog a little more afterwards, drink beer. I held out until the 'drink beer' part, but I shook hands and got out of the car.
About the 'revelling in the coolness of it all' part - I love airports. I fly just often enough that the whole air travel experience hasn't lost its cool factor for me. Unless I'm in a real hurry to get where I'm going, or I'm trying to get home, I don't even mind being delayed; an airport of any real size offers world-class opportunities for people-watching, not to mention the logistical ballet of people, aircraft, ground vehicles, luggage, and cargo (and the phrase 'logistical ballet' obviously marks me as a transpo geek). So the opportunity to run halfway around an airport, with a couple of miles of that on the runway, appealed to me. And did I mention there was beer afterwards?
I planned to run-walk-run it, more or less Galloway-style: 11mm pace for 4min, then 50 yards or so of strides, then walk for 1min. Varying your speed that often is all well and good when you're by yourself on the Pufferbelly; it's a little more problematic when you're sharing one lane of Ardmore Road with 300 other people. I had to do some bob-and-weave the first couple cycles, then we hit the airport property at the 1mi mark, the 5K separated from the 10K, and we got both lanes of the access road to ourselves.
The access road ran parallel to the runway, curved around the end, then ran back along the other side. The curve, oddly enough for a road with a 25mph speed limit, was banked. And I could tell there were no NASCAR fans in the vicinity, because I said "Good thing this is banked, otherwise I'd have to get off the throttle and I wouldn't get a good run coming out of the corner" and nobody laughed.
As we came around the end of the runway, the headwind became a tailwind and the sun came out so it got a little warm. I took one of my two shirts off without blundering into the electrified fence or onto the runway, but I hit my stopwatch without realizing it for about :50. No biggie, since it's just a training run, right? We made the turn onto the actual runway for the first time, and I couldn't resist putting my arms out like wings and making airplane noises.
On and off for the next two miles. Irritated the hell out of everyone around me.
There were a lot of course marshals, as you might expect for a race at an (International!) airport. The last thing they wanted was for somebody to hide ten pounds of Semtex under their track suit and 'get lost' only to go all suicide bomber on a departing airliner later. All runners had to be off airport grounds (5mi mark) by 11AM; even with a 9:30 start I was pretty sure they wouldn't have to motivate me to pick up the pace via gunfire.
Then we turned back into that 25mph wind and I wasn't so sure anymore. That is just a shock and a half to turn from headwind to tailwind back to headwind, but no biggie, since it's just a training run, right? I eventually managed to clear the airport, and with one last remark to the deputy at the gate ("I always wanted to be able to do that without y'all chasing me" - His Officerness was NOT amused, btw) turned back onto Ardmore for the final mile. Then I realized I'd been playing tag with the same group of three people for the last two miles - I'd keep pace with them on the jogs, get close to them on the strides, fall back on the walks. No biggie, it's just a training run, right? Eff that. It's a RACE. I called down to the engine room for more power and began to chase.
Catching two of the three was anticlimactic - they slowed to a walk at the aid station and I didn't. I reeled the third one in about 1/4mi later; as far as I could tell he'd kept the same pace for the previous 3 miles. Maybe he really WAS on a training run. We turned dead into the wind for the final quarter-mile and I saw a couple about 50 yards ahead of me. I gave it my best shot, but I came up just short at the end. I found myself wishing the race had gone 50 yards more (and tell me THAT ain't weird); I think I would have had them.
The results? Well, it's a bit complicated:
Naturally, I took the result most favorable to me and called it a 1:06:49 10K PR. Or at least I would have if it weren't just a training run.
]]>A military manual, said to have been smuggled out of North Korea, reveals Pyongyang's concern about electronic warfare technology used by the United States and South Korea. The document also indicates North Korea's military uses radar-absorbing paint and other stealth tactics to conceal its weapons.
The five-year-old handbook gives instructions on how to make radar-absorbing paint to help conceal jets, warships and tanks. It also explains how to fabricate decoys, pave bogus runways and deceive the enemy by having stationary units mimic the characteristics of those on the move. Such tactics have long been used by Western militaries.
That's all well and good, but when they've finished painting everything in sight they're still going to have a bunch of freshly-painted MiG-21s and T-72s, and unless they figure out how to make them silent, cold, and not obsolete, I'm not going to lose any sleep over our ability to target them if the balloon goes up.
]]>
I always wondered what happened to that guy from the Six Flags commercials in 2004.
]]>Sorry, only SD available right now. Hopefully, I'll be able to pull down an HD version and do a remix with audio from the Michigan Sports Network.
]]>In a research lab in France, a biological generator wired into a rat provides energy that could be used to power a machine. Implanted Fuel Cell Powered by Rat's Body Fluids:
A new fuel cell is putting a twist on alternative energy from biofuels: The implanted device draws power from chemicals in living animals.
Dubbed a glucose biofuel cell, the implant gets its juice from glucose--aka blood sugar--and oxygen, both of which are naturally present in the fluids between a body's cells.
In a recent study, researchers created a test version of their glucose biofuel cell and implanted it in a white lab rat named Ricky. The rat sported the device successfully for 11 days and suffered no ill effects.
Wires running from the fuel cell out of the rat's neck showed that the device was producing a significant amount of energy.
How far are we from being able to build our own little Matrix, with millions of rats wired into treadmills pumping out electricity? It'd be like a giant Kia Soul commercial.
]]>As a result of this, Lancaster is leading the fight to expand Britain's hate crimes law to include
. . .attacks on people from sub cultures to be classified as a hate crime, allowing judges the power to issue tougher penalties.In May 2009, then-Justice Minister Jack Straw announced upcoming changes to sentencing guidlines to take into consideration whether victims are members of a subculture.
Taylor explores the question "What is a subculture?" in his interview with Lancaster and Jon Garland, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Leicester:
TAYLOR: It's an odd question to have to ask, but how distinctive do they have to be in order to constitute a group who could be said to be the object of a hate crime?
GARLAND: Now I think that's, that's a very good question. I think one of the things that makes, say, alternative people, people from alternative subcultures something different is becuase they have got a history and also perhaps a sense of identity and community. So they are actually rather than just being sort of individuals that are targeted, they're part of this quite close-knit community that has a strong identity and an established history. I think that's one of the important things in this case.
But it's clear, to them at least, that not all subcultures are created equal:
TAYLOR: [what about] attacks on neo-Nazi groups, for example?
GARLAND: Yes, then we are on thorny territory, I think -
LANCASTER: But they've not got the same norms and values, have they?
TAYLOR: Well, neo-Nazi groups might say they share, you know, values, they share certain ways of dressing, the crew cuts, the heavy boots, or whatever, you know, that they have a distinctive thing, if they're attacked by the Socialist Labor League and flattened, presumably we want to invoke 'hate crime' in court there, do we?
GARLAND: Well, I wouldn't necessarily advocate that myself -
LANCASTER: No.
GARLAND: - I see the point you're making, it's where to draw the line, and this surrounds all of this hate crime debate, you know, it's regarding legislation, how we treat victims, who is a victim. And so far, at the moment, we're drawing the line in a certain place, and I think, you know, the great work Sylvia's done, is raising awareness that this line is more permeable than we thought. This boundary isn't as solid.
So, in the end, who gets to decide whether someone can have a hate crime committed against them, and what standard do they use? Until those questions get answered to my satisfaction, I'll have a problem with hate crime laws.
]]>The pastor of a small Florida church who has pledged to incinerate copies of the Quran on Sept. 11 said Wednesday he would press ahead with the plan, despite pleas from the Obama administration, U.S. military officials, the Vatican and religious leaders around the world.
"As of right now, we are not convinced that backing down is the right thing," said Terry Jones, pastor of the 50-member Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla.
No, that's not a typo. Some church with *50* members calls itself the 'Dove World Outreach Center.' I figure with 50 people, they can reach as far as Orlando. Tampa at the outside. But I digress. Naturally, this has pissed off everybody you would expect to be pissed off by it, and they're reacting pretty much how you'd expect them to (never mind that the aforementioned Quran burning hasn't even happened yet):
KABUL, Afghanistan - Hundreds of angry Afghans burned a U.S. flag and chanted "Death to the Christians" on Thursday to protest plans by a small American church to torch copies of the Muslim holy book on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
. . .
Local officials in Mahmud Raqi, the capital of Afghanistan's Kapisa province, estimated that up to 4,000 people took part in Thursday's demonstration. But NATO spokesman James Judge said the protesters numbered between 500 to 700.
It seems that the 'appropriate' reaction to this would be to burn some Bibles. Except that there aren't really any local-language Bibles in Afghanistan - the Army took care of that!
(CNN) -- Military personnel threw away, and ultimately burned, confiscated Bibles that were printed in the two most common Afghan languages amid concern they would be used to try to convert Afghans, a Defense Department spokesman said Tuesday.]]>
The unsolicited Bibles sent by a church in the United States were confiscated about a year ago at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan because military rules forbid troops of any religion from proselytizing while deployed there, Lt. Col. Mark Wright said.
But I'm really disappointed in something he said in last week's podcast about a privacy threat that you wouldn't normally think about: nonconsensual user tracking. This is a euphemism for "tracking your movement across the Web without your knowledge or consent, without using cookies." By collecting the headers that every web browser provides to every web site it connects to (e.g., user agent header, accept header, accept-language header), a site can eventually identify a given user to a disturbing degree of accuracy. The part of the show where Gibson talks about it is after the break (assuming I can figure out how to do a break in my spiffy new Movable Type 4 setup).
]]>So let's step back and look at this Panopticlick experiment, which was done during the first half of 2010 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF. . .. During the course of the first half year, this Panopticlick.EFF.org website was visited by 470,161 web browsers, so a little over 470,000 web browsers, just shy of half a million. The code which the Panopticlick site ran in people's browsers and also collected passively from their browser . . ..
. . .
So what they learned was that, without using cookies, with no cookies at all, just looking at passive browser headers and with the help of JavaScript that was able to enlist the help of Flash and Java - and Flash and Java, by the way, were used for the system font enumeration. JavaScript was able to be used for returning screen resolution, time zone, and enumerating the browser plug-ins and versions. So without Flash or Java, that got them to the 83.6 [percent unique]level. Flash and Java, which added the system font enumeration, brought them all the way up to, if you're willing to go for an instantaneously unique browser, that brought them to the 94.2 percent.
And it's not like changing these parameters will help, either:
Now, what they did recognize was that fingerprints are going to evolve over time. That is, my system, when I went to Panopticlick middle of this period, probably back in March, would have had a given fingerprint. I was one of those many browsers that went. But then I updated to a new version of Firefox. Well, that would have changed my fingerprint somewhat. Or NoScript came out with a new version, so I updated that. And that would have changed my NoScript plug-in. But what they recognized was, because they weren't just mashing all this together, that is, they didn't take all that and, for example, hash it into an opaque token. They kept all that separate, which allowed them to track the changes, that is, they knew when I updated my version of Firefox because only that one thing changed . . .. They were able to guess correctly, . . . just looking at the evolution of the fingerprint, they were able to lock on and hold onto the person 99.1 percent of the time. They guessed correctly about what change the fingerprint had made, and they were able to still lock onto the return visitor only using their fingerprint. And their false positive rate of guessing incorrect was 0.86 percent.
So here's the part where I expect Steve to lay out exactly what you have to do to evade being tracked this way, much like dozens of other times where he breaks down a newly-discovered security vulnerability and what you need to do about it before Microsoft issues a patch. So what's his advice?
You want to recognize that this is what's going on, unfortunately. Also unfortunately, our computers are just bleeding information about us as we use the Internet. I mean, it's pouring out of every contact we have with websites. All of this is available. So rather than imagining that you are not trackable, or that you're achieving something from deleting your cookies, recognize that you've lost that battle [emphasis added].
That's his advice? "Recognize that you've lost the battle?" I don't think I've been this disappointed since New Coke. Or maybe last year's Illinois game. I'm really looking forward to this week's podcast - by convention, it'll be a listener Q&A - and I'm hoping he has to face some tough questions about why he doesn't think anything can be done. First of all, a lot of this information gathering is done via JavaScript served by admongers like DoubleClick. Disabling JavaScript would stop that, although it's not a realistic solution since so much of the Web depends on it. Seems like a plug-in like AdBlockPlus would really help here - I run ABP and haven't seen any ads in a long time. Maybe an add-on that randomly changes multiple parts of your fingerprint dynamically, to prevent the admongers from 'getting a lock' on you. Maybe that's not feasible, I don't know.
Although the Panopticlick people are quick to point out that they can't tell who has a given fingerprint, just what web activity that fingerprint is doing, all it takes is for that fingerprint to be cross-referenced against ONE personally-identifiable transaction and it's all over. The admongers will know what you're doing AND who you are. We can't just give up; there's too much at stake.
]]>The victim was driving a white transit-type van towards Kinsgbridge when the bale of hay smashed into the front cab.And apparently determining the next of kin is a nontrivial exercise:
The van swerved after it was hit and then collided with another smaller van coming the other way - but the second driver was unhurt.
The accident caused long tailbacks and police diverted hundreds of vehicles through country lanes.
Police identified Mr Edwards with the use of photographs and YouTube footage and have appealed for help in contacting his family for formal identification.I can't bring myself to tag this 'Undignified Ways to Die,' because I'm fairly certain that Edwards was minding his own business when the cosmic dice threw snake-eyes.
Sgt Steve Walker of Devon and Cornwall Police's traffic unit said: 'We don't believe he was ever married. We have identified an ex-girlfriend but she is currently abroad.
'We think he may have a brother called David in the Yorkshire area and we obviously need to contact him.
'Michael had no immediate family but we believe he taught cello in Devon and would ask his students to contact us if they know of any relatives.'
Seriously. She was nine. I await my fatwa.
]]>Then Miller upped the ante, so to speak, by cutting 30-some calories below Select with its MGD64. Bud, not to be outdone, said "Oh, yeah? We'll see your 30-some and raise, err, lower you 9" and introduced Select 55.
I wondered how it was possible to have anything resembling a flavor in a 55-calorie beer (and here's where the crunchy beer snobs interject that 'there isn't any flavor at all in Bud et. al., and all the light variants actually have negative flavor'), especially since alcohol is 7-calories per gram and that leaves you almost no calories available for flavor. I finally got around to trying Select 55, and here's my conclusion as to how they did it:
Maybe I'm overreacting based on a small sample size, but when you buy a six-pack that claims to be less than 60 days old, and you're fairly certain that it's been stored cold since it got to the store, and every single one tastes like you sucked on the business end of a skunk, that's the easiest conclusion to draw.
I'll try Select 55 again from a different store just to make sure it wasn't an aberration, but if it tastes the same (and yeah, I'll remember. There's no un-ringing THAT bell), I'll recategorize this entry under Corporate Stupidity.
]]>If you asked me which towns in Indiana would be least likely to have a car museum, Shipshe would be near the top of the list (for those of you not from Indiana, here's a hint as to why).
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