Global Toad News

Just a little over 10 years ago, the man who had a car that ran on water died.  According to the Columbus Dispatch:

Stanley Allen Meyer, his brother and two Belgian investors raised glasses in the Grove City Cracker Barrel on March 20, 1998.

Meyer said his invention could do what physicists say is impossible — turn water into hydrogen fuel efficiently enough to drive his dune buggy cross-country on 20 gallons straight from the tap.

He took a sip of cranberry juice. Then he grabbed his neck, bolted out the door, dropped to his knees and vomited violently.

“I ran outside and asked him, ‘What’s wrong?’ ” his brother, Stephen Meyer, recalled. “He said, ‘They poisoned me.’

You can find more information at WaterPoweredCar.com.

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The head of the “Church” of Scientology acts very strange in video.  He calls the police on people and the police tell HIM that he is the one breaking the law and gives him a fine.

He then follows the protestors around and makes sexual comments.

More at EpicAnon.com.

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After knowing that there were problems with Sodium Benzote since 1992, some soft drink manufacturers are looking to phase out the substance that according to the Daily Mail:

Peter Piper, a professor of molecular biology research at Sheffield University found that the additive could switch off vital parts of DNA that could be linked to cirrhosis of the liver and Parkinson’s disease.

The article also talks about the ingredient causing brain damage and hyper activity.  In fact according to this article:

Dr. Wiley made it clear in his book, A History of Crime Against the Food Law (1929), that sodium benzoate was a food additive that was indeed harmful to health.

And this is just ONE ingredient in soft drinks.  It seems that the concern of the corporations that have taken over the food system (with the aid of U.S. government paid for research and patents) is all about profit and nothing about long term consequences.

Take for example the documentary “Patent for a pig“.  In the video it has Monsanto (a big U.S. based bio weapon food manufacturer) suing farmers for getting gm seed (that the farmer did not want) on the farmer’s property and WINNING.

The documentary has farmers who had breed livestock telling how when they feed Genetically Modified (GM) food to their animals, the animals became sterile, and the farmers went bankrupt (note these were farmers that had been in business for years before).

The documentary also goes into how Monsanto is attempting to get a patent that will allow them to control almost all the pigs on the planet.

And people are concerned that Microsoft abuses it’s monopoly position in Computer software?  Where is the concern about the monopoly over the food that you eat?  Are people even aware of the fact that there is less and less non gmo food on the market, and that GMO crops produce less food?

The government regulation of the food supply provides a false sense of security, serving to protect the profits of mega corporations while selling the people down the river. It’s amazing that people like President Bush can stand up and claim that we need GMO crops to feed the world, when the result of using GMO crops is sterility, less food, and more death.

But GMO crops mean more profits for the big ArgiBusinesses like Monsanto, so who cares about the rest of us.

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The minor accused of hate crimes for carrying a sign saying that Scientology was a dangerous cult can breath easier for now as the Crown Prosecution Service has declined to pursue the matter.  But new laws against “religious hatred” are being pursued to ensure that further outbursts of truth will be able to be prosecuted.  According to BBC a new law that is described as “Draconion” is being debated.  The BBC says:

The Racial and Religious Hated Bill would create a new offence of incitement to religious hatred and would apply to comments made in public or in the media, as well as through written material.

So if the “leaders” of the free world get their way, the next time someone waves a sign saying Scientology is a cult, they might not get off so easily.

And this is the “Freedom” that we talked about protecting against fascism?

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I think that Obama winning the presidency will be much better for the republican party than John McCain.  It’s not that I have anything personally against John McCain, it’s just that on domestic policy there really isn’t any difference between McCain and Obama.

Now, I am not a fan of Obama either, I mean he gave a speech where he said he visited 57 states in this election contest.  That’s interesting, I thought there were only fifty states, but heck I am not a law professor.  I think it’s great the stories Obama tells, like his uncle liberating Auschwitz (didn’t happen).

While me and Joseph Farah might not agree on many things, I have to agree with his statement:

“All things being equal, I’d rather watch the Democrats destroy America for the next four years, holding out hope that a new kind of Republican leadership might arise to fight back in 2012.”

Yes, I believe that the Democrats will destroy America, and I also believe that McCain will do the same thing!  As Farah says:

It’s really difficult for me to see any substantive difference between McCain and Obama or McCain and Clinton.

Of course I was saying that a year ago, but heck I am not a professional journalist, so what do I know?

I’ll go even further than Farah, the republicans will be better positioned for 2010 if McCain losses than if he wins.

And once upon a time, the laws were made by congress in America.

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According to the Guardian, a minor has been charge with a crime for calling Scientology a cult.  When police confronted the 15 year old for holding a sign that said ‘Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult.’, the person holding the sign responded by quoting a 1984 high court ruling from Mr Justice Latey, in which he described the Church of Scientology as a “cult” which was “corrupt, sinister and dangerous”.  In the continued tradition of lack of respect for freedom and justice, the minor was ticketed for displaying a sign that was ” threatening, abusive or insulting, within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby”.

I guess pointing out facts is illegal in some countries if it hurts someone’s feelings.

Another interesting thing about Scientology is that the manual on Brainwashing that has been promoted as a communist text, is allegedly written by L. Ron Hubbard.  There are people who even today are promoting it as being a real communist text.

Arguing that Scientology engages in the sort of practices that Hubbard allegedly wrote about in a book that was first “found” and distributed by Hubbard’s organization can be grounds for arrest it seems.

Free speech, a nice idea whose time seems to have passed.  As the Guardian quotes Shami Chakrabarti:

“After criminalising the use of the word ‘cult’, perhaps the next step is to ban the words ‘war’ and ‘tax’ from peaceful demonstrations?”

Could be.

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According to The Register:

According to the indictment, Drew and others allegedly conspired to violate MySpace’s terms of service and intentionally inflict emotional distress on Megan, identified only as MTM in the court documents. The indictment alleges that Drew obtained a MySpace account under a fictitious name, used the account to garner information from a juvenile, and used that information to torment, humiliate and harass that member — all violations of the social-networking site’s terms of service.

That’s right, violation of the “Terms of Service” can be prosecuted as felonies if someone gets upset about what you write.  Of course this is just the thin edge.  It’s bad enough that people write 32 page documents about what you can or can’t do if you go to a site or run some software, now according to the fascist logic of the current United States Government, if someone is “injured” (and injury can be merely psychological) by your violation of the Terms of Service, you have commited a felony.

And don’t think that anonymity is easy to find.  According to this web site (hosted by Stony Brook University), TOR (The Onion Router) an anonymizing proxy service can be compromised with fairly minimal resources:

Our technique does not require compromise of any Tor nodes or collaboration of the end-server (for some scenarios). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in tracking the IP address of Tor users in a series of experiments. Even for an under-provisioned adversary with only two network vantage points, we can accurately identify the end user (IP address) in many cases. Furthermore, we show that a well-provisioned adversary, using a topological map of the network, can trace-back the path of an anonymous user in under 20 minutes. Finally, we can trace an anonymous Location Hidden Service in approximately 120 minutes.

Of course, if you don’t spend too long on a site, it doesn’t matter.  I still recommend using a proxy server of some sort, but you have to evaluate which one works best for you.  I don’t trust most of the major ones. It’s not that I am doing anything illegal, it’s just that these days you have to prove you are innocent, not the other way around.

I have to wonder though, why we allow the government to contort the law, while ignoring issues such as the fact that the United States has dropped from 11th in the world in life expectency to 42nd?  I realize that Americans don’t want a medical doctor for president preferring lawyers and other dilettantes, but at some point you would hope that people will wake up from their slumber before we all are criminals or dead.

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The House of Representatives passed HR 4279 on May 8th. According to RougeGovernment.com, this bill, when it becomes law will:

If you boil it down to brass tax, this legislation allows the U.S. government to lawfully seize your computer if it has one unauthorized mp3 file on its hard drive. It also provides the authorization for the creation of offices within the executive branch to enforce a law that is impossible to enforce.

So the government will have new powers to search and seize computers based on the presumption that you might have downloaded an illegal copyrighted file.  According to the U.S. courts, such evidence can be that your web browser did a get from a web page.

Most web sites (not this one) typically have images from several different locations (for example Advertisments).  If an advertisment was an illegal copy of an image, your computer could be siezed under this new law (I doubt it will happen right away, just whenever it suits the courts).   This has already been used in court against people who allegedly had tried (but did not succeed) in downloading (allegedly, since all they had was a request for a file and an ip address that may have been used by the suspect) illegal files.

All the more reason to install TrueCrypt and use Linux.  Because if you don’t, through no fault of your own, you could go to jail.

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According to the Wall Street Journal a professor at Northwestern University is threatening to sue her former students.  Apparently while she taught english compostion, she liked to lecture about science.  The Wall Street Journal says:

After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on “ecofeminism,” which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out.

That’s right, the problem is that science only benefits men, and leaves women out.  I don’t see what that has to do with writing, but heck let’s give these lunatics huge salaries to castigate and indoctrinate the students.  If the students don’t like it, they will get sued.

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Even though I had problems with Windows XP SP3 causing crashes (along with many others), I have to say that the best thing is that the uninstall worked great.

Of course I did a full image of the drive before I installed (just in case) and if you didn’t and have problems Microsoft has a whole article about uninstalling the service pack.

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Well I installed Windows XP sp3 and everything seemed to be fine (I did tweak the TCP connections as I mentioned earlier).  However, after looking into it some more, I seem to have a problem with the latest Java (Version 6 release 5).  It runs ok, and it responds to mouse overs, but it doesn’t seem to respond to mouse clicks.

Now this could be due to something else, but this same software worked before SP3, and now doesn’t.  I haven’t installed any other software other than the Microsoft updates between the last time this worked and now, so you can make up your own mind.

Of course, this is probably by design, as Microsoft already has notices like:

If you use Microsoft Dynamics™ Retail Management System (RMS) Store Operations or Microsoft Dynamics RMS Headquarters, you should not install this service pack without first installing the related hotfix when it is available.

Installing the service pack could cause the following: data loss in both the store and the Headquarters databases, Headquarters communications failure, loss of functionality, and applications that fail to respond or unexpectedly quit.

 Oh, wait that is how Microsoft’s own software works on SP3.  Sorry.  It’s not that Microsoft is being anticompetitive, it’s just that they want to kill off XP, and breaking everyone’s software is going to work so much better than just making things work.

I am not saying that SP3 is completely horrible, I am just saying that for a multi billion dollar software company to publicly release something that is supposed to fix problems but ends up causing new ones is amazing.

[update]

I installed the latest beta Java from Sun and still have the same problem.  However it only seems to effect the Java Web apps, not programs like Open Office.  So some java programs work and some don’t.

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Microsoft finally came out with SP3 for Windows XP.  Unfortunately Microsoft has decided to continue to put a speed limiter on the Tcp connections.  You can fix this by going to this page and applying the patch there.

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Some people have suggested that I just don’t have any readers.

Just to put that to rest, here are my recent stats (this is just for this blog).

Figures in parentheses refer to the period ending May 07 2008 at 4:44 AM.

Successful requests: 336,133 (10,093)
Successful requests for pages: 221,843 (9,010)
Failed requests: 18,003 (77)
Redirected requests: 70 (3)
Data transferred: 2.77 gigabytes (96.00 megabytes)

I have a lot of data to put back up from when I hosted everything myself.  Hopefully I will around to that soon.

It’s nice that I am breaking the gigabyte data transfer and I want to say Hi to all the people that are signing with the subscribe feature.

I really do appreciate that people take the time to read this commercial free blog.

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According to this article, which states “Redmond Refugees Driving Open Source”, many Microsoft alumni are getting into the open source field.

Why?

I can think of many reasons, but one thing that sticks in my mind is the copyright assignments that companies require.  That and the Non Disclosure Agreements can make anyone want to work for an open source paridigm.  The agreements that people have to sign for closed source projects are, on the surface, quite intimidating, and if you can avoid signing them, you are much better off.

Open Source eliminates the whole point of signing your life away, because the source is, well freely available.

Of course some of the most pro Microsoft people that I know are people who never worked there, and some of the people I know who have worked at Microsoft are a little more open to other choices.

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Recently Stephen King was attacked for saying:

“I don’t want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don’t, then you’ve got the Army, Iraq, I don’t know, something like that. It’s not as bright,”

First, I want to get out of the way that I think that people can have a great career in the military and I think that the military career path is much more HONEST than that of being a police officer or many other government jobs.

The second point I want to make is that some elements in the military even if they aren’t illiterate might pretend to not understand english anymore.  An example of this is at this blog (might disappear):

Thousands of California, Tejas y Puerto-Rican soldiers don’t speak a lick of English, just beautiful Spanish, and yet the US military is still happy to snap them up to send off and fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Latinos who’ve been in the USA and used Spanish for centuries are good enough US citizens to fight and be killed in US imperialistic– um, er, “democratizing” wars– then we’re good enough to retain our culture as well.

Okay, well that’s just some blog.  Well what about Stars and Stripes?  They have an article that states:

For these soldiers, English is not their first language. And some might struggle with English in the environment of the U.S. base camp, admitted Borge.

“This is not the common language that we speak,” he said.

But he will not pressure his troops to speak English.

That’s right there are whole units in the U.S. military that at least pretend not to be literate in English, even more they are PROUD of the fact that they can get away with this (feigned?) ignorance.

But heck let’s not let facts get in the way of demogogary.

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I found a good collection of tools for Microsoft Sql @ SqlTeam.com, a lot of the tools compare favorably to commercial programs.  One program that I especially liked was dbDiff which compares the data structures between databases.

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