Rumble Strips|You have been warned!

Why the Democrats are throwing Hillary under the bus:

The Democratic Party is struggling to raise money for its convention in Denver on Aug. 25-28, with fund-raising by the host committee falling far short of the party’s goals and lagging behind the Republicans’ efforts for their convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul. (Link)

Obama raising more money than Clinton has been the news since, well, since the media anointed Obama some several months ago. That the DNC can’t even adequately fund their convention while Obama’s coffers are healthy is telling. Support for Obama isn’t translating into support of the Democrats so they are jumping like rats from a sinking ship. They can’t help it. When a political scalawag lives off the public cheese, it instinctively follows the cheese no matter how bad it might stink. In some cases, they get nervous and follow just the promise of some cheese. Some new cheese that comes from Change in the cheese.

CISCO’S CHIEF SECURITY OFFICER on anti-virus products: “It’s completely wasted money”

Though I agree with Cisco’s John Stewart, according to the ZDNet story, security software vendors did not agree. Big surprise.

Here is the problem. If you have one person in your organization who is prone to launch a virus, either accidentally or on purpose, all your anti-virus protections have to be perfect or else you will be compromised. Every organization of any size will have one of these people and probably more than one. The problem is that computer systems are created and operated by imperfect people and thus there is no such thing as a perfect computing system. So it’s a complete waste of money, just like homeland security.

Of course I use anti-virus, but I don’t spend any money on it. If you are paying money for anti-virus software, you are a dupe. Nor do I patch my operating system unless absolutely necessary, which in the last several years has been none. I am running XP SP2 with no patches on three PC’s right now and since my installation will not pass the Window’s genuine advantage bullshit, even though I must own about 20 XP licenses from all the PC’s I’ve bought over the years, I simply do not patch. It’s as simple as that.

My primary protection from the outside world comes from a properly configured hardware firewall. My secondary protection is proper training on email use. Here is the email training: Do NOT ever open an email if you do not know who sent it and it wasn’t expected. Just don’t even open it. Like it never happened.

Considering that I am running a secure Win NT4 server I think it might be a while before Microsoft causes me to buy a new copy of Windows. If Microsoft does somehow cause me to have buy a new copy of Windows, it will be a Linux version. Heh.

Oh, I forgot to mention. I rarely get a viruses on my workstation. Maybe twice in 25 years. Even with a wife and two kids running free on the internet I bet I have only had to clean one virus in the last five years from a PC I control.

I don’t think I’ve ever witten about the lack of custom user interfaces to automotive electronics, but I have mentioned the lack of options to friends a few times over the last couple of years. There is an amazing amount of software involved in modern automobiles and for the most part the consumer has zero control over it. For example, the new Toyota Tundra I bought a few months ago has about 47,000 sensors — okay, maybe not that many — and I can not set, reset, or modify any one of them. After the car leaves the showroom having met all the governmnet required standards, the consumer should be able to modify the equipment however they wish.

The first thing I would do is modify the seat belt chime. I don’t mind the car reminding me to strap in when I first get underway, but after that, further warnings are a strict no no. I might want to disable the door chimes, running lights, and inside lights altogether if I am driving through a wildlife refuge trying to take photos.

Well, help might be on the way:

Wind River is joining Intel to develop an open source Linux platform to your car and shake up the auto industry by bringing greater innovation, efficiency and development speed to the emerging in-car infotainment market.

It’s a radical effort to force automakers — which tend to favor evolutionary, not revolutionary, R&D – to embrace open source as a way to speed up development. If Wind River and Intel pull it off, it would be a crucial step toward spurring innovation and cooperation in the growing but fractured in-car multimedia market.

This is cool. And not really for the reason of reprogramming the seat belt warning — though I would do that — but for the purposes of interfacing other devices you own with your expensive automobile. Why should I pay a premium price for multimedia gear in a car when the technology is available, and probably already owned, in much more flexible packaging as well as lower price? I don’t want to have to shop for a car that has the right combination of digital accessories; I want a car that doesn’t have any accessories but provides industry standard interfaces to my existing equipment. I don’t want to load six CD’s into my car when I already have a thousand ripped to my PC. I don’t need a GPS system when I already have one on my phone. And so on.

THE ONION: New Starbucks Opens In Rest Room Of Existing Starbucks

DRUDGE: JUPITER IN THE BALANCE: Recent ‘red spots’ likely due to climate change…

I can’t wait to see how humanity gets blamed for this one. Probably now we will go from Global Warming to Solar System Warming. We greedy car-driving, coal-burning, McDonalds eating Americns are not only destroying our own planet with selfish consumption; we are destroying the entire solar system.

HILLARY: “My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it.”

Good Lord Almighty! What was she thinking? All you liberals out there need to Face the Truth: Hillary is simply pandering to her core constituency. That is, you.

If it wasn’t so sad it’d be funny. No wait. It’s funny. LMAO!

This is where Clint Eastwood should take a page from Kidd Rock’s book.

Spike Lee launched a bitter attack on Clint Eastwood yesterday
…
Lee said: “There were many African-Americans who survived that war and who were upset at Clint for not having one [in the films]. That was his version: the negro soldier did not exist. I have a different version.”

Yeah, ain’t America great? What is so sad that it is so painfully obvious that what Spike is really doing is using racism to pimp his new film. And if you go see Clint’s film and you don’t see Spike’s, you are a racist. Rumors are that Spike was looking to pick a fight with Tom Hanks because there were no negro astronauts in Apollo 13.

Applied to Spike Lee, bitter is the best one-word summary of a man I think there ever was.

Dear Hillary.

I hate your guts but I’m sending you ten bucks because you got moxie.

E. I.

Via Instapundit:

RANDALL PARKER: “As we design computer systems to make us do what their designers decided are the best behaviors from us we are effectively designing computer systems to manipulate us. I suspect that the first AIs deployed into widespread use will therefore possess enormous skills for manipulating humans.”

So the first AI will be politicians?

Obama has publicized yet another weakness that the Republicans can use against him:

“But I do want to say this to the GOP. If they think that they’re going to try to make Michelle an issue in this campaign, they should be careful. Because that I find unacceptable,” he said.

Obama praised his wife’s patriotism and said that for Republicans “to try to distort or to play snippets of her remarks in ways that are unflattering to her I think is just low class … and especially for people who purport to be promoters of family values, who claim that they are protectors of the values and ideals and the decency of the American people to start attacking my wife in a political campaign I think is detestable.”

Obviously something there they don’t want getting out. But even if there is nothing there, Obama has hung a big red light over what would be a weakness. He doesn’t like anyone talking bad about his dumb ass wife.

I guess we will see Michelle Obama baking cookies next.