I don’t get much comment spam that I have to directly moderate. Most of it is picked up by the wordpress-default comment spam eliminator Aksimet. I get some, though, and the majority is linking to (allegedly) prescription drug or (definitely) sex sites. One in particular has been hitting my moderation queue in the past week. …
Category Archives: Opinion
Comcast Denying Bittorrent Traffic
AP has (apparently) confirmed that Comcast is blocking Bittorrent regularly. A back-of-my-envelope thought on this matter is that they are saving bandwidth to sell to other people, so it’s part of their business model to manage the network traffic through their backbones. Seems that this will have continuing impacts on their customers and the ongoing …
Gay Dumbledore
Jenn alerted me to the news fracas caused by J.K. Rowling saying that Dumbledore was gay (is gay? Do the portrait people have love-lives?). Apparently, there’s always been suspicion amongst fans that he was gay, due to his lack of a love interest and other items. Personally, I never pulled up a hint of gayness …
James Watson: Victim of Politics
Yesterday, I alluded to racist statements made by James Watson, regarding the inability of africans to measure up to other persons in the intelligence arena. Today, I see that he has been suspended from “the administrative responsibilities” of his posting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, due to the board’s “disagreeing with the comments…” This is …
Holy Racism, Batman!
Through a fluke set of circumstances, I ended up beginning to read the story, “Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle.” You may recognize this as the derivation of the acronym TASER (Thomas A. Smith Electric Rifle). Not knowing much about the story, who wrote it, or when it was published, I dove in. As I …
It's a Mad Mad Mad … World
Phil Plait has a posting concerning a major TV personality who doesn’t know whether the Earth is flat. Phil hit it hard, but I’ll reiterate one of his points. It is just not possible to exist in an industrialized country in the 21st century and not know that the Earth is a ball. People who …
Ten Things Not to do on your Blog/Website
I think I’m only doing two of these things that Binary Moon says shouldn’t be included on a website. Of course, I don’t have any advertising, which eliminates the possibility of me screwing up numbers 1-4, which means I’m hitting two of six bad-things-to-do. Well, a 66% is almost passing in the US High School …
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Dedication, Time, OCD
Somedays I think my life would be easier if I were an obsessive-compulsive.* Let’s look at what I’m doing right now: Working a consultant engineering job, with its attendant time consumptions, busy putting in more personal exercise hours than I have since high-school, trying (and failing) to keep a bi-weekly podcast operation, trying (and not …
Track and Field Units of Measure
I was watching Track and Field last night when a seemingly obvious question came to mind. I say “seemingly” because it has never crossed my mind before. Why do we measure running distances (except the marathon) in meters but throwing and jumping distances in feet-inches? Of course, this might be a foible of American TV. …
Why We Don't Trust Mechanics
My vehicle was making some distressing new noises this week. They seemed to originate from the front end (front wheel drive) during acceleration and cornerning, which is not a good combination. I was thinking CV joint or axle. It turns out to be the right half axle, which is being replaced. However, when I called …