The most valuable supply of worthlessness on the web
To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
[tags]Roosevelt, Teddy, Unpatriotic[/tags]
We all know that medical care and especially drug costs are crazy high in the US. We’ve probably all heard the many commercials that recommend jumping from name-brand drugs to generic drugs. However, not all drug manufacturers find that to be a good idea. In an attempt to protect the big-money drug LipitorTM, representatives from Pfizer are citing a widely questioned study that indicates patients on generic cholesterol-blocker simvastatin die more often and have more heart attacks.
While simvastatin is not a generic equivalent for LipitorTM, it is a generic version of competing cholesterol-blocker ZocorTM. Studies other than the one Pfizer is referring to show that at the most commonly prescribed doses of LipitorTM, simvastatin is equally effective for most patients. Naturally, Pfizer representatives disagree.
The company has mounted a campaign that includes advertisements, lobbying efforts and a paid speaking tour by a former secretary of the federal Department of Health and Human Services. Pfizer is also promoting a study – whose findings many experts are questioning – that concluded that British patients who switched to simvastatin had more heart attacks and deaths than those who remained on Lipitor.
Naturally, the mighty dollar plays in here. And I do believe Pfizer has not only a right, but a duty to shareholders to try protecting such a big funding source. However, I think reliable science needs to be behind any claims used to try swaying opinions, and apparently the study in question may not be reliable science. We’ll just have to see how it turns out, I suppose.
I also take issue with the following claim from a Pfizer senior vice president:
Continue reading “Maker of Lipitor cites dubious study to keep patients from generic”
Since the first time I watched his show, I’ve liked Glenn Beck. Sometimes I disagree with him, but often I think a lot of what he says makes sense. So I find it exceptionally odd that Glenn would chose to say that conservatives hate America on his program.
“I think there is a handful of people who hate America,” Beck said. “Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.”
Now of course, many folks would hear that, think “Ahhh – California is a bunch of liberal nuts” and guess Beck is talking about Democrats losing their homes. The reality is that the places hit hardest by the fires currently are California’s 49th and 50th districts, which are more in the 3/5 to 2/3 conservative range. So generally speaking, if you hear some unknown person lost their home to the fires, the safe bet is to guess the unknown person is conservative.
Furthermore, if you listen to what Beck actually says (roughly the last 30 seconds of the clip), he ends his comment saying “There are a few people that hate America, but I don’t think the Democrats are those.” So in an area that is over 60% conservative, people who are not Democrats hate America and are losing their homes.
No matter who Beck is talking about, the comment is unnecessary and idiotic. A person’s political views should never lead someone to imply they deserve bad circumstances. Sadly, rather than own up to making a stupid comment, Beck tries to explain it away as if it were some joke and that liberals are just hating on conservatives. If you can go listen to the clip linked above and explain the joke to me, I’d love to hear it. I just don’t find the funny in there.
[tags]Glenn Beck, Beck says conservatives hate America?, California fires, San Diego[/tags]
All the cool kids are in to peer-to-peer filesharing these days. Estimates suggest anywhere from 30% to 90% of all internet traffic (depending on which source you believe) is P2P filesharing traffic, so this is clearly something that a lot of folks online are using. Naturally, the companies responsible for distributing physical media resources for distributing this information (here I’m thinkg of companies like the RIAA and MPAA since they are the most visibly affected) want to stop this online trading, and have taken steps to disrupt the data-streams.
Recently, University of California, Riverside researchers studied filesharing traffic, looking to see how much those sharing files are watched. Condensing that report to a highlights summary, PhysOrg has this brief article about the results of the filesharing observation work.
“We found that a naïve user has no chance of staying anonymous,” said Banerjee. “One hundred percent of the time, unprotected file-sharing was tracked by people there to look for copyright infringement.”
However, the research showed that “blocklist” software such as (PeerGuardian, Bluetack, and Trusty Files) are fairly effective at reducing the risks of being observed down to about 1 percent.
Read the linked PhysOrg story for a little more information, or download the full PDF paper, titled P2P: Is Big Brother Watching You? to see what the researchers found. This should help you understand how to protect yourself and minimize your exposure to the industry watchers who are looking for downloaders.
While I don’t propose folks start stealing songs, movies, TV shows, and so on from the content producers, I agree with one of the researchers who points out that this technology is not going away, and these industries would have a much better future if they worked to leverage the technology and offer reasonably priced options to users rather than trying to just shut down P2P.
[tags]P2P, Peer to peer, Filesharing, Is big brother watching you, Big Brother, MPAA, RIAA[/tags]
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There are scumbags out there who think it’s cool to sexually abuse children. Some of the extra stupid of them post pictures on the internet of themselves with children they’ve abused. Thinking that simple photo manipulation will keep their identities secret, these idiots thankfully don’t realize that such editing can be undone. Recently, Interpol posted one such partially restored image and asked the public to help identify an abuser who has for years posted images of himself with many different children.
Interpol sought public help Monday in identifying a suspected pedophile, revealing a technique to unscramble digitally altered images to show the face of a man seen in Internet photos sexually abusing young boys in Vietnam and Cambodia.
. . .
[Interpol child abuse database overseer] Persson said he personally had opposed making the photos public because it demonstrated to criminals that police can now unblur pictures. But that consideration and the risk that the man could face public humiliation or even violence now that he is recognizable were outweighed by the desire to protect other children from abuse.
Points for the good guys, and hopefully they’ll catch this bastard soon. Sadly, people like this, when caught, are often kept in solitary confinement to protect them from other prisoners. Even among criminals, child abusers are looked down upon. According to folks I’ve known in law-enforcement, child abusers tend to be especially abused in prison if not kept separate.
[tags]Sexual abuse, Interpol, Hunting child abusers, Image manipulation[/tags]
In 2001, President Bush signed an executive order which would allow a President to disallow the publication of Presidential papers as long as he/she wished, even extending that write to descendants. Since these documents are public records except in the case of classified information, this has never been done before. Formerly, all Presidential documents (again, excluding classified materials) were released as the public records they are after a set time past the end of a President’s administration. With the Bush executive order, researchers had to prove a need for the records before they would be released if any relative wished to hold them as non-public records. And that’s pretty hard to prove, when you don’t know what the records hold.
Recently, a judge upheld the public’s right to access to these records and blocked the portion of the executive order which would stop the release of papers.
A federal judge on Monday tossed out part of a 2001 order by President George W. Bush that lets former presidents keep some of their presidential papers secret indefinitely.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that the U.S. Archivist’s reliance on the executive order to delay release of the papers of former presidents is “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion and not in accordance with law.”
You might remember Kollar-Kotelly for her work on the Microsoft case. While some of her work in the past has been criticized, I like her for the fact that she has ordered Bush administration officials to speak on the illegal domestic surveillance in the post-9/11 era.
[tags]President Bush, Executive order, Presidential papers, Public documents, Kollar-Kotelly[/tags]
You have to admire a dog who understands what our form of government is all about.
I’d vote for him.
[tags]Dogbert, Democracy, Polls[/tags]
I am so sorry for once leading you, my brilliant and far above-average reader, to believe that the coming zombie uprising was one of the greatest fears we had to face. Apparently, the robots have been amassing numbers and improving their designs for long enough to be the real threat to humanity. I don’t know how soon the robots will take over, but I believe the wall-climbing Waalbot is further proof of the superiority of robots. We humans have Spiderman, and, if you are to believe The Simpsons Movie, Spiderpig. I present to you now early images of the robotic army of the future – the Waalbot:
. . .
Approach: The tri-leg Waalbot will use dry adhesion to stick to walls and ceilings as it climbs. The tri-leg design uses simple rotary actuators for a singly degree of freedom motion, but includes passive joints and elastic flexures to allow this motion to provide the preload and peeling forces necessary to climb using dry adhesion. A PIC microcontroller is used to control the motion of the robot and onboard power makes the system fully autonomous.
Other Wall Climbing Robots: Geckobot, Compliant Geckobot, Tank
You may look at the image and claim me a fool for phearing such a miniscule droid, but just like with little rat dogs – sometimes the smallest ones have the most fight in them. And when the robots are swarming you, and your enemy-bot sensor indicates hundreds of them are in front of you and behind you – remember they are in the ceiling, and you should check the vent shafts, too.
The site also has a few cool videos, including a sped-up movie of the bot climbing an acrylic wall done last year. I imagine more work will allow the designers to increase the weight or carrying capacity of the waalbot and we’ll end up with a more useful critter in the future. (via Spatial Robots)
[tags]Robots, The coming robotocalypse, Robots will take over, Gecko, Dry adhesion, Wall climbing robots[/tags]
I remember reading about the recent slip in which half a dozen missiles with nuclear warheads were flown from North Dakota to Louisiana before being discovered. I didn’t say anything about it back then because there really wasn’t a lot of good information on it, and I figured most visitors would miss it if I just posted as an aside (that mini posting box on the right hand side of the Blahg). Now, the Washington Post has a very nice story up about what happened, and I figure pointing out the article for those that want to read about it now would be reasonable.
Just after 9 a.m. on Aug. 29, a group of U.S. airmen entered a sod-covered bunker on North Dakota‘s Minot Air Force Base with orders to collect a set of unarmed cruise missiles bound for a weapons graveyard. They quickly pulled out a dozen cylinders, all of which appeared identical from a cursory glance, and hauled them along Bomber Boulevard to a waiting B-52 bomber.
The airmen attached the gray missiles to the plane’s wings, six on each side. After eyeballing the missiles on the right side, a flight officer signed a manifest that listed a dozen unarmed AGM-129 missiles. The officer did not notice that the six on the left contained nuclear warheads, each with the destructive power of up to 10 Hiroshima bombs.
. . .
A simple error in a missile storage room led to missteps at every turn, as ground crews failed to notice the warheads, and as security teams and flight crew members failed to provide adequate oversight and check the cargo thoroughly. An elaborate nuclear safeguard system, nurtured during the Cold War and infused with rigorous accounting and command procedures, was utterly debased, the investigation’s early results show.
. . .
A former Air Force senior master sergeant wrote separately that “mistakes were made at the lowest level of supervision and this snowballed into the one of the biggest mistakes in USAF history. I am still scratching my head wondering how this could [have] happened.”
A recounting of the oversights and skipped protocols that let this roll into such a problem are well covered in the story. Having worked in an environment where classified material was handled, and having seen the safeguards in place, it’s always interesting to me to hear about breakdowns in procedures. This particular incident was a little more interesting because the mistakes happened, I think in part, when people who were not expecting to be handling abnormal goods didn’t follow the necessary steps involved when abnormal materials work was occurring.
By skipping the safety protocols because this was viewed as a normal (i.e. non-nuclear) goods transfer, a real problem developed. That was why we were always instructed to always, always, always follow procedures as if we were dealing with classified information. That prevents accidental information leaks and reduces the probability of missing a step in proper handling of classified information.
[tags]Nuclear materials, Broken Arrow?, Bent spear, Mishandling nuclear warheads[/tags]
I’m not blind to the bias in all sources of news. Such is the nature of people that I would question any claim of an unbiased news source. That said, when a new fact-checking operation comes around (to compliment the FactCheck and PolitiFact sources I currently use), I’m interested in seeing what I can learn from the source. In the case of the Washington Post’s Fact-Checker, I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll be able to use the site when researching my own political rants and spews.
Now why would I think after just a first look that I might be able to use WaPo fact-checker? Well, one of the first news items they cover is contrary to the normal WaPo political stance – they are debunking moveon.org’s criticisms of General Petraeus’ Iraq status report. I haven’t checked the Washington Post home page, but I’m pretty sure if you look around you can find some criticism of Gen. Petraeus from the newspaper, so when the fact-checking section takes steps to defend the General, it at least offers some hope that the writers for the section will do a good job.
General Petraeus is a military man constantly at war with the facts.
While some of the facts and statistics cited by General Petraeus can legitimately be questioned and debated, MoveOn.org offers only partial support for such a sweeping accusation. The data they do cite is itself open to challenge.
The fact-checkers continue to break down the MoveOn.org criticisms of Gen. Petraeus, pointing out a number of flaws in their claims. The entire disection of the anti-war status claims is worth reading, no matter what side of the war debate you fall on.
I hope the site can continue to provide worthwhile analysis in the future. I know I’ll be checking back to see how things roll in the future.
[tags]Washington Post, WaPo, Washington Post Fact Checker, Fact checking[/tags]
As 
you probably already know, the airline industry hasn’t been in the best shape since the 9/11 attacks. With delayed or cancelled flights a growing problem in the US again (and a direct view of the data as compiled by the US government) after years of steady or improving tardiness, flyers have more to gripe about than probably any time in the past.
With the extreme delays some flights/airlines/airports have suffered lately – such as JetBlue’s 11 hour JFK delays and American Airlines’ 9 hour Austin delays – some passengers have had just enough of this crap, and one in particular has taken steps to force the airlines to handle these delays better.
Continue reading “The angry traveller – a crusade against airline incompetence”
Folks, this is just your warning – it’s almost International Talk Like a Pirate day.
Yarrrr!!! 3 more days. Consider ye warned.
[tags]Talk like a pirate, Pirates[/tags]
